Preventive indicators for creating brownfields

Abstract

Although the problem of brownfields in urban territories is successfully limited, it is a negative phenomenon of a sustainable city. Moreover, the number of recently created brownfield territories has become higher than that of the regenerated ones. Such territories reduce the quality of the social and economic setting of a city as well as visually and physically affect the life quality of city residents. Unfortunately, methods for the revitalization of brownfield land have been applied to deal with the consequences of the problem rather than to limit the problem itself. The authors of the article have investigated the aspects to be avoided to not create brownfields. The indicators that enable predicting the probability of a territory becoming a brownfield have been analyzed in this paper. Countries develop and exist under different social and economic conditions. Therefore, there is no uniform and universally accepted system of indicators for brownfield prevention that can be applied in any country or city. The authors have attempted to implement a recently developed idea of indicators for prevention under Lithuanian conditions and have selected those facilitating the identification of brownfields with an aim of identifying the most significant ones warning about the potential harm from the creation of brownfields in Lithuania. The selected indicators have been grouped, taking into account social, economic, natural, building and infrastructure settings of the city and ranked by a group of experts in urban planning. The established hierarchy of indicators in the groups of urban setting has allowed the authors to select the most significant preventive indicators for brownfields. The created system of indicators could be applied in practice as a basis for monitoring pertinent data and tracking their change.