Informing Heritage Conservation Through Diverse Experiences: The Case of the Leuven Town Hall

Awareness is growing of the need for more inclusive and sustainable cities and communities, as evident in the objectives of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The targets underline the importance of participatory approaches, protecting cultural and natural heritage, and providing universal access to inclusive public spaces. To achieve these targets in the context of built heritage, our research explores a pathway that aligns with conservation practice’s gradual shift to collaborative approaches involving diverse others. Seeking a more inclusive approach in built heritage conservation, we engage people with diverse bodies and minds as users/experts, attending to their situated and embodied experiences. Their unique expertise-by-experience informs architecture and conservation practice by providing nuanced insights into qualities and obstacles of built heritage. However, suitable methods and tools are necessary to capture and transfer these insights to practice effectively. In this article, we present the approach we experimented with in the case of the historic Leuven Town Hall (Belgium), which is undergoing a restoration project. We outline our process and methods for transforming disability experience into actionable knowledge that facilitates exchange between users/experts, architects, and city representatives. We detail how the resulting tools illustrate and situate the identified qualities and obstacles in the user/experts’ interaction with this heritage site, building on the concepts of affordance and gradient of accessibility. Leveraging user/expertise for built heritage, our approach promotes a conservation process inclusive of diverse voices and experiences and fosters collaboration between academia and practice, while contributing to creating inclusive and socially sustainable historic environments.