INTEGRA SITES INTEGRA SITES - INTEGRAted Management and Revitalisation of Contaminated SITES

The Integra Sites project intends to face the industrial restructuring as a problem common to the proposing cities, but also other cities in the regions of North 
Rhine Westphalia, Silesia and Nord-Pas-De Calais as well as cities all over Europe by providing a strategy for targeted resource management and recycling 
of urban sites.    
    
In order to establish sustainable city development, Integra sites project will help turning around the undesirable development of increasing numbers 
of derelict sites and sealing green sites instead. Redeveloping such sites, often called brownfield sites, is a crucial element of the European Commission’s 
strategy for urban sustainability. An important measure to achieve this is the persuasion of investors to select inner city brownfields instead of outer city 
greenfields by actively offering them suitable former industrial sites with reliable information on contamination and costs of revitalisation.     
    
The Integra sITES project wants to facilitate this process by bringing together all stakeholders involved in revitalisation of sites such as investors, 
city planners, environmental departments, engineering offices and research institutes as well as banks/insurance companies in order to collect user requirements 
of each group.     
    
In order to achieve this aim different steps have to be taken. Topic of investigation shall be the preference of investors for greenfields in the surroundings 
of the cities instead of brownfields inside the cities. Therefore a round table shall be established with people from all areas affected to collect the specific 
troubles and thoughts.    
    
The next step is to find already existing support tools and concepts for the sighted problems in order to design a tool which combines all the collected ideas, 
solutions and tools in one hand to help potential investors make a positive decision for Brownfield-recycling.    
    
The collected information will provide the basis for a first step towards a creation of an architecture for a decision support tool including a guideline 
and a software, which will provide necessary information for all stakeholders presenting all possible investment sites in a city in a user-friendly way.    
    
An objective in the long run will be the completion of a “real-life” software developed from the architecture designed by the currently running project.