木下 剛

The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage (ARCH) is an innovative, sustainable approach to architectural heritage conservation; however, current research on the subject lacks public awareness surveys from the bottom-up, and the non-use value of ARCH buildings has not been clarified. We investigated the willingness to pay for ARCH among 1460 residents of the Nara Prefecture using a contingent valuation method and clarified the factors affecting the willingness to pay through an ordered logistic regression model. The results of this study showed that 75.1% of the respondents were willing to pay for ARCH projects, which were valued at JPY 6036.13 (USD 41.15) per person per year excluding zero payments and JPY 4531.23 (USD 30.89), including zero payments. In addition, residents’ attitudes toward ARCH and heritage awareness positively influenced both the willingness to pay and its magnitude, while the degree of place attachment was a positive predictor of willingness to pay. This study demonstrates the role of public participation in cultural heritage conservation, emphasizes the importance of heritage awareness, and provides a reference point for policy makers in promoting public participation in ARCH buildings, which contributes to the implementation of a recycling approach to heritage conservation in a sustainable context.

In the post-pandemic era, cities are facing new demands and challenges. Both telecommuting and dense development require communities to provide more public space to meet people’s psychological and physical needs. The insufficient space currently left in the city calls for stock development. The Japanese public libraries affected by COVID-19 are part of this stock. We aimed to determine and propose strategies for using the external space of libraries to enhance the sustainability of cities. Ultimately, we expect to achieve a synergy between public libraries and cities in terms of sustainability. We found that the most dominant element in the exterior space of Japanese public libraries is parking lots, which have the potential to be flexibly utilized in the post-pandemic era. We also summarized the current patterns of external space for public libraries in Japan. Finally, we proposed six strategies to enhance the sustainability of libraries and cities. These strategies can simultaneously enhance the sustainability of cities and public libraries from multiple perspectives, especially in the post-pandemic era. Our proposal will not only help to build or renew public libraries in the future, but also fills a gap in the urban perspective of Japanese public libraries and their external spaces.