Keywords: N.A.
The decline of the manufacturing industry since the 1960s has left many historic industrial buildings
in the Netherlands abandoned. Many of these buildings are considered heritage due to their cultural,
historical, and technical significance. They should therefore be preserved for present and future
use. Adaptive reuse has proven an effective strategy to preserve heritage buildings while
repurposing them for the present. Adaptive reuse is the process of converting buildings into other,
more efficient, and effective uses such that they can better serve user needs and have an extended
useful life. Adaptive reuse can deliver multiple benefits to communities and authorities while
offering potential opportunities for developers and investors. As empirical research on factors of
adaptive reuse is lacking, the study at hand sought to quantitatively assess the effect of building
and location variables on the adaptive reuse of historic industrial buildings in the Netherlands.
To attain the study objectives, a literature review combined with a retrospective case-control study
was conducted. Twenty independent building and 29 independent location variables, believed to
affect adaptive reuse, were derived from literature. Since it wasn’t possible to identify all members
of the population, a convenience sample was selected from sources publicly available. The sample
consisted of 518 historic industrial buildings in the Netherlands of 50 years or more, equally divided
into a case group of adaptively reused buildings and a control group of vacant buildings. Data on
the independent variables for each sample building were extracted from public secondary sources
and stored in an attribute dataset. Data analysis was performed using logistic regression. Besides
a null model, three alternative logistic models were successively developed using stepwise
selection. The second and third models assessed the effect of the building and location variables
on adaptive reuse, respectively. The fourth model assessed the effect of both the building and
location variables. Of the 20 building and 29 location variables tested in the fourth model, five
building and 12 location variables reached statistical significance and remained in the final model.
The results of the fourth model showed positive effects of increasing building age, listed monument
status, increasing surrounding address density, and multi-corner lot on adaptive reuse. In contrast,
the variables no window area, small window area, wooden structure, site with industrial zoning,
increasing area status score, increasing distance to highway ramp, and fronting a through road
showed negative effects on adaptive reuse. The results also suggested a possible effect of the
province location of a building on its adaptive reuse. Besides these empirical results, the study
produced a table of common types of historic industrial buildings in the Netherlands such as
factories, warehouses, and water towers including their typical building and location attributes.
The variable with the largest effect on adaptive reuse was site with industrial zoning, followed by
listed monument status and surrounding address density. The positive effect of building age and
negative effect of area status score were unexpected because the literature suggested otherwise.
Given the nature of the sample, the findings may not generalize to the overall population but will
surely prove useful in understanding (some of) the dynamics of industrial heritage adaptive reuse.