Please cite this article in press as: F. Ribera, et al., A multicriteria approach to identify the Highest and Best Use for historical buildings, Journal of Cultural Heritage (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.06.004 ARTICLE IN PRESS G Model CULHER-3620; No. of Pages 12 Journal of Cultural Heritage xxx (2019) xxx–xxx Available online at ScienceDirect www.sciencedirect.com Original article A multicriteria approach to identify the Highest and Best Use for historical buildings Federica Ribera , Antonio Nesticò ∗ , Pasquale Cucco , Gabriella Maselli Department of Civil Engineering, University of Salerno, 84084 Fisciano, Salerno, Italy a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 25 February 2019 Received in revised form 16 June 2019 Accepted 17 June 2019 Available online xxx Keywords: Historical Building Restoration Highest and Best Use (HBU) Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) a b s t r a c t The cultural heritage conservation is essential to preserve the memory of monuments, places and terri- tories and to ensure their transmission to the future. This can be pursued through continuous and careful maintenance, which, however, is lost when a place loses its function and becomes prey of neglect and decay. It is easy to understand how fundamental is to assign compatible intended use to safeguard the historical goods. From this perspective, the research proposes an innovative and economic evaluation model in order to identify the Highest and the Best Use (HBU) for the historical buildings that would take into account both their social, cultural and economic identity and the preservation of their integrity and original image. The choice of HBU requires a rational study approach that can employ the Multi- criteria Decisional Methods (MCDM). These Methods could allow us to consider not only the financial performance of the restoration and enhancement intervention, but also the wide variety of the effects that it will generate on the territory, by involving the community in the new functions, the employment opportunities and the project’s aptitude to encourage the cultural growth, by respecting the historical and architectural values. According to this framework, the research outlines an economic evaluation protocol that implements the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a hierarchical multicriteria technique consisting in breaking down the complex decision issues into fundamental constituent elements based on multiple criteria and sub-criteria. The protocol consists in a sequence of logical and operational steps that starts from the preliminary selection of possible functional destinations among those technically feasible, urbanistically permissible, economically viable and historical-architecturally compatible; the next definition of evaluation criteria and sub-criteria; the assignment of the weights to the criteria and the scores to the use options; then the implementation of hierarchical analysis algorithms, which return the final ranking of alternatives and thus outline the Highest and the Best Use for the building. Novelty elements concern the rationalization of the phases, the selection of the criteria evaluation according to the international references for the disciplines of the conservation of cultural heritage and the economic evaluation of projects, and finally the formalization of calculation schemes. The model is validated on a real case study: the monumental Palazzo Genovese in Salerno (Italy). Here the goal of researching HBU meets the need to remove the historic building from the current state of abandonment or underuse and to give it back to the citizens, by ensuring the use and the constant care and maintenance. The applica- tion demonstrates the practical usefulness of the protocol in decision-making processes for the re-use of architecture in order to maximize the economic benefits and, at the same time, to safeguard its historical and architectural values. © 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The theme of reusing the abandoned buildings is a central topic for the scientific debate in the current international scenario that encourages the intentions to transform large disused containers ∗ Corresponding author. E-mail address: anestico@unisa.it (A. Nesticò). into opportunities for sustainable urban development in the future cities. This theme becomes more complicated when it concerns all those buildings classified as cultural heritage. The evolution of the concept of “cultural good” has widened the application domain of the modern restoration project: “Monument” is defined as any sig- nificant document of the history of civilization, regardless of eras and typologies, which is therefore worthy of conservation, protec- tion and of the most extensive usability. Lately, this perspective has been accompanied by a more strictly economic orientation https://doi.org/10.1016/j.culher.2019.06.004 1296-2074/© 2019 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.