Valuation and the future of abandoned buildings

Abstract

Since the buildings known as Hochhausscheibe A-E and located in the centre of Halle-Neustadt (a district of the East German city of Halle (Saale) that was built as a socialist model city) were abandoned around the year 2000, their futures have been struggled over and are yet to be found. Numerous possible futures between demolition and preservation have been un-/made throughout the years – that is, designed, thought and decided, but they eventually never materialized.

The proposed paper highlights valuation practices as an integral part of the un-/making of possible futures for the buildings. It studies how (e)valuations are made in urban planning and more specifically how emptiness and significance are mediated and translated in planning with the help of specific instruments and in relation to other places and buildings.

The paper takes inspiration from the emerging interdisciplinary research field of valuation studies, one of whose biggest achievement is the move beyond value as a noun and thus beyond essentializing conceptions of value and towards value as a verb, towards processes and practices of valuation. The paper makes use of such insights for an investigation of evaluations of emptiness, valuations of significance and the negotiations of worthiness of this particular abandoned site.

Being interested in practices of (e)valuation related to abandoned places seems particularly interesting, as valuations contribute to their future in that they may determine whether a building is preserved if found ‘worth keeping’, or demolished if not. The paper therefore turns to categorization, comparison, relating and attribution of meaning and their de-/stabilizing effects on the buildings.

As will be shown, the Hochhausscheiben get performed both as ‘problem’ and ‘value’ in practices of (e)valuation. It finds that the buildings were found to be ‘problematic, but not problematic enough’, ‘valuable, but not valuable enough’ and argues that this contributed to the fact that the Hochhausscheiben remained in an in-between throughout the years after their abandonment and the non-materializing of possible futures for them.