Mines and Water

The Genesis of Anthropogenic Landscapes

The recognized cultural value and the public meaning of industrial Heritage in the Europe have crossed many phases and undergone important evolutions over the last two decades, reaching well beyond the initial studies that focused on the protection of early industrial architectures and on the celebration of the industrial mechanics they hosted while they were in operation (Berger, 2019; Berger & High, 2019; Pinton & Zagato, 2017; Xie, 2015). As Lelli (2017b) emphasizes, the interweaving of natural and anthropogenic elements in post-industrial landscapes calls for a reevaluation of what constitutes heritage, urging a shift towards acknowledging the intricate bond between human activity, its remains, and the natural environment where human activity took place.

The recent discourse on Industrial Heritage has been enriched with political and social readings, linked to the growing awareness that natural and anthropic scenarios, urban areas, ex-rural and ex-industrial zones, design altogether a single and non-separable continuum, heterogeneous but absolutely connected whole anthropic space. The reflection on industrial heritage has become more complex, expanding towards the analyses of its direct relationship with today’s multiple crises: overpopulation, climate change, pollution and soil consumption.

In “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime”, Bruno Latour (2017) challenges us to reconsider interactions with the planet in the face of the Anthropocene, a period marked by significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. This perspective is particularly relevant to our discussion of industrial heritage, as it underscores the intricate connections between industrial activities and their long-lasting environmental consequences. Latour’s analysis invite us to view industrial heritage sites not only as historical artefacts but also as key players in the history of human engagement with the Earth’s systems. By acknowledging the role these sites have played in shaping the current ecological crisis, we can start to reimagine their potential contributions towards a more sustainable and ecologically aware future, reinforcing the idea that preserving industrial heritage is intrinsically linked to broader environmental stewardship and innovation. Humans are just beginning to realize that they belong to the same community of destiny with all other living forms and with the spaces on the planet that they occupy together: the awareness of such profound interdependence is deeply reshaping the way we read the open and built spaces, landscapes and environment. The new need to engage with the protection of the anthropic, modified and built environment has to be conceived together – and not in contrast – with the protection of the natural environment, in a single process of thought and action that expands the traditional concept of heritage towards spurious and hybrid and imaginaries spaces. Such a reconceptualized version of the environment consists in an assemblage of undistinguishable areas of natural-cultural, empty-dense, abandoned-inhabited kinds of spaces (Birkeland, 2017; Lelli, 2017a).

In this volume, our gaze on industrial heritage is directed to the dynamic and always reversible relationship occurring between former industrial areas and the surrounding natural-cultural spaces, whether these are still inhabited, or abandoned, or anything in between. Our attention focuses on the shift between the constructed / modified spaces and the original landscapes, which can only presumably be defined as natural: actually, we observed that natural spaces are often just remembered, described, painted, regretted, and re-discovered. Landscapes designed by Industrial Heritage studied in this volume are intended in a broad dimension that requires broader meanings: more than being simply anthropically modified, altered and redesigned, industrial landscapes are crossed by open-ended transformative processes that neither begin with the industrial phase nor end with de-industrialization.

Our concept of Anthropogenic Landscape emerges precisely from this assumption: spaces and their inhabitants, occasional or permanent, workers or observers, human and non-human, constitute a single vast spatial hyper-object (Morton, 2013), a single and dynamic hyper-environ- ment. Anthropogenic Landscapes are characterized by a complex and non-intuitive temporality, marked by the dual rhythms of an accelerated eco-geological scale and a slowed-down bio-anthro-pological scale. On the one hand, in fact, Anthropogenic Landscapes are generated and transformed over geological time scales, since their dynamics concern the shape of the mountains and the design of the courses of the rivers, huge morphological and slow changes that in the Anthropocene occur faster than in natural geological processes, because they are subject to powerful human pushing factors. The first and non-intuitive rhythm is therefore a geological one, accelerated by the human push. On the other hand, transformations of Anthropogenic Landscapes embrace a classically anthropic time scale, based on the rhythm of human generations, faster than any geology: in reverse, human rhythms are paradoxically slowed down in their flowing by the longer times required by humans to adapt to the occurring to the landscapes. Life lasts longer, generations are longer, memories and awareness of spaces and landscapes last longer, and many epochal changes are witnessed by each generation during their lifetime. Once again a non-intuitive time pace is set up by the dynamics of Anthropogenic Landscapes.

In the specific sense adopted in this volume, the Anthropogenic Landscape is not limited to former industrial spaces, rather it includes its productive – and also no longer productive – activities, and the complex socio-technical scenario that derives from them: in fact, we try to intercept the flows of creative sometimes ephemeral, in other cases solid emergencies that develop around formerly dense and commodified humans spaces.

Understanding and interpreting industrial heritage in today’s European space implies an effort to understand the present in a broader sense, considering its historical roots and, at the same time, its creative, future-shaping potential. We achieve this understanding by emphasizing the voices emerging from local communities and giving relevance to the specific cultural tools and local activation processes that have emerged in the investigated social contexts.

Anthropogenic Landscapes are the collective scenarios of the present, and as such they must be preserved while they are still being used and inhabited. As natural and cultural artefacts of our era, we should be able to take care of them and to hand them over to future generations. In the development of our project, we observed that highly anthropized spaces are the ones where we Europeans feel more at home, better at ease, much more than in any pristine or mythical natural space, as a desert, or a wood or the open sea. We have developed a sort of complacency towards the built spaces, which recalls De Martino and his concept of cultural apocalypses emerging when the manufactured and well-known scenario risks to disappear (De Martino, 2023 [Ed. or. 1977]). Anthropogenic Landscapes push us also to redefine the concept of identity in a very flexible, post-industrial and provisional way.