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When geographer David Lowenthal penned the first pages of his book The Past is a Foreign Country in 1985, he could not have imagined just how accurate his observations would prove to be in the 21st century regarding the relationship that post-industrial society establishes with the past. From old songs to revivals, remakes and even grandmother’s recipes, the past has escaped the museums and is now everywhere.
In 21st-century societies, awash in vintage culture, heritage plays a more central role than ever. But the same is true in the cities. A decade ago, the British newspaper The Guardian published a ranking of Europe’s most interesting urban sites, such as La Sucrière in Lyon, The Spinnerei in Leipzig and the Ler Devagar Bookshop in Lisbon. All these sites had two things in common: they reused former industrial facilities and none was more than sixty years old.
Never before has so little time been required for a piece of infrastructure to be considered heritage once it has lost its productive function. While capable of producing waste at top speed, or perhaps precisely because of it, 21st-century urban society also maintains buildings and landscapes from a past that is no longer remote or archaic, but recent and close at hand, as if the relentless pace that globalisation imposes on contemporary urban life also drives heritage to play a new and central role in our lives, as a counterweight.
This explains the success of maintaining and recycling industrial landscapes in European cities. Former mines, extractive complexes and power stations now host significant new uses and functions for the city. Post-oil Europe has thus begun to recognise that, when we speak of urban heritage, we should not limit ourselves to the conservation of what is extraordinary. In fact, the management of ordinary landscapes is what makes the city living and vibrant.
Including these industrial landscapes as heritage in our collective mental map is now a shared challenge for most European cities, which are devising all kinds of strategies to give visibility to them as latent but still scarcely tangible potential elements in our urban experience.
However, the most successful industrial recycling projects do not strive to freeze the past or preserve heritage as unique pieces to be displayed in glass cases. In fact, quite the opposite holds true: heritage is already beginning to be understood not as a postcard capturing memories of the past, but as a catalyst for activities in the future. Therefore, we are speaking of a ‘smart heritage’, which makes it possible to reconcile the conversion of the industrial landscape into heritage with the incorporation of new uses and activities that represent new added value. From this perspective, we can even speak of a new urbanism, in which the landscapes of the past infuse personality, interest and diverse uses into the city, and in which the enhancement and organisation of heritage landscapes would no longer be a final complement but, on the contrary, the true starting point of urban planning.
Understanding urban landscape and heritage in this way also allows us to suggest a genuine new ‘heritage landscape infrastructure’ for the city, made up of diverse urban landscapes rich in heritage significance, which would help to create a local narrative from the peculiar aspects that define the sites’ diverse identities.
This urban strategy is now more necessary than ever, because the standardisation and uniformity that the global world imposes on the urban landscape is forcing cities to reinvent themselves to highlight their differences.
In other words, in the age of urbanalisation, the industrial landscapes of the past present a real opportunity to create lived environments, where the heritage elements of the past make the urban experience something unique and memorable. However, and above all, they are also anchored in place, providing clear proof of how landscape shapes the primordial substance of urban belonging and identity, which is more necessary than ever at a time of violent and rampant globalisation.
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