Location of economic activities in the Ostrava metropolitan area (Czech Republic): focused on brownfield redevelopment

There are a number of research themes related to location of economic activities. Brownfield redevelopment or comparison of brownfields and greenfields belong to them. Note that the importance of these themes is given by their close relationship to sustainable development principles. Generally, location characteristics of brownfields are regarded as worse than location characteristics of greenfields. In this regard, several barriers of brownfield redevelopment are repeated in scholarly literature. However, a complex empirical research on this issue is rather limited. Thus, the intent of this paper is to contribute to the discussion on the location characteristics of brownfields, redeveloped sites and greenfields. We chose the Ostrava metropolitan area in the Czech Republic in the post-socialist period after the year 1989 as our case study. The research is designed as follows. First, we identified three hundred sites which satisfied our conditions (e.g. area, former use, location in the model area). These sites were classified into six categories - brownfields, partially redeveloped brownfields, sites without changes in use after the year 1989, partially redeveloped sites after 1989, redeveloped sites after 1989, and greenfields newly used after 1989. Location of economic activities was the main factor for categorization. Second, the location characteristics of all these sites were added. These included location in morphogenetic zones of the model area, ownership structure, existence of environmental burden, quality of transport accessibility and others. In this way, a data matrix of the sites and their characteristics was created. Third, relations in the data matrix were analyzed. We identified the location characteristics and their combinations which differentiated between the particular categories of the sites. Finally, a model based on the rough-set method was suggested to evaluate the development potential of brownfields. Our findings show some important conclusions. The assumptions on worse location characteristics of brownfields were confirmed but the differences between the particular categories of sites were rather not statistically significant. However, this was true for some combinations of location characteristics of brownfields. This conclusion evoked the idea on the uniqueness of brownfield redevelopment projects. In addition, our findings supported the thesis that brownfields and greenfields were two partial real estate submarkets.