[en] From coal extraction mines to steel industries the Wallonia landscape reveals how the industrial
production has marked the transformation of this territory. The deindustrialisation phenomenon
has left a huge number of derelict lands, waiting for a new identity. The debate on territorial
reuse generates conflicts between citizens, public government and the industrial companies,
defending different values in the recovery process.
The case of Martinet represents a virtuous example of bottom-up reclaim strategy based on the
recognition of landscape value as an evolving factor of the industrial site.
Since the cessation of the coal extraction activity in 1969, the site of Martinet (Charleroi, Belgium)
has been transformed by a spontaneous recolonisation process who turned its two terrils into
wooden hills. By walking on the terrils people rediscovered new qualities of the site as it became
progressively a space of biodiversity, a landmark in their territory, a green reserve in town,
perceiving it as a “common good”. During the '80s, as an industrial company tried to acquire the
site in order to exploit the residual coal, the inhabitants of Martinet strongly opposed to face the
risk of the disappearance of their “little Amazonia”. They defended the environmental and
landscape values of the site against the mere economic opportunity. The regional protection act,
in 1995, marked the beginning of a new phase in the life of the site of Martinet. The integration
within a pedestrian path network, the restoration of industrial structures to host cultural and new
productive activities, the experimental phytoremediation plantation are expressions of a new
vision of the site, based on the reconciliation of the memory of a cultural landscape and its reuse
potential.
The paper explores how informal practices and co-productive design provided a landscape
based renewal of the industrial site where conservation (of nature) has been the first step towards
a development process oriented to give a new identity to the site.
