Evaluation On Economic Non-use Value Of Industrial Heritage

In the context of urban renewal,industrial heritage is an important type of cultural heritage resource.However,a large amount of valuable industrial heritage in many cities was abandoned,left unused,or demolished due to the rapid urbanization over the past few decades.In fact,the economic value of industrial heritage has been ignored since it is relatively hard to get to know the specific market price for a certain industrial heritage because as quasi-public goods they are not continuously and freely circulated and traded in marketplace like pure private goods,thus with the market price method the true economic value of industrial heritage may not be fully reflected.Thereby we have adopted the prevailing concept of total economic value(TEV)in economics to estimate the value of industrial heritage,and the TEV of industrial heritage consists of both use value(UV)and non-use value(NUV).In this research we mainly focus on the non-use value which is way more easily to be overlooked in practice resulting in underestimation of the total economic value of industrial heritage.In the study,we have applied the contingent value method(CVM)to evaluate the non-use value of the industrial heritage and selected Qingdao New 100 Creative Cultural Industrial Park as study case.It used to be the original Qingdao embroidery factory established in the 1950s and nowadays it has been one of the first as well as the most representative cultural quarters&creative clusters to succeeded in adaptive reuse of historic industrial heritage in Shandong Province.A questionnaire survey about the non-use value of reusing industrial heritage as cultural quarters has been conducted in this research towards local residents in Qingdao City.1,106 respondents have been inquired twice about their individual willingness to pay(WTP).In the first place we apply the payment card elicitation technique and afterwards we text a novel approach where we present respondents with some related valuation survey results for reference before asking them to state their WTP values ranging from 0-300 yuan.Next,we calculate the average WTP values by cumulative frequency and median method.Finally,we capture a mean WTP of 31 to 40 yuan per capita per year and the total non-use value for all the local residents living in the main urban area in Qingdao City(including four districts which are Shinan,Shibei,Licang and Laoshan)of reusing industrial heritage as Qingdao New 100 Creative Cultural Industrial Park was calculated at about 110 million to 137 million yuan in 2020.We also use sub-samples to make comparative analysis of the mean WTP values between different population groups in terms of cognitive preference,willingness to pay and demographic characteristics.The specific indicators or factors that probably relate to people’s WTP are as follows:1.each respondent’s completion time of the questionnaire;2.whether they know about the city’s industrial history;3.their awareness of urban industrial heritage’s value;4.their visiting experience or familiarity with the city’s industrial heritage;5.their attitudes towards reusing industrial heritage as cultural quarters;6.their willingness to visit cultural quarters;7.their demands for public cultural goods or services(which can be satisfied by engaging in festivals and events,learning industrial culture and history,attending cultural and industrial tourism,attractiveness of fasade design and landscaping,getting support from cultural business incubators,participating in activities promoting rural revitalization);8.motivation for conservation(existence value,option value and bequest value are the three main components of non-use value);9.respondent’s initial stated WTP values elicited by the payment card mechanism;10.payment vehicles(one-off cash donation,membership dues,funds for industrial heritage conservation and reuse,taxes,voluntary labor);11.impact of COVID-19 on consumer behavior;12.socio-demographic characteristics of respondents such as gender,age,residence,education,job and income.The thesis is divided into seven sections.Introduction part includes background and context of the thesis,research objectives of the study,survey methodology,literature review of valuation studies in cultural and industrial heritage,and self-evaluation of the work.Chapter 1 discusses the studies in non-use value of urban industrial heritage and the evaluation methods.Chapter 2 attempts to apply the contingent valuation method on measuring the non-use value of one famous industrial heritage in Qingdao City,containing scenario design and data collection of the CVM questionnaire.Chapter 3 describes and analyzes the sample data.Chapter 4 focuses on individual willingness to pay for the non-use value and captured the mean WTP values.Chapter 5 explores the various factors’impacts on different population groups’ WTP values,and includes discussion and interpretation of the results.In the concluding section,we summarize the main findings from our case study and some further methodological considerations are proposed.