Sustainable Regeneration of Former Military Sites

Samer Bagaeen, Celia Clark, Samer Bagaeen, Celia Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138016521
• eBook ISBN: 9781317220985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Sustainable Regeneration of Former Military Sites is the first book to analyze a profound land use change happening all over the world: the search for sustainable futures for property formerly dedicated to national defense now becoming redundant, disposed of and redeveloped. The new military necessity for rapid flexible response requires quite different physical resources from the massive fixed positions of the Cold War, with huge tracts of land and buildings looking for new uses.

The transition from military to civilian life for these complex, contaminated, isolated, heritage laden and often contested sites in locations ranging from urban to remote is far from easy. There is very little systematic analysis of what follows base closures, leaving communities, governments, developers, and planners experimenting with untested land use configurations, partnership structures, and financing strategies.

With twelve case studies drawn from different countries, many written by those involved, Sustainable Regeneration of Former Military Sites enables the diverse stakeholders in these projects to discover unique opportunities for reuse and learn from others' experiences of successful regeneration.

1 Framing military brownfields as a catalyst for urban regeneration

Samer Bagaeen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315621784-1

All over the world – driven by recession, defense cuts or expansion in military spending, changes in military technology, geopolitics and finance ministries’ expectations of financial return – property dedicated to national defense, sometimes for centuries, is becoming redundant and is being disposed of and redeveloped. In the context of reductions in defense spending, changing requirements for defense estate property result in defense ministries combining formerly separate facilities for training, education, catering and depots onto core, tri-service sites. Wars still occur, but the new military necessity for rapid flexible response requires quite different physical resources from the massive fixed positions of the Cold War, rendering huge tracts of land and buildings – some of them historic, contaminated, in central urban areas or remote – redundant and looking for new uses.

The redundancy process has accelerated over the last 20 years. The redevelopment of defense sites is a complex planning challenge, differing from ordinary changes of use because of the unusually wide range of interested stakeholders and their expectations. In the United Kingdom (UK) in particular and in many countries around the world, bringing these brownfield sites back into active use has taken on a new urgency among policy-makers, developers, campaigning organizations and other stakeholders in the development process in order to address a growing housing crisis (O’Brien and Henderson 2015). In terms of the academic and policy literature on brownfield regeneration, very little of this literature is about military brownfields. One good example is Dixon et al.’s Sustainable Brownfield Regeneration: Liveable Places from Problem Spaces (2007), which examines how brownfield regeneration has become a major policy driver in the UK and other developed countries, but without explicit reference to those vacated by the military.

Brownfield regeneration is seen as the panacea needed to address a national housing shortage in the UK (CPRE 2014). Williams et al. (2015: 379) report on the “long-standing rationale in favour of focusing new development within existing cities, mainly on brownfield land”. Previously developed land, or brownfield land, is that which is or was occupied by a permanent structure and associated fixed surface infrastructure. The UK’s National Land Use Database (NLUD) defines vacant land as previously developed land that is now vacant and could be redeveloped without treatment where treatment includes any of the following: demolition, clearing of fixed structures or foundations, decontamination and leveling.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) in the UK has had, and, as land reverts to civilian uses, continues to have, a substantial impact on the patterns of settlements, both urban and rural, even though it is not a civilian planning authority. Greed and Johnson (2014: 25) note that it did so because it had rights over “vast areas of land for training” and because “it is not subject to the normal planning control for its own activities”. The MoD could, Greed and Johnson point out, “build service housing in the countryside without going through normal planning procedures” (2014: 25). Special provisions could also apply for the disposal of forces housing and army camps in countryside areas (2014: 48). This was the case, of course, until 2006 when provisions to remove Crown immunity from planning controls were included in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 (the 2004 Act).¹ Hart (2015: 177) explains how Part 7 of the 2004 Act “brought an end to Crown immunity from planning control”. The countryside in some parts of the UK is particularly prone to defense activities – the MoD owns, for example, over 90,000 acres of forestry and over 10 percent of the land mass of the English county of Wiltshire (Greed and Johnson 2014: 181).

In addition to sites in the countryside, urban defense sites are proving quite lucrative (see Wright 2015). Writing for the Sunday Times, Wright reports on how the “great Ministry of Defence property sell-off is kick-starting a wave of residential schemes steeped in military history”. The apartments she refers to, in the Old War Office Building, on Whitehall in London, close to the heart of the UK government, will sell at between £4 million and £35 million to start with, as subsequent sales may result in higher prices given the nature of the London property market.

No matter where we look, and the case studies in this book are no exception, the state appears to be heavily involved in the process of converting former military sites into civilian use. This is a natural outcome given that the state is the landowner in the case of most of these sites. Where this becomes of particular interest to the state is when a landownership portfolio is in highly lucrative and desirable locations, and when the uplift in land value can generate much-needed income for the state. Hooks and Getz (1998) highlight a growing interest and body of evidence pointing toward the distinctiveness of the state’s political and military policies and the impact of these policies on economic processes on the sites concerned. More recently, others such as Doussard (2014) have focused on the windfall economic gains, or losses, that can ensue from military realignment and base closure and redevelopment. In the United States, individual states are often dependent on their ability to raise income from properties through taxation. When military sites are therefore set for closure, it has been seen as appropriate to use federal funds to bring about their redevelopment. In the UK, in the first round of closures and sell-offs, once defense sites were sold, the government took no further interest in the sites. This is now changing, with the MoD now more likely to retain a financial interest in any subsequent redevelopment of a given site.

A brownfield bonanza

Previous research has shown that rather than treating brownfield sites as problems, many cities have now come to recognize the advantages that come from redeveloping such sites in terms of providing housing and job creation (Bagaeen, 2006). Amin and Thrift (1995) argued that the need and desire of cities to compete in the global marketplace drove them to seek to derive competitive advantage by means of place marketing and adopting certain approaches to regeneration, such as large-scale property-based initiatives to achieve image enhancement. Where sustainable redevelopment of former military installations and property is achieved, their reuse makes a welcome contribution to brownfield regeneration and to local economies. As a possible antidote to urban sprawl, Hansen (2004: 127) argues that closed military bases, particularly those in urban areas, provide ready-made industrial parks, airports and universities, among other economic benefits, without “additional habitat destruction”, providing environmental concerns are addressed. After all, not all former military sites may be recycled for civilian use. More recently, Woodward (2014: 43) recognizes the “tenacity in urban forms and lives of a military inheritance into a civilian present, and the possibilities or otherwise of conversion of post-military landscapes”. Others, such as Ashley and Touchton (2015: 19–20), have gone as far as to suggest that military base redevelopment is not influenced by national redevelopment trends so much as other factors like market conditions, costs of environmental rehabilitation, stakeholder power and timing. What is certainly true is that the size of the military in most Western economies is shrinking. Wright (2015) quotes UK MoD figures issued in July 2015 and reports how the size of the British Army has shrunk from 102,260 in 2010 to 81,700 in 2015. She adds, crucially for the purposes of the research in this volume, that as personnel numbers have come down, among the barracks and bases across the 900 square miles of property portfolio owned by the UK’s defense industry, more and more land and buildings are lying empty, waiting for their turn to be redeveloped. Wright particularly notes that the MoD sell-off of sites since 2011 has released land for the provision of 37,000 homes. Some of these, as noted in case studies in this book, are already being redeveloped.

According to Jacob (1991: 167), thousands of acres of otherwise high-value urban real estate may have to be abandoned because of concerns regarding hazardous contaminants on site. Dealing with contamination is an issue when dealing with brownfield land (Gross and Bleicher, 2013) given that the reuse of such land usually requires the clearance and clean-up of substantial quantities of materials relating to the former and subsequent use of the land. For land with a former military use, Hansen (2004) argues that environmental degradation is the most daunting barrier to successful military base redevelopment. This is because a high level of pollution is often associated with defense sites. In the case of barracks or warehouses, this may consist of waste, surplus material and scrap left behind, often in large quantities. Environmental problems tend to be much more serious in the case of former air bases, missile sites, maintenance and repair facilities, boiler houses and fuel and chemical storage sites where the clearance process can be more challenging in the absence of records of hazardous material that may have been left on the site. The most common problem is that of fuel products and lubricants: kerosene, diesel, gasoline and heavy fuel oil. On former missile bases, one of the main problems is liquid missile fuels and oxidizers (Myrttinen 2003: 12). In the United States, the Pentagon is responsible for clean-up costs, but many sites will have been used in different ways – with different environmental consequences (Hansen 2004: 4). In the UK, in accordance with the Town and Country Planning (Environmental Impact Assessment) (England and Wales) Regulations 1999, an Environmental Statement is required for major sites on the likely significant environmental effects of the proposed redevelopment and to recommend measures to mitigate any adverse effects. A weakness is that the statement is funded by the developer, which may call into question its objectivity.

Military geographies

The transition from military to civilian has been accelerating in recent times. Current scholarship describes the closure process, yet there is very little information about what happens after bases close. The available literature on the redevelopment and rehabilitation of military bases has been relatively scant compared to the amount of investment, in both built environment and financial terms, injec...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Frontmatte Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Origins
• Preface and guide to the book
• 1 Framing military brownfields as a catalyst for urban regeneration—SAMER BAGAEEN
• 2 From Crown to commons? A UK perspective—JULIAN DOBSON
• 3 Democracy, military bases, and marshmallows—CONNOR RYAN
• 4 Make art not war: defence sites find new life as centres of creativity—CELIA CLARK
• 5 A parable: the emergence of ruderal ‘communities’ on former military bases in the UK—FEN B. KIPLEY
• 6 Communities old and new: military brownfields and the Aldershot urban extension—ROBERT ADAM
• 7 Twelve miles, eighteen years, and worlds apart: the cases of the Philadelphia Navy Yard and the Frankford Arsenal—CHRISTOPHER A. PREBLE
• 8 Military sites conservation and regeneration in Taiwan—YI-JEN TSENG
• 9 Military brownfields in the Netherlands: the revitalisations of the New Dutch Waterline (1980–2014)—GERDY A. VERSCHUURE-STUIP
• 10 The regeneration of disused military airfields in China—TANG YAN AND YANG DONG
• 11 Redeveloping Naval Air Station Brunswick: from a navy base to a great new place!—STEVEN LEVESQUE
• 12 The Brooklyn Navy Yard revived: a defense conversion case study in the United States—CHRISTOPHER A. PREBLE AND CELIA CLARK
• Conclusion: diversity in the transformation of defense sites to new civilian life—CELIA CLARK
• Index