Adaptive Reuse of Religious Heritage and Its Impact on House Prices
- PDF / 1,149,533 Bytes
- 22 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 5 Downloads / 165 Views
Adaptive Reuse of Religious Heritage and Its Impact on House Prices Caixia Liu 1 & Xiaolong Liu 2 Accepted: 28 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Due to social demographic change and secularization, religious heritage sites in Europe are on the verge of losing their original functions. While the adaptive reuse seems to be a proactive strategy to preserve the historical and cultural value embedded in religious heritage sites, little is known concerning its external impact. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating the external effect of reusing religious heritage on surrounding house prices. Employing both the parametric and non-parametric difference-indifferences hedonic model on a sample of 42 projects of reusing religious heritage and a rich dataset of housing transactions in the Netherlands, we find significant positive externality of reusing religious heritage on local house prices. The external effects are heterogeneous across differentiated project size and monumental status. Larger religious heritage reuse projects and those listed as national monuments exert greater influence on surrounding house prices. Keywords Religious heritage . Adaptive reuse . Urban revitalization . House prices JEL-Classification C21 . D62 . D84 . O22 . R31
Introduction Religious heritage constitutes an important element that shapes the urban historical and cultural landscape in Western European countries. Over the last few decades, due to
* Xiaolong Liu [email protected] Caixia Liu [email protected]
1
College of Economics, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China
2
Real Estate Center, Department of Economic Geography, Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen 9747AD, The Netherlands
C. Liu, X. Liu
secularization and social demographic changes, more and more churches and monasteries have been underused or closed, losing their original functions of worship and hosting religious events. As a consequence, these underused or vacant religious sites are inevitably neglected or even demolished eventually in spite of the cultural and historical value embedded in them. Adaptive reuse of redundant historical buildings is increasingly recognized as being fundamental to sustainable urban development since it can contribute to the preservation of cultural and historical value in place, while, in the meantime, serve as an effective tool to stimulate local economic development (Latham 2016). Hence, the adaptive reuse brings about benefits not only to users and investors when redundant historical buildings are transformed with new functions while maintaining their original physical appearance, but also to the welfare of local communities in the form of amenity provision. For instance, reusing existing historical buildings is expected to create attractive inner-city environment that draws residents with high income and education to the city (Heath et al. 2013). Reused religious heritage, in particular, is valued as visible community amenity that contributes to the living environment and people
Data Loading...
