Memories at risk. How to support decisions about abandoned industrial heritage regeneration

Industrial sites are frequently abandoned, since they are often considered as a difficult heritage to be developed to new uses. The significant remediation costs and the limited market values, given their frequently marginal locations, make the investment unattractive in particular for the private sector. The increasing decay, due to the progressive loss of appeal for the ownership, in many cases compromises not only the feasibility of hypothetical reuse scenarios, but also threatens the memory and the sense of identity of places. The relevance of industrial memories and their recognition as cultural assets are the result of a recent theoretical evolution that brought the attention to the potentials of their adaptive reuse. Thus, regeneration projects of this kind of assets is in between the instance of development and the one of preserving the architectural characteristics as well as the historical and cultural values. Despite the degradation resulting from the abandonment represents an important economic constraint, former industrial buildings present construction features, as large spaces with high indoor lay-out flexibility, which make them particularly suitable to be redeveloped for new uses. In this context, the paper focuses on the potential reuse of an abandoned industrial building in the Northern Italy. The future scenarios have been defined according to a composite Development Suitability Index and then evaluated by applying the PROMETHEE method.