Sustainable Development and Built Heritage: Post-Catastrophe Reconstruction with Reclaimed Materials.

In this paper, we discuss strategies and potentials offered by reusing construction materials for post-catastrophe reconstruction in a simultaneous social-cultural and technical approach. This is explored as an alternative to the existing reconstruction practices because it has the potential to retain architectural, social and cultural values while being environmentally sound and economically attractive in existing social networks. The discussion is based on a recent broadened version of Life Cycle Assessment: Social Life Cycle Assessment. LCA is a powerful tool for analyzing commensurable aspects of quantifiable systems. Not every factor, however, can be reduced to quantitative terms and inserted into a model, and social implications of products are generally lacking in LCAs. Social Life Cycle Assessment offers to include social components and it is tested here to include heritage as a cultural value in its account. Cases of study are drawn from the experience in post-catastrophe heritage reconstruction in Chile after the earthquake of 2010, which strongly affected heritage zones. Alternative reconstruction alternatives in this context are evaluated for an integrated appraisal with SLCA. The conclusions underline the potentials and limitations of SLCA for integrating heritage values in its analysis, and suggest further developments.