Brownfields and disused factories: analysis and digital cataloguing platforms

Brownfields, abandoned land that may be contaminated, are the result of the XX century's industrial economic policies and may be a useful resource to reduce the environmental costs in our cities nowadays. We need to study how the brownfields could be part of a new sustainable urban ecosystem, where the brownfields and the disused factories, which no longer have their original productive function, can have a new meaning for the urban palimpsest: they can become “nutrients” used to produce secondary raw materials and recycled building components to be reintroduced into the living chain of the urban metabolism. To meet this circular point of view, it could be useful to design practices and a technological tools able to transform the chain of recycled materials through a usable and comprehensible approach. For this reason, it is important to catalog brownfields and disused factories to analyze and model them through algorithmic tools. The paper will describe the criteria and digital tools developed to map the brownfields and the disused factories located in the industrial East area of Naples, a very polluted site, where in the last century there was an intense industrial production.