Using conjoint analysis to investigate preferences of inhabitants for the future of a greyfield area: an application to the Old Port in Trieste

In developed countries, abandoned industrial (derelict or underused) areas often occupy important parts of the cities. This raises issues about the reuse of these areas as well as on the conservation of industrial heritage they often entail. In order to help decision maker in understanding the preferences of inhabitants for different reuse possibilities, different techniques have been used in the literature. Most of them were based on Contingent Valuation techniques, while the competing approach, Conjoint Analysis, has barely been used in this area of research. In this article, we present the results of a Conjoint Analysis experiment on the reuse of a large, partly abandoned, port area in Trieste (Italy) featuring buildings with intermediate historical and industrial heritage value. Three hundred computer-assisted interviews have been made on a representative sample of Trieste inhabitants, eliciting their preferences for different reuse hypotheses and building conservation scenarios. The collected data have been processed using Latent Class and Mixed Logit models to explore heterogeneity among interviewees' preferences. Our findings indicate a very clear preference in favour of tourism and leisure oriented uses. On the other hand, preferences in terms of conservation and the impact of cost are much more difficult to measure. This difficulty persists even when specified or non-specified heterogeneity is taken into account, although Mixed Logit estimates provide more convincing results.