Page 39 - Beyond Decommissioning

20 Beyond Decommissioning

Fig. 2.3 Cornwall mining site, United Kingdom. In such a case, the remains of the old, remote
facility can only make a monument or an open-air museum, but no adaptive reuse seems
realistically possible.
Credit to Pixabay.

Needless to say, there are cases where the degree and extent of preventive mainte-
nance are irrelevant to reuse. Chernobyl is possibly the most notorious example in this
regard. In no way will that plant be reusable. But its site will be reusable as illustrated
in Section 6.1, Chernobyl Site, Ukraine.

2.2 Industrial heritage

Our duty is to preserve what the past has had to say for itself, and to say for ourselves
what shall be true for the future.
John Ruskin (1819–1900)

When undertaken on former industrial buildings, adaptive reuse is a viable strategy
for both neighborhood revitalization and heritage conservation. This strategy is opti-
mized when the industrial buildings requiring reuse demonstrate heritage signifi-
cance. This is because cultural heritage and archaeological resources conservation
provide important environmental, economic and social benefits and because adapta-
tion provides a link to past cultures through built form. Industrial heritage buildings
present a built form that is unique both aesthetically and because their construction,
during the industrial revolution, transformed familiar landscapes, disrupted habits
and challenged established values of the times.
Sugden (2017)