Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing awareness that not all decommissioned and obsolete real-estate assets can be recovered and reused. After the paradigm of urban growth, and following the paradigm of regeneration, a new paradigm seems to be looming on the horizon: the paradigm of shrinkage. Due to this change in perspective, discussions on the potential of demolition policies as an alternative to regeneration and reuse are gaining support in the debate about urban growth. In the United States, there are two on-going programs using demolition as their main tool for urban planning: the blight elimination programs and the flood buyout programs. The former foresees the demolition of abandoned and decayed real-estate assets, while the latter envisions the demolition and relocation of buildings within areas under flooding risks. Given their successful employment in the U.S., this paper evaluates the applicability of these programs to an Italian case, which is characterized by a different building heritage and different territorial conditions. Simulations of the programs’ application are made using two case studies: Lecce nei Marsi (Abruzzo) and Moncalieri (Piemonte). The results demonstrate the substantial feasibility of the blight elimination programs’ usage in Italy, while the flood buyout programs instead demonstrates major obstacles that may hinder its successful application.
Highlights
Decommissioning and demolition of no longer used real-estate assets have, in recent years, gained emphasis in urban planning debates, both as a conceptual issue and regarding their implications as policies and planning instruments
An analysis of the results of the first phase of blight elimination programs (BEP) implementation demonstrated that the values of real-estate located within a 500-foot radius from the renovated area had increased by an average of 4.2%, while the values of properties located within a Hardest Hit Fund zone, but beyond the 500-foot radius from where interventions were made, increased their overall value by 13.8%
Urban and territorial regulations have restricted the construction of new real-estate assets in areas with systemic environmental hazards, reducing the total number of structures subjected to risk
Summary
Decommissioning and demolition of no longer used real-estate assets have, in recent years, gained emphasis in urban planning debates, both as a conceptual issue and regarding their implications as policies and planning instruments. In the United States, the need for an intervention in decommissioned real-estate assets became evident in the late 1970s, due to a redefinition of geographies and production patterns; public programs were started with the objective of removing underused, as well as abandoned, residential and productive real-estate In that regard, these blight elimination programs (BEP) [3] were the first to admit that urban growth could be reduced, and inverted, leading cities to a process of contraction in which the habitual policies of regeneration and repurposing would prove to be fragile and inefficient. In many Italian areas, the market values are lower than the costs of renovation and new construction, making any real-estate investment economically unsustainable, even for simple building renovations In these contexts, which become more and more diffused, urban regeneration strategies cannot be realized, since they lack economic sustainability. Due to the typological and constructive nature of the Italian building heritage, flood buyout programs tend to be excessively expensive and their commitment in terms of public resources is comparable to the expenditure that would be incurred with interventions aimed to mitigate the environmental risks
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