The concepts of heritage and preservation emerge from the imperative to carry forward traces and memories of the past amid rapid social transformation. The transmission of heritage is not an automatic process; it requires the active promotion and safeguarding of diverse values to render them visible, while also necessitating their adaptation and reinvention in response to changing sociocultural contexts. Thus, what may appear to be a straightforward act of “preserving the past” is, in fact, a dynamic and future-oriented process—one that links past, present, and future through a present-centered engagement with social change (Harvey 2001).
Nevertheless, the prevailing societal emphasis on growth and progress often entangles heritage preservation within the logic of development. In recent years, the rise of the tourism economy, cultural industries, and efforts to reshape regional identities have elevated adaptive reuse as a favored strategy in national and local development agendas. These approaches frequently seek to capitalize on heritage assets for economic gain. Mechanisms such as the transfer of development rights are employed to navigate the tensions between property ownership and preservation imperatives. However, when heritage becomes subsumed within development-driven frameworks, it frequently assumes a subordinate role—serving more as an aesthetic or rhetorical device than as an active agent in shaping sustainable and meaningful environments.
Moreover, the revitalization and reuse of heritage sites often encounter substantial regulatory and practical challenges. A notable example is the Changhua Railway Hospital in Taiwan, originally the Kōhinka restaurant during the Japanese colonial period and later repurposed as a hospital. Following a grassroots preservation campaign, the building was designated a cultural asset and slated for adaptive reuse as a daytime care center operated by a business that also intended to promote local specialty products. However, due to conflicting cultural heritage and caregiving regulations, its function was ultimately restricted to operating as a bookstore, clothing shop, and exhibition space. Such cases are not uncommon in Taiwan and underscore the persistent disconnect between historic architecture and contemporary regulatory frameworks—a gap that hampers the effective integration of heritage into everyday life and limits its capacity to address diverse community needs.
Nevertheless, as the climate crisis deepens and alternative development paradigms—such as sustainable development, the circular economy, and post-growth—gain traction, heritage preservation is increasingly recognized for its potential to actively reshape society and mediate the relationship between humans and the environment. This evolving perspective positions heritage not merely as a cultural artifact to be safeguarded, but as a dynamic resource for envisioning more sustainable modes of living. The emergence of the sustainable heritage movement reflects this shift, highlighting the role of heritage in supporting environmental stewardship, long-term resilience, and community well-being (Cassar 2009; Landorf 2009; Leifeste and Stiefel 2018).
Building on this foundation, we propose the concept of integrated heritage as an alternative to conventional approaches to heritage reuse, which are often confined to individual buildings or designated sites and constrained by inflexible regulatory frameworks. Integrated heritage emphasizes the role of heritage ensembles as the nucleus for reintegrating the surrounding social and spatial fabric, envisioning their contemporary relevance at the scale of entire neighborhoods or even towns. We argue that such heritage must be reconceptualized as an infrastructural commons—a foundational component of everyday life that not only supports local networks but also constitutes a resource subject to ongoing collective stewardship and equitable access.
Moreover, for integrated heritage to function effectively as an infrastructural commons, it requires the support of new social configurations—namely, a shift toward a maintenance-oriented society that challenges the dominant paradigm of perpetual growth and expansion. In this context, our broader concern is to envision a future in which heritage preservation serves as a guiding principle in the reorganization of the built environment, advancing a more sustainable, resilient, and community-centered mode of living.
From Adaptive Reuse to Integrated Heritage
Since the 1980s, Taiwan’s heritage preservation paradigm has gradually evolved from a static, object-centered model to a more ecological approach—one that embraces transformation, traces of use, and integration with everyday life. The Cultural Heritage Preservation Act, developed from the earlier Antiquities Act, reflects this shift. Its scope has broadened beyond tangible artifacts to encompass the techniques of their production and, importantly, the practitioners themselves (Lin 2014). Parallel to these legal reforms, government policy has increasingly emphasized the importance of revitalizing heritage—recognizing that historical sites, museums, and heritage buildings must be adaptively reused to become active cultural assets (Yin 2013). Adaptive reuse has thus emerged as a central strategy in cultural heritage governance.
Despite these conceptual and policy shifts, preservation efforts in practice often remain entangled in tensions with development. Heritage designation and the broader process of heritagization are frequently perceived as state-led interventions that resist progress and preserve the status quo. This perception reinforces the longstanding dichotomy between static preservation and dynamic development. As a result, heritage conservation is still widely viewed as an impediment to growth, rather than as an integral and generative component of sustainable development.
Heritage preservation, at its core, is about re-creating and sustaining meaningful living environments. In the context of adaptive reuse, particularly of industrial sites, Lin (2012) argues that revitalization efforts should move beyond merely repurposing spaces for consumption. Instead, they should foster “cultural production bases” that support the growth of new cultural ecosystems. Moreover, heritage assessment, investigation, and restoration are inherently contested processes, involving multiple, and often competing, narratives of value as well as negotiations over resource allocation. These processes also function as arenas of cultural governance in which identities are both reinforced and challenged (Wang 2013).
Heritage embodies contemporary interpretations of collective memory and lived experience through tangible forms—such as buildings, landscapes, archives, and publications. Once materialized, these interpretations not only reshape the foundations of everyday life but also have the potential to inspire alternative modes of living (Kao and Wang 2023). Heritage preservation, therefore, is not external to development; it constitutes a distinct form of it. Crucially, this form of development is not predicated on creative destruction—through erasure and replacement—but rather on creative maintenance, adaptive reuse, reinterpretation, and transmission.
Although heritage preservation is frequently invoked as a means of engaging with and shaping contemporary life, we argue that genuinely generative preservation must be understood as a mundane, ongoing process of maintenance and transmission. Rather than merely identifying and protecting buildings, landscapes, or objects that have survived time and retained artisanal or mnemonic value, preservation must also engage with the cultivation of “future heritage.” This involves ensuring that what is passed on to subsequent generations retains relevance and meaning.
In this regard, it is not sufficient to simply critique or dismantle the “authorized heritage discourse” (Smith 2006) that underpins dominant preservation practices. Instead, there is a need for proactive strategies that support the continuous production and reproduction of the built and lived environment. Such an approach broadens the horizon of heritage work—from the conservation of the past to the construction of possible futures. Heritage, then, should not only be integrated into everyday life but should also serve as a foundational infrastructure for shaping inclusive and sustainable living environments.
Existing policies and grassroots initiatives already offer a compelling foundation for rethinking heritage preservation in more integrated and future-oriented terms. In 2017, Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture launched the Regeneration of Historical Sites program, which centers on sites of historical significance as focal points for improving the surrounding living environment and strengthening residents’ sense of place and identity. This initiative exemplifies the integration of spatial and cultural governance (Wang and Kao 2023).
Similarly, since 2008, the Foundation of Historic City Conservation and Regeneration has spearheaded the Old House Renewal Project, which focuses on revitalizing private residences that fall outside the conventional frameworks of heritage designation. By promoting everyday maintenance and adaptive reuse, this project demonstrates the potential of these structures to thrive through flexible and localized approaches. The initiative ultimately catalyzed a bottom-up movement, culminating in the Tainan City Government’s pioneering adoption of the Historical District Revitalization Autonomy Ordinance in 2012 (Lin 2014). In 2018, it also informed the Ministry of Culture’s launch of the Private Old Building Preservation and Regeneration Project (Cultural Affairs Bureau of Tainan City Government 2020).
Notably, both the Private Old Building Preservation and Regeneration Project and the Regeneration of Historical Sites program share a common objective: to reposition cultural governance as a central driver of urban and rural development, and to move beyond the protection of isolated or fragmented heritage assets. As articulated by the Ministry of Culture, these initiatives aim “to emphasize cultural governance as a driving force for urban and rural development and to move beyond the preservation of isolated, individual, or fragmented cultural heritage” (Ministry of Culture, ROC, n.d.). They reflect a growing recognition within the cultural policy domain of the need to integrate heritage preservation with everyday life and the broader social and spatial fabric.
It becomes increasingly clear, then, that heritage must not only be integrated into daily life but must also serve as a fundamental support system for the rhythms and needs of everyday living. Sustainable heritage is not static; it evolves in dialogue with societal change. We propose the notion of integrated heritage not as a mechanism to reinforce the prevailing growth-oriented paradigm, but as a catalyst for alternative social logics. Heritage preservation should transcend nostalgia or the aestheticization of space. Instead, it should operate as a transformative and imaginative force—one that opens up possibilities for rethinking how society lives, remembers, and sustains itself. In this light, we advocate for a shift toward a maintenance-oriented society, where heritage functions as vital infrastructure: adaptive, generative, and deeply embedded in the everyday.
Toward Infrastructural Commons in a Maintenance-Oriented Society
innovation, reinforcing a logic of continuous capital accumulation. Within this framework, practices such as preservation and maintenance are often relegated to a secondary status—perceived as outdated or inferior when compared to technological invention and progress. Even energy-saving and carbon-reducing technologies, promoted under the banners of sustainable development and green transformation, frequently serve capital accumulation by aligning with the tenets of ecological modernization. As such, they remain embedded in a cycle of competitive development rather than challenging its underlying assumptions.
Technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels, and wind turbines—while branded as green or renewable—are not exempt from the contradictions inherent in capitalist accumulation. These industries are similarly prone to crises of overaccumulation, supply-demand imbalances, and excess capacity. Their integration into financial and credit systems introduces further volatility, exacerbating spatial inequalities and uneven development (Harvey 1982). Despite their environmental claims, the production, use, and disposal of green technologies continue to deplete natural resources, pose ecological risks, and generate new forms of environmental and social displacement. For instance, the installation of ground-mounted solar arrays frequently results in the encroachment on agricultural land and aquaculture zones, revealing the unintended consequences of green industrial expansion.
servation, and circular economy discourse to engage with the deeper societal logics that structure these efforts. Growth-oriented development—driven by capitalism, industrialization, and monoculture—has underpinned many of the crises we face today and has long been critiqued by movements grounded in social justice, ecological sustainability, and cultural pluralism. However, our aim is not simply to reiterate these critiques. Rather, we argue that a more fundamental transformation in modes of living demands a reevaluation of the often-overlooked domains of preservation, maintenance, repair, and care—practices traditionally marginalized in favor of technological and economic innovation.
To effect such a transformation, maintenance must be accorded the same conceptual weight as development and justice. It should be reimagined not as passive upkeep, but as an active, generative force—central to the formation of knowledge, ethics, and aesthetics. In this view, maintenance becomes a foundational principle for a new societal logic, one capable of restructuring the way we live, relate, and sustain our environments (Kao and Wang 2022).
The knowledge, skills, and ethical principles associated with maintenance and repair emphasize sufficiency, functionality, and long-term sustainability. These values directly counter the prevailing obsession with constant innovation, novelty, and obsolescence. Accordingly, even when new objects, infrastructures, or environments must be created, they should be designed with durability, maintainability, and local adaptability in mind. Whenever possible, their upkeep should be manageable by local communities, rather than dependent on bureaucratic or specialized systems of repair that are costly, opaque, and difficult to replace. The concept of integrated heritage—which understands heritage (whether material or intangible) as interwoven with the everyday living environment—underscores the need for maintenance-related knowledge, skills, and tools to be broadly applicable across life domains. In a society that places maintenance at the core of both production and use, the things we make and inhabit should exist in a state akin to heritage itself: sustained through systems of continuous care, renewal, and community stewardship.
In proposing a maintenance-oriented society through the lens of heritage preservation, we foreground the critical role of infrastructure. Infrastructure refers to the organized systems of technologies, materials, and spatial configurations that enable everyday life. Unlike natural environments, which support human life through ecological processes, infrastructure is systematically produced through technological development and institutional coordination. It thus constitutes the backbone of modern living (Wang 2024). Cultural infrastructures—including heritage—play a parallel role in supporting cultural continuity and social cohesion (Wang and Kao 2019). Reconceptualizing heritage as infrastructural shifts the focus away from a narrow concern with authenticity or isolated preservation. Instead, it foregrounds heritage’s embeddedness in everyday life and its functional potential within broader socio-spatial systems. Preservation, then, becomes a process of infrastructuring—a mode of material and symbolic integration that enables alternative urban meanings and social imaginaries to take form (Wang 2020).
Ideally, both integrated heritage and cultural infrastructuralization should emerge through participatory, citizen-driven practices. Community involvement is essential to the realization of a maintenance-oriented society—one in which infrastructural commons are collectively governed and sustained. Taiwan, like many societies, faces mounting challenges such as climate change, rural-urban disparities, and demographic aging. These issues cannot be effectively addressed through technologies and policies rooted in the logic of growth-oriented accumulation. In contrast, if we are to meaningfully conserve and transmit both cultural and ecological legacies, our efforts must move toward slowing development—and, where necessary, embracing degrowth. Such a shift entails approaching our environments with care and respect, engaging in cycles of maintenance, adaptive reuse, and locally grounded renewal.
By repositioning heritage preservation from a peripheral concern to a central principle of societal organization, we advocate for integrated heritage in a maintenance-oriented society as foundational for alternative futures. This vision calls for a reimagining of heritage not simply as a static remnant of the past, but as a dynamic and infrastructural commons, which, we believe, can be fundamental for the co-creation of sustainable living environments through interdisciplinary collaboration and long-term collective care.
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