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The New Symbiotic Architecture
Published in Kyoung Hee Kim, Microalgae Building Enclosures, 2022
Increased urbanization, traffic pollution, industry manufacturing, as well as agricultural pest treatment and synthetic fertilizers become sources of soil contamination. Urbanization causes environmental and social stress primarily due to industrial production and inadequate disposal of solid wastes, affecting water quality, biodiversity, and filtering of pollutants. Traffic pollution such as gasoline spills and polyaromatic hydrocarbons from asphalt, tars, and incomplete combustion of fuels introduce urban soil contaminants. Manufacturing sites, smelting, and machine/auto repair shops with harmful processes and products can easily contaminate urban soils. Brownfields are typically contaminated with hazardous heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, and mercury in quantities above the ecological baseline or regulatory levels. Brownfield sites are estimated at over 5 million (totaling over 50 million acres) globally73 with nearly half-a-million brownfields in the United States.74 Superfund sites, estimated at 664 potential sites, require long-term management and clean-up plans.75 Typical contaminants at brownfield sites include lead, petroleum, asbestos, and other heavy metals discharged from industry/manufacturing/agriculture processes, metal fabrication, and mining. Potential health effects include brain damage, various cancers, and organ damage. Table 3.7 summarizes past activities producing contaminants in brownfield sites and potential effects on human health.
Brownfields as waste/race governance: U.S. contaminated property redevelopment and racial capitalism
Published in Zsuzsa Gille, Josh Lepawsky, The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies, 2021
Over the last few decades, local, state, and federal government policies promoted the redevelopment of contaminated land using voluntary and market-based policy instruments that depart from traditional regulatory strategies. In this environment, “brownfields” emerged as a widespread and prominent mechanism of land conversion and waste governance. Brownfields, in this context, are abandoned or underutilized industrial and commercial sites that are, or are perceived to be, physically, chemically, or biologically contaminated; they are reused land or property complicated by the (potential) presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant. Such land is often what remains of former industrial and/or military occupation, but the term is used more broadly to include other idle, abandoned, underused, derelict, damaged, vacant land or buildings. Brownfields therefore may refer to land known/suspected to be polluted or contain hazardous waste, or to land that is not being used to its potential value. For advocates, brownfield policies offer not only environmental cleanup, but also locally driven land recycling and health improvement, “with the promise to transform distressed sites across the U.S. from blight to valuable economic and environmental resources” (Dull and Wernstedt 2010, 120).
Applying Technology to Sustainability, Part I
Published in Julie Kerr, Introduction to Energy and Climate, 2017
There are several benefits of utilizing brownfields. Brownfield redevelopment ensures that contaminated land is cleaned up and restored. Many existing brownfield sites are contaminated as a result of past industrial or commercial uses. Depending on what these sites were formerly used for, contaminants may include a range of toxins, such as petroleum, metals, asbestos, pesticides, PCBs, and solvents. These contaminants may create significant health and safety risks for those who live and work close to brownfield properties. When abandoned brownfield lands are left neglected, contaminants may migrate off-site, creating hazards for others nearby. Even where soil and groundwater at a brownfield site are not contaminated, deteriorating buildings and surface debris on these sites may still pose health and safety risks and have a negative impact on property values and on a neighborhood’s image. Cleaning up these sites helps to improve the quality of the environment in the community and removes real and perceived threats to health and safety.
Significance of authenticity: learning from best practice of adaptive reuse in the industrial heritage of Iran
Published in International Journal of Architectural Heritage, 2020
Sepideh Samadzadehyazdi, Mojtaba Ansari, Mohammadjavad Mahdavinejad, Mohammadreza Bemaninan
Industrial buildings are one of the important building typologies which demonstrate the technological development of the country through their architecture. The Nizhny Tagil Charter for The Industrial Heritage (2003) defines them as remains of industrial culture which are of historical, technological, social, architectural, or scientific value. These remains consist of buildings and machinery; workshops, mills, and factories; mines and sites for processing and refining warehouses and stores; places where energy is generated, transmitted, and used; transport and all its infrastructure; as well as places used for social activities related to industry such as housing, religious worship, or education (Figure 8). Industrial sites are often brownfields. A brownfield is an abandoned, or under-used industrial facility where redevelopment is complicated by environmental contamination. Reusing brownfield sites in preference to green ones has been the central focus of urban development in Britain since the 1990s (Yanbin 2014). International conventions represent principles on the conservation of industrial heritage (Table 4).