Abstract :
[en] The de-industrialization process, which has interested for years Vallonia’s region, sustains the debate on territories reuse, where the labour model which had generated them, ceases to exist. Particularly in the province of Liège, places reveal how the arrival of industrial economy has transformed identities and structures of the local rural landscape, turning it into a fragmented and hybrid territory.
The presence of industry has caused the concentration of material and social capitals and imposed a model of life based on the augmentation of consumption and waste, breaking the pre-existing environmental and social balances linked to the rural economy system.
The damaging effects linked to industrial production model, based on the intensive exploitation of resources, have generated a gap between territories and their inhabitants and the consequent escape towards “uncontaminated” lands, where new residential zones extended, exporting “urban” way of life.
The closure of steel industries left a large heritage of environmental degradation: a constellation of “derelict lands” specially along the main rivers, from the Meuse to the Sambre. These industries, after extracting, transforming, setting down materials, have stopped their operations and have left huge inaccessible areas, ruins and waste, fading the idea of a possible inhabited landscape, because of the compromised conditions of lands.
In these discontinuous and “polycentric” territories the reconfiguration of the rural altered system, starting from recycle and remediation interventions through the reintroduction of elements and dynamics belonging to the agricultural system, has a double value.
At a first level to lead an ecologic reactivation process, where time and “scenarios” correspond to time and answers given by cultivations. Furthermore, this new way of approaching territory, considering new access and uses, promotes a gradual re-appropriation of the lands by the citizens, who discover new way of life.
The act of “cultivating”, interpreted as “taking care of something, recovering it or not letting degrade it” (V. Tuzzi), refers to a condition of new rurality, where local development is founded on the respect of environmental and landscape typical characters, reinterpreted as resources to reactivate cycles of life: from the reconstruction of ecosystems, to the activation of new production chains and to the discovery of shared green spaces.
The reclamation project of the HF6 blast furnace area, in Seraing, represents a study case, where the landscape approach leads the re-writing of parts of the city, starting from the open spaces, which become green surfaces to mend the pre-existent landscape weave. Through phytoremediation techniques and monitoring activities on spontaneous vegetal recolonization, the land is prepared to a gradual reuse process.
Environmental engineering, agronomy and landscape planning contribute to a new “agricultural landscape”, intended as a “perennial in progress fact rather than a defined fact” (P.Bevilacqua), reimporting a condition of alter rurality, based on the activation of a virtuous production chain, on the protection of environment and landscape and on the balance in territorial development.
