Shaping the Futures for Industrial Cities in Decay: Urban Planning and Memory Retrieval

Abstract

The radical changes experienced by the world of work in the last decades have deeply transformed our regions. Cities that bloomed during the industrial age lay nowadays abandoned and useless suffering from serious problems of decay. Their plight is linked to productive reorganization, economic transformations and changing shifts. Industrial cities endure today shrinking populations, increasing unemployment and poverty rates, segregation and social exclusion and the abandonment and obsolescence of their physical structures. The future of industrial cities is today, in most cases, uncertain. Some of these cities have decided to forget their industrial past in order to survive. They have become business centers or tertiary, commercial or cultural poles. They have usually restored and reused one of their factories as a ‘symbol’ of their industrial past. The reversibility of urban decay has usually been linked to the restitution of economic value and lost status. It has not been related to the improvement of the quality of life or to the amelioration of urban or social conditions of the inhabitants and former industry workers. In this context, it is increasingly important to claim alternative futures for these decaying cities, based on their own potential: their industrial past. Urban planning is the fundamental tool to retrieve industrial memory and preserve cultural heritage. Urban planning can restore the futures of the city that decline took by force