**2. Current Barriers to Industrial Heritage Reconstruction and Reuse**

Although industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse presents obvious benefits, "challenges and barriers involved make it futile and hard to obtain" [9]. André Fernandes, et al., highlighted the challenges and barriers of the reconstruction and reuse of waterfront areas by investigating the different foci of stakeholders, which they divided into six categories: governance (e.g., inconsistency of political vision, inadequacy of the intervention concept, inadequacy of the institutional model, inadequacy of institutional coordination, instability of the institutional model, lack of promotion and marketing); infrastructure (e.g., undefined structural projects, lack of accessibility); territory (e.g., size of the intervention areas, location of the intervention areas, metropolitan territorial model, land ownership issues); finance (e.g., lack of investment, financial liabilities, financial crisis, property market crisis); culture (e.g., industrial tradition, industrial stigma); and environment (e.g., environmental liabilities, climate change effects) [10]. These problems basically cover every aspect of the difficulties of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse. In the past five years, research on the barriers to industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse has focused on some of these obstacles. Based on time limits imposed on the completion of any reconstruction and reuse project, these obstacles can be divided into financial and systemic barriers in the early stage of a project and into secondary problems in the latter stage of a project. Some representative literature is summarized in Table 1.


**Table 1.** Main literature on the current barriers to industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse.

#### *2.1. Financial Barriers*

Most researchers have shown that the lack of sufficient funds is the most important barrier to industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse, and that industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects need to find appropriate and feasible implementation methods and financial instruments [9]. In practice, "few of them are restored under poor conditions as a result of financial profits" [11]. The private sector has also often been uninterested in these projects due to "the significant remediation costs and the limited market values" [12]. Meanwhile, "the support of public actors is limited" [13], which has further aggravated the problem of funding in industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse projects.

It has happened that some private investors realized that industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse was profitable and thus invested in it, hence solving the financial obstacle encountered in the process of reconstruction and reuse. However, the shortsighted economic vision of private investors has generally pushed industrial heritage into the abyss, and the conflict of interest between the protection of heritage value and the realization of economic profits has been prevalent [14]. As Cristina Merciu, et al., pointed out, "some of the existing buildings of industrial heritage (special architecture, machinery and working tools of an outstanding value) entered a process with actions based on interests of economic gain. Interventions of brutal functional conversion affected a part of the industrial heritage, with buildings being partially or totally demolished or even being torched". This comment emerged in the context of the privatization process initiated in Romania in the 1990s, which led to the "capitalization of industrial heritage". When industrial buildings are bought by investors who often have different development aims, there is a "natural barrier" against the intervention of protective measures [13]. Due to the different degrees of capital intervention, a discourse based on power emerged, and industrial heritage became dependent on capitalist profit-seeking. The original purpose of industrial heritage reconstruction and reuse has tended to deteriorate, and protection has ceased to be a prerequisite for intervention.
