DNA of Industrial Heritage: Deindustrialization aNd Adaptive Reuse. 01/01/2024 - 31/12/2027

Abstract

There are different trajectories of deindustrialization leading to abandonment and neglect. Deindustrialization and industrial heritage are two terms coined in and around the same period in 1970s. Although both are a by-product of industrialization, deindustrialization studies and heritage studies often do not come close, they prosper in their own silos. On the one hand deindustrialization studies focus on the narratives of displaced workers and their experiences/suffering without a direct link with the place, while on the other hand, heritage studies are concerned solely with the physical remnants of the industrial complexes. Concerned with the physical remnants of the industrial complexes, the adaptive reuse approaches permit conservation through development– utilization and integration of redundant industrial areas in the contemporary urban landscape. Although adaptive reuse of industrial heritage is a culturally sustainable option in urban transformation and heritage is a potential resource for the urban and regional development, the implementation is often problematic in the sense that the industrial sites after adaptive reuse are stripped from being memory places of worker's, instead they are sterilized, creating a disconnect with its context, both in terms of deindustrialization history, and meaning. In that sense, the adaptive reuse of industrial heritage often fails to meet sustainability criteria that prioritize people's needs in social and cultural terms, focusing mainly on the economic dimension and paying little attention to the environmental concerns. This PhD thesis wants to investigate different deindustrialization trajectories to understand if they have an impact on defining the adaptive reuse processes. This approach rejects taking the abandonment as the starting point of transformation for adaptive reuse, but rather wants to look at the entire history of the building, including the contextual background preparing its construction, dynamics of the deindustrialization processes, the abandonment processes and the adaptive reuse as a whole. By doing so, it hopes to identify patterns or links between deindustrialization processes and adaptive reuse strategies.

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  • Research Project