Regeneration of disused urban land

(New page, being edited by Sophia and Duncan)

A considerable percentage of land cover in most contemporary cities lies vacant or in deep neglect, often leading to social and economic problems. These areas are often brownfield sites or post-industrial areas, whose regeneration to improve urban biodiversity and provide additional ecosystem services can lead to a more ecologically sound built environment and improvement of amenities and contact with nature for local communities who have faced, at times, decades of social neglect and social fragmentation.

This page is part of an ongoing, open-ended online collaborative database, which collects relevant approaches that can be used by city-makers to tackle unsustainability and injustice in cities. It is based mainly on knowledge generated in EU-funded projects and touches on fast changing fields. As such, this page makes no claims of authoritative completeness and welcomes your suggestions.

General introduction to approach

Regeneration of disused urban space focuses on sustainable, socially and economically beneficial, remediation and revitalization of disused urban spaces such as landfills and other brownfield sites. This remediation is done to create productive green infrastructure through: nature based solutions, co-creation, and sustainable business models (proGIreg) and a ‘Brownfield Navigator’ decision support tool (HOMBRE). All these measures follow the same aim: to make better social, economic, and environmental use of these spaces, but their methods are different (i.e. nature based solutions (NBS) vs a strategic decision-making tool). Both projects involve multiple stakeholders, including: local citizens, governments, businesses, NGOs and universities, urban planners.

ProGIreg (Green Cities for Climate and Water Resilience, Sustainable Economic Growth, Healthy Citizens and Environments, 2018 - 2023) is exploring the use of Carbon-neutral methods to restore soil fertility and involves combining the poor quality soil with compost from organic waste and biotic compounds. At the heart of the HOMBRE (Holistic Management of Brownfield Regeneration, 2010 - 2014) project, for exmaple, was the ambition to create a paradigm shift towards a ‘Zero Brownfields’ approach, where Brownfields become areas of opportunity that deliver useful services for society, instead of derelict areas that are considered useless. In this context, new synergies between different types of services are brought into consideration, in order to leverage change. The “Zero Brownfields” perspective was an elaboration of a circular land management framework that was previously developed (by an earlier EU project; CircUse -Managing land use for the benefit of all). This perspective promotes sustainable urban development by limiting the use of new green spaces and by reusing previously used or underused land. The territorial cooperation often involved means that different regions, in different countries, could pilot different aspects of sustainable land use, using an approach based on the motto: “avoid – recycle – compensate”.

Shapes, sizes and applications

• General insight: Regeneration of disused urban spaces takes many forms, but brownfield development is central to the approach. Brownfield development is a process of regeneration for land that has become abandoned, derelict, or contaminated after its previous use (e.g. industry, unused large-scale unused transportation infrastructure). In the 1980s, the UK, France and Germany were forerunners in initiatives for derelict land recycling programmes. These programmes aimed at: reducing the use of greenfield sites, preserving architectural heritage, general urban renewal, employment creation, and improved environmental quality. According to Grimski and Ferber (2001), structural (economic) policy remains dominant in brownfield remediation programmes, but ecological objectives are becoming more prominent. Other than brownfield regeneration, different NBS tools are used both within and in addition to brownfield regeneration.

• Development stage, level of maturity: In general, NBS used in regeneration is a relatively developed/mature approach which has been studied and applied in widespread contexts. The term “NBS” has been used only since the 2000s. Meanwhile, brownfield remediation is also a mature practice, but the use of HOMBRE’s Brownfield Navigator tool may be still more experimental and not wide spread.

• Successes and limitations: The NBS for remediation are still being tested in proGIreg (project in progress), and the brownfield navigator seems to have gotten some degree of attention and use. The largest limitation, in general, is the large remediation costs that create a barrier to undertaking this approach. Remediation (decontamination and regeneration) is extremely costly, and the initial land value is usually very low (Grimski and Ferber, 2001).

• Level of transferability/stated applicability of approach: High, applies to all urban areas with disused spaces, particularly post-industrial urban areas. Though high remediation cost requires a context which financially supports the approach. I.e. Renaturation of the post-industrial Ruhr region is extremely costly, and is financed by industry foundations and the government etc. And while the general approach is highly transferable, the specific regeneration solutions are strongly context-dependent.

Relation to UrbanA themes: Cities, sustainability, and justice

Urban. High extent. Specific brownfield and disused sites within urban areas. Post-industrial cities especially. However, regeneration of disused space is also applicable to rural areas that have been subject to primary economic activities (mining, agriculture, forestry).

Justice. Slightly. Regeneration of these spaces does not necessarily increase justice, since it depends on the intended use of the spaces afterwards. However, disused areas may be more frequently found in lower-income/less desirable areas and therefore their restoration could contribute to distributional justice (e.g. green space provision). Yet, very intensive biomass production could also involve burdens for rather poor residents locally, to the benefit of wealthy users or investors elsewhere. The process of regeneration may enhance procedural justice, like in the co-creation aspect of the proGIreg project.

Sustainability. Medium extent. Remediates sites that are contaminated/heavily damaged. However, outcomes may not necessarily be ecologically sustainable if the remediation is aimed at intensive human recreational use such as new housing developments or business parks, e.g. This is often the case.

Linking sustainability and justice. Depends entirely on the intended use of the land afterwards and the process by which it is remediated (inclusive of the community e.g.) There is a high potential for a strong link between sustainability and justice if the regeneration follows the proGIreg approach (co-creation, NBS…).

Narrative of change

The approach cluster aims to make use of the potential social, environmental, and economic benefits of disused (toxic, damaged) land in urban areas. The process creates this change through co-creation between many stakeholders and smart tools and NBS that assess each situation in order to be effective and efficient in remediation efforts.

Transformative potential

Regeneration projects usually try to overcome power relations that may have blocked the usage of unused land after being dismissed. They usually do not interfere with the power relations that led to the damaging of the land in the first place. However, regeneration initiatives may help indirectly with problematizing the damaging practice and also challenge the way in which disused land is viewed. This may increase transparency and accountability in the relation between previous owners and users of the land with government regulators and future user groups. More likely, however, government funded redevelopment may distract from responsibility for past damages. Since the impact of regeneration initiatives is confined to specific sites, (rather than the socio-economic system on a larger scale), we consider its transformative potential to be rather limited.

Illustration of approach

An example of urban space regeneration is the regeneration of Dortmund, Germany’s industrial and landfill regions around the Emscher River (Huckarde district) using NBS (pollinator diversity, aquaponics, accessible green corridors, community urban farms and gardens, leisure activities and renewable energy projects).

This effort includes many actors working collaboratively, including: the City of Dortmund, RWTH Aachen University, Die Urbanisten (local NGO), ICLEI, a network of 7 other cities (involved in the proGIreg project), urban design companies, and other NGOs focused on social considerations of the new developments (to ensure they improve citizens’ quality of life). In this effort, living labs have been used to strive for community-led solutions. Regarding regeneration efforts in the Dortmund region as a whole, the Foundation for Industrial Heritage (which is financially supported by the RAG-Stiftung) and the Emschergenossenschaft are also heavily involved in regeneration of Dortmund’s disused urban spaces from its historical industrial use. The regions’ regeneration activities have social equality considerations at their core. Therefore, there is a strong connection here between urban, sustainability, and justice in this case. All of the initiatives are in urban spaces, aimed at renaturating the contaminated sites, and making them accessible to the community in efforts to increase quality of life and social cohesion in a context of racial and economic tensions. Regarding (limits to) transferability, this approach is enabled in the Dortmund case partly due to the financial support enabled by a governance system that holds industry responsible for regeneration (German law requires industrial firms to decontaminate and decommission their unused sites), and a strong network of different actors working towards the same goal. Another enabling contextual factor is the population density and need for urban green space and green infrastructure in the Ruhr region, which provides motivation for the regeneration.