Functional recovery and structural refurbishment of disused industrial buildings: an integrated approach

In the last decade, due to the processes and the changes that took place in the field of industry, with special reference to the most developed countries, primary industrial activities (steel, chemical, mining, etc..) moved to countries in the developing world. This process made available a number of industrial buildings no longer used. The recovery of these buildings is a problem of great interest and importance, because of the obvious impact on the related economic and social opportunities and represents an unavoidable challenge for the sustainability of the urban development. In this paper a methodology for the rehabilitation of buildings that fall into the disused industrial areas is proposed. It makes use of a support tool proper of the project management, the graph of logical sequence (GLS), in order to identify the concatenation and the logical sequence of activities that make up the building process of recovery. Both the architectural and structural features are considered in an integrated way. The proposed methodology leads to the definition and use of suitable indicators, which represent in summary the information that is transmitted between the various logical blocks that make up the graph. An example of application, consisting of the proposed recovery of abandoned industrial building, belonging to the former Falck area in Sesto S. Giovanni, helps to clarify the practical application of the procedure.