Adaptive Reuse as a Cultural Strategy: The Case of Cinema Bologna in Rome

The paper explores the relations between urban regeneration, heritage and adaptive reuse (AR) as mediation process between protection, transformation and the construction of a collective meaning. Dealing with heritage in Italy often entails a dual condition: on one hand, the bureaucratic stiffness that transforms protection into a constraint; on the other, the European vision of heritage as a shared and productive resource for inclusive growth and urban quality. This conflict results in a condition of stasis, where the city’s transformation is hindered by the commodification of history and the loss of architecture’s active role. Within this framework, adaptive reuse emerges as a cultural and strategic practice, no longer merely an environmental response, but a design approach that reinterprets the relationship between material heritage and present day needs. Through the case study of ExtraLibera—the regeneration of Riccardo Morandi’s former Cinema Bologna in Rome—the paper investigates how adaptive reuse can act as a tool to reconnect the physical and social dimensions of heritage. The project, promoted by Libera and designed by Berretta Architetti Associati, transforms a degraded modern structure into a cultural hub through a process of adaptation and reuse based on subtraction, adaptation, and social re-appropriation. Architecture operates together with the immaterial actions to reconstruct an identity, turning decay into a design resource. AR, understood as a cultural process, enables a dynamic interpretation of heritage, one that integrates historical, spatial, and social values into a forward-looking urban vision. Rather than opposing preservation and transformation, AR is the framework within which the evolutionary character of urban landscape is recovered in an inclusive and context sensitive regeneration.