Rehabilitation is defined as the carrying out of works on any facility beyond the normal routine maintenance with a view to extending its normal life-span by ensuring its economic viability or social desirability. Rehabilitation refers to the repair of a re-useable structure which overcomes deterioration and provides a satisfactory improved physical condition for the intended use of such structure. It is thus the alteration or repairing back to an original assumed purpose or performance. The restoration or improvement of deteriorated structures, public facilities or neighbourhoods are rehabilitation. It is more than a repair or remodelling, less than a conversion or reconstruction and close to a reconditioning. Nevertheless it has come to be used to describe any substantial improvement in a building.
Rehabilitation may be aided or unaided, private undertaking or a public operation such as the rehabilitation of damaged roads. Private rehabilitation is common in cities and will be undertaken when projected new rents justify the outlays. Like redevelopment, rehabilitation is one of the Urban renewal treatment measures for the removal of ‘urban blight, which is a condition of economic dislocation, premature obsolesce and physical deterioration of large areas. Thus a rehabilitation area is an area where usually only simple forms of blight, according to local standards, has not progressed to the stage where so-called rehabilitation measures will not restore the area back to standard condition Rehabilitation measures include activities as spot condemnation of structures, enforced building repairs or provision of missing sanitary facilities through regular enforcement, public improvement programme for the provision of missing common facilities and a campaign for voluntary clean-up, painting and improved building maintenance standards.
