Strategies for the Sustainable Reindustrialization of Brownfields

The rapid de-industrialization of Western economies has left an enormous impact on the urban landscape in Europe, leaving behind vacant warehouses and production facilities. Industrial sites reuse is a crucial issue for sustainable land and urban development. This work is concerned with the fundamental aspects of industrial heritage and the ways to incorporate brownfields back into the urban fabric as a value-adding element. Adaptive reuse represents the most sustainable form of reuse, as it is based on maximal conservation of built assets, minimizing time, materials, embodied energy waste, and preserving site identity. For industrial areas redevelopment and reuse often site remediation is required. This activity is usually designed, carried out and assessed before and independently from urban design, planning and real estate strategies. This independence leads to higher remediation costs and often implies demolition of built industrial infrastructures, preventing any potential adaptive reuse. The former industrial site of Acciaierie Lucchini in Settimo Torinese, just outside of Turin, offered the chance to test a holistic approach, based on the multidisciplinary integration of knowledge and skills during the whole design process in order to define real policy proposals trying to improve the technical framework for more sustainable reuse procedures. In the 93.000 m² area, abandoned and left to degenerate since 2000, trading in ferrous materials and then steel manufacturing were carried out for over fifty years, leaving a legacy in the form of heavy metal contaminated backfill material and underneath soil. Isolation from the city centre, poor accessibility for pedestrians and the location within an industrial zone make this site inadequate for any form of residential development. Whereas re-industrialization of this brownfield can bring new value to the site, transforming the abandoned spaces into an innovative industrial hub able to combine logistic, production, leisure and temporary living, experimenting with mixed-use programs the new relation between innovative production and the city.