Page 239 - Beyond Decommissioning

220 Beyond Decommissioning

be taken into account, including financial interests, funding, visual appearance of the reused
site, socioeconomic aspects, relevance to heritage, stakeholder concerns, etc. To take a final
decision on site redevelopment, all of these elements will have to be combined into an inte-
grated cost-benefit assessment or MAUA (see Chapter 5).
6. The local property market will determine the channels (e.g., to private or public use) and
timing (e.g., through an interim use period) of sale or lease of the redeveloped property.
In fact, this is an iterative element, which can influence the selection of the redevelopment
option.
The following are examples of redevelopment projects for contaminated areas (radio-
logically and/or chemically).

6.4.1 Former Eternit Factory, Casale Monferrato, Italy

On September 10, 2016 a park was inaugurated in the area of the former Eternit
factory (a trade name for asbestos-based materials), in Casale Monferrato, Italy.
Somehow it tries to reconcile the present with a tragic past, the asbestos contam-
ination that claimed more than 3000 deaths. The area is 3 ha wide, of which 2.4 ha
are green spaces with more than 100 trees, and 0.6 ha are playgrounds. There are
also cycling and jogging trails, picnic areas, and a 200-seat amphitheater for
school shows.

6.4.2 From dumps to parks

The number of parks and public recreational sites created on old landfills is huge. Just
in the USA there are certainly more than 250, and possibly over 1000. Two famous
sites are Flushing Meadow, NY, (site of two World’s Fairs) and the rightly named Mt
Trashmore in Virginia Beach, VA. A converted landfill at Berkeley hosts an interna-
tional kite festival; another in Albuquerque houses a celebration of hot-air balloons.
The former Gardner Street Landfill was a dump until 2000. Today the 40-ha Boston’s
Millennium Park includes sports fields, playgrounds, an outdoor classroom and
amphitheater, 10 km of walking and biking paths, and river access.
San Francisco’s Trust for Public Land (TPL) has become a US leader in this field.
TPL has launched a national campaign to foster the conversion of landfills into parks.
TPL maintains that landfills are so suited for conversion to parks that recreation plan-
ners and landscape architects should not wait until the landfills are closed. New land-
fills could be planned and predesigned as parks even before the first batch of trash is
disposed of. The design-for-redevelopment concept has been first presented as DRR in
Section 4.4.
However, compared to a greenfield site, an old landfill requires more time and
planning to convert into a park. Such issues as toxicity, liability, and ground settlement
often make local institutions and private investors reluctant to launch such projects.
But these issues can be overcome. In a similar manner, the rails-to-trails program in
many countries has converted thousands of km of former railways to parks and bike
trails (Section 6.7.5). In an urban or suburban area, a former landfill may be one of
very few large, open spaces remaining on which a new public park can be installed.