This article presents an analysis of some policies concerning the intervention in the existing city, from 2000 Lisbon Strategy until 2020 Europe strategy. It considers urban policies and policy instruments that have led interventions in urban built heritage. It also considers cultural heritage policies or environment and energy policies with effects on the intervention in the existing city, in the urban building stock.
These policies were analysed from the point of view of the contribution for the general objective of integrated urban regeneration and for two specific objectives: safeguarding cultural heritage and promoting environmental efficiency. The relations between these objectives have been studied in the research project “Assessing Urban and Building Rehabilitation Impacts on Urban Metabolism and Heritage” financed by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.
The article aims to analyse how the policies gave priority to cultural heritage safeguard or to environmental efficiency and also how these sectorial objectives interacted with the multidimensional objectives of integrated urban regeneration.
Grounded on the presented analysis, the article concludes that the effective conservation of urban buildings as a component of integrated urban regeneration has not found sufficiently specific, effective and widespread policies. Therefore, although the environmental policies could had led “recycling of the existing city” trends, the scarce and incomplete consideration of the cultural value of the existing urban housing stock in the programming of urban regeneration policies has constituted one of the obstacles to the effective return of urban areas to their generalized housing use, hampering an adequate promotion of the urban social cohesion.
