Decision-Making Support for Housing Projects in Post-Industrial Areas

Abstract

Post-industrial areas, despite often showing immense damage and high soil contamination, equally often stand out via many positive assets, displaying immense potential. Post-industrial areas, in most cases, commemorate the modernisation and development of a country’s market in urban space. It is expressed in surviving buildings and urban complexes, many of which possess high historical and aesthetic value. We reviewed the literature, identified gaps and demonstrated that this subject is relevant and topical. Insofar as analyses of the urban and architectural structure of post-industrial heritage and assessments of their potential use appear often in the literature, we found that scholars rarely discussed redeveloping post-industrial areas via housing projects. The publications, methods and tools we discussed lacked solutions that could support decision-making in redeveloping post-industrial areas into housing while accounting for the needs and requirements of all stakeholders. Our initial study was based on an online survey performed among a group of specialist experts with close ties to the Polish construction market. Due to the specificity of decayed and degraded areas, any action taken entails high risk and requires a broad range of analyses, which are often not carried out due to said specificity. The main focus of our study was to determine the need to develop a new tool and the necessity of accounting for aspects that directly affect housing projects to be sited in post-industrial areas. As a result, we demonstrated that Polish practitioners displayed a need for a tool to be developed that could aid in decision-making and assessing the potential of redeveloping post-industrial areas into housing areas and that would account for the legal, organisational, technical and economic aspects and that of market analysis.