The Potential of Living Labs for Smart Heritage Building Adaptation

This paper examines: smart buildings as part of 'smart cities'; the particular challenges of heritage buildings; whether smart heritage buildings have any specific characteristics; the lack of data to inform appropriate refurbishment and retrofit; the emerging potential of technologies to engage people in acquiring that data and build bridges towards smart heritage, so easing the task of sustaining heritage buildings for the benefit of current and future generations; and 'Living Labs' as a key enabler. It is increasingly argued that there is a need to involve citizens in city development, so urban areas may be rendered more suitable to their needs and social problems be prevented. Meanwhile it is held that the value and significance of Heritage buildings and landscapes needs to be maintained, despite increasing pressures to adapt all building stock to address climate change and reduce increasingly expensive energy use. To convincingly engage citizens, such adaptation needs to enhance rather than reduce quality of life for users. Over the last decade there has been a move to repeated post-occupancy evaluation (POE), including some heritage building stocks, to ensure these goals continue to be achieved. Yet it can be argued that the number of such POE studies is limited by shortages of expertise, to the extent that in most cases we still lack sufficient data about the existing building stock, and in particular Heritage buildings, to make reliably informed judgements on suitable adaptation and mitigation measures. Simultaneously the sustainable transformation of Heritage buildings and landscapes into Smart Heritage can be held to be a key component in the metamorphosis of existing cities into Smart Cities. Thus this paper examines how Living Lab processes of engagement may deliver innovative approaches to POE, and thus support the scaling and speeding up of the transformation of Heritage into Smart Heritage.