When we attempt to shape the city of tomorrow, starting from a blank sheet of paper is doomed to failure. Urban planning and design are not, as some modernists may have dreamt, invention in an empty space but rather imply intervening in existing urban landscapes. Such a premise raises fundamental questions about value: What aspects of the urban landscape do we deliberately want to retain or strengthen and what to change and leave behind in striving to meet what we believe will be tomorrow's needs and desires? What kind of a reading of the existing landscape, inherited from the past, underlies such choices?

One of the key tasks of contemporary urbanism is to address the urban landscapes that were shaped for industrial purposes. In the last decades former industrial production and distribution facilities in many European and North American regions have closed due to changing global and local economic, political and social processes. Finding out what roles former plants and distribution landscapes should have in the city is a new challenge in many metropolitan areas and this task is entangeled with questions about if and how to transmit the inheritance of industrial cultures of the past. Postindustrial landscapes mutate without authorized uses and official plans; materials decay, people enter without official permission, trees penetrate built structures and different human sub-cultures and faunas evolve. Those landscapes later or never become sites for explicit plans, turning them into museums, cultural centres or loft appartments, or – as is the focus of this book – comprehensive urban redevelopment plans may seek to transform larger industrial plants into urban districts, seeking to combine multiple urban functions such as housing, retail or cultural institutions. Such urban redevelopment often happens in regions characterized by economic and demographic growth or with aspirations to grow. Urban redevelopment projects are complex inter-disciplinary processes, which always involve processes of re-reading and re-imagining the industrial landscape while seeking to convert it to something new.