Collaboration and social networks for the adaptive reuse of religious heritage: the case of the oratories in the historic center of Naples

The reuse of religious cultural heritage has been at the center of national and international debate in the last decades years. The vastness and importance of this heritage in Italy makes it extremely urgent to address its sustainability, and therefore to identify strategies that are consistent with the set of values it embodies (cultural, social, economic, and environmental). By exploiting cultural resource as a driver of local development, heritage-led regeneration approaches are aimed at generating economic, social, and cultural values in the territory. These approaches are particularly suited to highly complex contexts such as the historic centers of metropolitan areas which, in addition to the challenge of sustainable management of their cultural heritage, are called upon to deal with the consequences of urban degeneration processes such as crime, social marginalization, gentrification, urban decay and the progressive loss of cultural identity and traditions. In these contexts, the unused or underused heritage can represent an opportunity to improve the social, economic, and cultural well-being of metropolitan areas if properly valorized through specific adaptive reuse interventions. In line with this scenario, the Ad Maiora project: "Designing a sustainable service system for the enhancement of cultural heritage. An innovative model for the Archconfraternities of Naples" aims to valorize, in a network logic, some of the unused or underused oratories (churches) through the definition of innovative services systems and related business models, able to bring out and promote the identity of this heritage and support local development processes. From the methodological point of view, the starting point for designing effective adaptive reuse interventions is the analysis of the context in which these oratories are located, namely, the historic center of Naples. At this regard, this exploratory phase of the project can be approached through the application of the Social Network Analysis (SNA). Some recent studies apply the SNA to the study of cultural organizations, analyzing the contribution of the social network to the value co-creation processes in customer-supplier interactions, as well as to the generation of social, cultural, and economic values in local context. From this perspective, it is the network of actors, and their links that co-produces value. By applying the SNA to the study of reuse initiatives of the cultural heritage, the objective of the paper is twofold: to outline the associated "social and relational patterns" and to identify the structural characteristics of the reuse initiatives network through a set of indicators. In particular, based on the network centrality measurement, it is possible to identify and evaluate power, prominence and subalternity, dominance and dependence, influence or prestige of local stakeholders depending on their relational and social patterns in the network. The empirical analysis involves public and private entities (such as cultural associations, foundations, individual, and public institutions) that manage religious cultural heritage assets, such as churches and cloisters. Through the administration of an open-ended questionnaire, the aim is to identify actors with whom they collaborate in the provision of social, cultural, and economic services, as well as in the organization and participation of events and initiatives in the neighborhood in which they are located. The work is highly innovative as, to the knowledge of the Authors, it is one of the first to apply SNA to the study of collaborations and social networks in heritage re-use initiatives.