Flatted Factories: When factories runs out of space.
Urbanization is changing our cities pretty fast. The high cost of realty is cutting down the profitability and making expansion an expensive endeavour. The ‘flatted factories’ idea is making its appearance as a solution. Flatted factories are multi-storied industrial buildings. We will look at the significance and pros and cons of flatted factories.
Significance
In most major cities, the land for industrial purposes is getting increasingly unavailable. The vertically constructed factories (flatted factories) optimise the space above. While making the best use of the land, flatted factories help create manufacturing hubs, generate employment, and create an ecosystem of suppliers, buyers, skilled workers, managerial talent in urban localities.
Benefits
- Land-use Optimisation: Flatted factories make best use of the urban land by building a manufacturing setup vertically. This smart use of land keeps the costs down, as the premium land is better utilised.
- Cost Savings: Flatted factories can have mulitple factories – just like residential apartments with multiple owners. In such a case, several resourses become common/shared resources. Loading docks, elevators, and utilities can all be shared thereby reducing the running costs.
- Sustainability: The land space saved by building flatted factories eases pressue off the environment – to start with, deforestation is considerably reduced.
- Collaborations: With distance out of the way and shared resources at play, it is a good and easy way to collaborate with the neighbouring factories. Factories can have their suppliers and buyers in the same block or it could be their R&D partners who reside in the floor upstairs – all making colloboration a breeze.
Two key challenges
- Cost of construction: A heavy duty building will be a good host for heavy machineries. But, it is going to come at a cost – a heavy cost. Lot of money will have to be poured into a solid foundation, heavy load bearing pillars, Thick concrete floors and models to move machinery and the manufactured goods around and out.
- Physical disturbances: Machineries produce noise when at work. There will be vibrations too, that are more pronounced in a stacked structure. There are solutions available to fix this issue but how well they help depends on the momney spent on them.
Conclusion
Flatted factories are a good solution. With smarter factories in focus, it is likely that the factory designers will come up with a right design solution that tackles the challenges well and makes most of the benefits.
