Ensuring Sustainability in Brownfield Revitalisation as PDF

Introduction
Sustainable Development Evaluation and the Promotion and Preservation
of Industrial Heritage are two sets of issues that are key to the
contribution of successful revitalisation of brownfield sites. An EU
Transnational partnership project called REVIT, funded by INTERREG IIIB,
has researched these issues through the collaborative working of six
participating partners from four different countries: Germany, France,
Netherlands and UK. The result has been the development and sharing of
new ways to approach sustainable development and industrial heritage and
to capitalise on their contribution to regenerating different types of
brownfield sites.
Sustainable Development includes balancing environmental, economic and
social needs within the context of brownfield site redevelopment. EU policy
and legislation, driven by the Gothenburg Agenda, places obligations on
developers to consider and mitigate the negative impacts of redeveloping
brownfield sites through an evaluation of sustainable development
indicators, setting targets and then taking the appropriate action to
ensure that revitalisation meets minimum legal as well as social, economic
and environmental obligations.
The redevelopment of brownfield sites requires a full assessment of the
environmental factors, such as the potential soil and water contamination
as well as reviewing the ecology of the area. Remediation strategies and
techniques can then be considered once a full understanding of a site is
known. The cost of cleaning a site then has to be assessed against
economic criteria based on the future use of the site and this in turn
should be supported by a wide range of stakeholders. Thus the
process of sustainable development is one of reviewing each
stage in the process. This can be a daunting task and the
difficulty is often the large number of sustainability
indicators that are available to be chosen to assess a
potential site.
Research undertaken for the REVIT project has shown that
each country - and even regions within different countries
- has developed its own sets of sustainable indicators and
targets. It was hoped that a common set of indicators
could be applied to all brownfield site redevelopment at an
EU level, however this has not proved possible. This is because
each country has its own environmental legislation requirements
and local policies, both influencing the choice of sustainable
indicators. The REVIT project has however developed a methodology
to evaluate sustainable development based on selecting an appropriate set
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