Artists Residencies for Architectural Quality of the Historic Coastal Landscape: Operational Guidelines for the Creative Regeneration of Built Environment

Historic coastal built heritage across Europe is increasingly exposed to multiple forms of degradation, shifting resulting from the anthropic and to environmental pressures. Interventions aimed at its reuse still struggle to reconcile regeneration requirements with the creative, social, and economic functions to keep these sites relevant to their communities. The Joint Declaration “Europe for Culture—Culture for Europe” (2026), and the European Commission provides a new shared culture and creative-led vision for interpreting regeneration processes as connection among individual, social, spatial, territorial, environmental, and institutional dimensions. This vision raises specific architectural and planning challenges: the need to reconcile overlapping heritage, landscape, and environmental protection regimes with the introduction of new creative and social functions, and to favour lightweight, reversible, and demountable interventions over permanent transformations. However, a gap lies in the lack of structured tools capable of guiding the creative regeneration of historic coastal built heritage under these constraints. While culture and creative-led regeneration, and adaptive reuse have been extensively investigated, the translation of creative regeneration principles into operational actions for the transformation of historic coastal built heritage into artist residencies remains insufficiently systematised into replicable design criteria for architectural and planning practice. Within this framework, the research aims to translate the aforementioned culture and creative-led vision into operational guidelines for improving the adaptive reuse of built heritage as artist residencies, providing a set of criteria that link European cultural-policy objectives to concrete architectural and planning actions for artist-in-residence adaptive reuse. The iterative methodology consists in three main phases: a knowledge phase, based on bibliometric and systematic analysis of the literature review and best practices; a development phase, which systematises these outcomes into operational framework (consisting of dimension and criteria) and integrates them in an Impact Evaluation Matrix; and a transfer phase, in which the proposed framework is applied and tested in an Italian case study. The research outcomes are operational guidelines for the creative regeneration of the built environment, conceived as innovative tools to guide an appropriate project in the historic urban coastal landscape. The proposed framework, unlike existing adaptive-reuse and artist-in-residence approaches, integrates functional, spatial, socio-cultural, and economic criteria within an Impact Evaluation Matrix. It has been tested in the case study of Torre Minerva within the Punta Campanella Marine Protected Area in Italy.