Refurbishing the Industrial Heritage in the age of transition

The redevelopment of places born with and for industry requires complex and long-term processes, investing interventions of different scales and magnitudes, from reclamation operations to reuse and redevelopment issues, from urban to architectural scales. A motivation for urgent action is the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). In light of the Plan, disused industrial heritage could take on a new centrality if seen as a potential resource for the hoped-for recovery. There are many experiences since the turn of the millennium that can be regarded as a basis for comparison for different approaches to regeneration and redevelopment. Vast areas once earmarked for manufacturing plants are now large parks where designed greenery, mainly not spontaneous, symbolically takes over from old buildings: smokestacks and steel mills that once discharged polluting fumes now stand as monuments/ruins, icons of a past civilization. But there are still too many brownfield sites and buildings abandoned to decay without adequate projects. Many questions are still open including the conflict between cultural aspects and technical-economic issues that inevitably slow down the decision-making process. Meanwhile, the question that the scientific community needs to address concerns the real possibility of looking at industrial archaeology as a heritage to be enhanced, recognizing in industrial ruins resources and potential for the contemporary project of redevelopment of the existing.