Industrial Sites in Transition

Today, industrial heritage is commonly accepted as part of our cultural heritage and has even become useful to commercially promote an area. Additionally, industrial heritage sites have become accepted as places of continuous production. Places for repair and maintenance are argued to have great importance to the resilience of cities while many enterprises in urban industrial areas contribute to a diversified job market and to be important for ecological and social sustainability.

In this paper we will analyze what kind of urban identities that are established and maintained while turning these living landscapes of production into attractive new neighborhoods. We will delve around the question: How can a vision of mixed urban uses be understood and realized?

Underlying this paper are case studies that the research group has performed in the meat packing district in Stockholm, along with Ringön, a 20^th  century industrial riverfront in Gothenburg, Sweden. A couple of reference cases from the outskirts of Stockholm are highlighted also. In these areas 20^thcentury industrial areas are transformed for new residential uses. For comparison we refer to a limited number of international examples.

We have surveyed a limited number of core concepts that are frequently used in recent urban development plans for industrial sites. We try to find out what is it, in the end of the day, that diverse stakeholders truly wish to achieve while agreeing on certain sympathetic but rather loosely defined concepts such as ”permissive character”, ”preservation” and the often used ”mixed urban uses”.