Abstract
The article highlights the potential of brownfield areas in the sense of the rules and principles of sustainable development of the regions which shows significant disparities determined by the developmental tendencies of the socio-economic and environmental spheres, whose interactions were its basic platform in the Slovak Republic in the last years. Brownfield areas, with a degree of degradation and environmental quality depending on their type and original use, have a negative impact on all mentioned spheres of regional development, since such sites are unused and represent so-called brown investments, i.e. areas from which the region has no benefit. From the explicitly defined positive and negative determinants of the actual occurrence of brownfield areas in terms of sustainable development of the regions, the article quantifies their prioritization in the process of implementation into the regional development model, accepting the principles of Saaty matrix which is objective from a process perspective of sustainable regional development. Based on the explicit quantification of the above-mentioned determinants, the categorization of brownfield areas in the process of sustainable regional development, including the model of regional development with implemented brownfield sites, whose actual occurrence supports the occurrence of diversified activities, reduces the price of the surrounding land and ultimately threatens the health of the affected population and reduces the price of surrounding lands.
Highlights
Sustainable development can be defined as the environment as “a development that preserves the opportunity to satisfy their basic living needs to the present and future generations while not diminishing the diversity of nature and preserving the natural functions of ecosystems” within the meaning of § 6 of Act no. 17/1992 Coll. on the Environment
The degree of degradation of brownfield areas and the level of environmental quality depend directly on their type and original use, which determines the financial means associated with their revitalization in favour of sustainable regional development
This fact is complicated by different understanding of brownfield areas in selected countries of the European Union (Table 1), which complicates their implementation in a unified definition of sustainable development (Pavolová & Kyseľová, 2011; Beck, 2016; Tvaronavičienė & Razminiene, 2017; Mura et al 2017)
Summary
Sustainable development can be defined as the environment as “a development that preserves the opportunity to satisfy their basic living needs to the present and future generations while not diminishing the diversity of nature and preserving the natural functions of ecosystems” within the meaning of § 6 of Act no. 17/1992 Coll. on the Environment. The negative determinant of the occurrence of brownfield sites in regions that hinder their sustainable development include: the decline in the economic performance of the region (D1), the greenfield competition (D2), the reduction of the aesthetic nature of the landscape (D3), the threat to the health of the population (D4), insufficient return on investments in brownfield sites regeneration (D5), the possibility of environmental burdens and associated additional investment to remediate them (D6), the occurrence of devastated buildings (D7), the non-use of brownfield sites in the development of the region (D8) and the reduction of the territorial ecological stability system (D9) and their weight values for the need to define their prioritization in the process of sustainable development of the regions were quantified (Table 4). Among the positive determinants of the use of brownfield sites in the systematic process of supporting the sustainable development of the regions were included: sustainable use of the area in the region (D1), support for social development (D2), increasing employment in the region (D3), promotion of economic development due to regeneration of brownfield sites and their re-use (D4), enhancing environmental quality by removing environmental burdens, (D6), increasing the purchasing power of the population (D6), and increasing the average wage in the region (D7) due to the re-use of brownfield sites by supporting small and medium-sized enterprises in the region (D8), increasing the competitiveness of the region (D10) and the improvement of population life quality (D11) and, by the same procedure, the values of their weights and the need to define their priority in the process of sustainable development of the regions were quantified (Table 5)
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