The Alps as context

Abstract

The Alps provide all the relevant conditions for studying the occurrence of brownfields in mountain settings, from the advanced socio-economic structure which enables deindustrialization to the high development pressure that sets context-related transformation objectives. Through a detailed geo-economic analysis of past Alpine industrialization and the late structural change, the source and types of mountain brownfields are first identified. On this basis, and having always the specificity of the Alpine context as reference, the challenges and potentials of brownfield redevelopment are then explained through the lens of economy, society and environment. This review ultimately helps to frame mountain brownfields as a unique territorial capital for regional development, as well as a space of possibility firmly embedded in the cultural landscape.

“The Alps are the symbol of the complex interactions that characterise modern life. Being the most industrialised and urbanised mountain territory worldwide, they represent a challenge for the whole planet, but also a great opportunity. In these regions, in fact, almost all the major global issues are concentrated: from the excess of development to environmental pollution, from the extinction of species to cultural impoverishment and the irrational management of resources. Nevertheless, right in the Alpine territory there are the resources to effectively address these problems.”¹ S. Aga Khan

These few words perfectly address the relevance of the Alps as an outstanding laboratory for investigating contemporary societal, environmental and economic changes in mountain regions, as well as to develop innovative and sustainable development solutions. This is also and especially valid for what concerns the rising challenge of brownfield redevelopment in mountain regions, a crucial yet underestimated planning issue whose influence extends far beyond the mere physical transformation of disused sites. The Alps provide indeed all the necessary conditions for deepening and grounding the study of mountain brownfields. First, the well-developed socio-economic structure of the Alpine region—identifiable with a rather high degree of ‘industrial maturity’ compared to other European mountain areas—implies that brownfield sites are not only being ‘naturally’ generated, thus growing by number and diffusion, but also that their perception as a strategic asset for future territorial development is being established. At the same time, and exactly because of the rapidly evolving socio-economic dynamics, the Alps are increasingly subject to an extremely high development pressure, which translates into more and more selective land uses as well as in the dual process of erosion/emergence of cultural landscapes. In this context, brownfield sites are often occupying a key position in terms of both physical constituents of the changing mountain landscape and available ‘space of possibility’, suitable for new uses and interpretations. Through these arguments, the chapter outlines the Alps as the context of brownfield redevelopment, highlighting in particular the connections between macroeconomic processes behind brownfield existence and the actual challenges inscribed in the contemporary Alpine landscape.

1 Industrialising mountains: landscape as resource

The functional dualism industrialisation-urbanisation, well documented in Europe’s modern urban history, leads often to consider industry as an exclusive feature of densely urbanised regions. Peripheral areas characterised by scarce urbanisation and a strong yet stereotyped rural appearance, such as mountain regions, are rarely considered as territories of mainstream industrial development. However, in many cases the mountain resources and their primary processing have constituted the fuel to the intensive and successful industrialisation of the surrounding lowlands and the hosting regional and national contexts (Nordregio 2004; Perlik 2019). In the first half of the XX century, the Alps have not only supported the industrial growth of nearby regions and national states by providing the necessary energy sources, but also through the local establishment of key production chains with regards to iron and steelmaking in Austria, Italy and France, electrochemistry and electrometallurgy in Switzerland and France, and textile manufacturing in Italy, Switzerland and Slovenia. Similar developments occurred in many other European mountain ranges, such as the Pyrenees in France (metalworking, electrochemistry) and Spain (metalworking, cement, textile), the Cantabrian Mountains in Spain (coal mining, ironmaking), the Vosges in France (textile industry), the Apennines in Italy (textile industry, electrochemistry), the Erzgebirge between Germany and Czech Republic (ore and coal mining, ironmaking), the Carpathians in Slovakia (coal and ore mining, ironmaking, chemical industry), Hungary (ore mining, ironmaking) and Romania (coal mining, ironmaking, chemical industry), the Balkans in Bulgaria (coal mining, metalworking, textile industry), the Caucasus Range in Armenia (metalworking, chemical industry) and Georgia (coal mining)². Beyond Europe, on a far bigger scale, the Urals in Russia as well as the Appalachians and the Rocky Mountains in North America have also fostered a regional and nationwide economic growth.

Despite the geographical and socio-economic diversity, in all of the aforementioned mountain ranges the growth and development of industry followed the common path of ‘dependent industrialization’, proper of economic marginal regions (Kopp 1969; Ian Hamilton 1986). As a form of exogenous development, this model suggests that key production factors such as technologies, investments and intellectual/human resources are to be mostly introduced in the region from the outside. At the same time, the added value generated locally by the newly established manufacturing activities is transferred partially or entirely out of the region, where decision-making centres and end markets are located. Behind this approach stands a clear logic of “hetero-centred” (or outer-oriented) appropriation of resources (Puttilli 2010), which is shared by industry with many other modern economic activities developed in mountain areas, such as mass tourism and energy production. The structural dependency of mountain industry can be also read through the lens of technological progress and innovation. In many cases, mountain regions have always chased technological development without being able to dominate it, constituting instead a mere and temporary test-field for innovations developed elsewhere (Raffestin and Crivelli 1988). Again, as the testing phase reached its completion, the achieved innovation and its related productive infrastructure are transferred and implemented elsewhere—exemplary is the case of aluminium industry in the Western Alps (Dalmasso 2007; Combal 2018). With the sole exception of specialised SMEs, which can be found in small amounts only in certain highly developed mountain contexts, mountain industry is basically a raw industry, strongly tied to the exploitation of natural resources such as minerals, water, energy and wood or often a combination of those. In this sense, the industrialisation of mountain regions can be understood as a large-scale, intensive and time-wise process of landscape exploitation, which entails its transformation and ‘re-ordering’ through different forms and cycles of utilisation of the embodied resources³. The cases of mining and hydropower-based industries are self-explanatory of this resource-intensive development. The mining sector and its related primary processing did and still constitute a key industry in most of the European mountain regions (Nordregio 2004), although significantly downsized, as well as in many other mountain ranges worldwide (Perlik 2019). The ‘exploiting’ character of mountain industry is perfectly depicted by branches of mining industry such as metal smelting (copper, lead, zinc, etc.) and building material production (cement, refractories, etc.), which are characterized by rather volatile socio-economic benefits and a burdening environmental and landscape impact (Josephson 2007; Modica and Weilacher 2020). Another abundant resource of mountain areas, water, has been intensively used since the early phases of industrialisation at first to provide hydraulic power to textile mills (Fig. 3.1), paper mills and iron forges, and later to obtain hydroelectric energy for large-scale heavy chemical and metallurgical industries (Veyret and Veyret 1970; Muller 1995; Collantes 2003). In terms of human resources, the industrial development in economically disadvantaged rural and mountain regions did also profit considerably from the cheap and abundant workforce ‘expelled’ from the modernising agricultural sector (Salstrom 1994; Bätzing 2015). Until the mid-XX century, the figure of the ‘farmer-worker’ half employed in rising heavy industries and half running his family agricultural business was central to the industrial growth of many Alpine areas—and it still is in less developed or developing mountain regions worldwide.

Fig. 3.1

Wool mills along the Cervo river in Biella, 1898

Being strongly resource-based, exploitation-oriented and externally dependent, mountain industry is indeed extremely weak, if no literally ‘ephemeral’ (Weissenbacher 2014). It relies mostly on a few core activities in mature and low added value sectors, i.e. basic industries characterized by low degrees of technological resilience and thus scarcely adaptable to change. On a long-term perspective, and in absence of economic diversification measures, the inevitable decline of such an industrial mono-structure will negatively affect the development of entire territories which previously invested on it—as in the case of the many inner valleys of the Alps once relying on hydropower-based industries (Dalmasso 2007). At the same time, however, the strong ‘functional’ dependency of industry from the mountain landscape and its resources has fostered in many cases a ‘reverse’ adaption process, thus establishing powerful cultural identities and territorial relationships able to survive long after the end of industrial production (Lorenzetti and Valsangiacomo 2016).

2 Growth and decline of Alpine industries

The Alpine region has reached the current industrial maturity though a complex, often nonlinear superimposition of different phases of industrial development. The temporal discontinuities between these phases are interpreted differently by economic historians and geographers, depending on the relevance assigned to the main drivers of industrialisation. Traditional manufacturing and heavy industries have developed roughly between 1850 and 1945 (Kopp 1969), having main discontinuities or shifts between 1880 and 1900—introduction of hydroelectric energy (Veyret and Veyret 1970; Raffestin and Crivelli 1988; Gebhardt 1990)—and between 1920 and 1945—war industry and forced modernisation in authoritarian states (Gebhardt 1990; Bätzing, Bartaletti, and Gubetti 2005). A further, radical turn can be identified in the post-war period (1945–1960), in coincidence with the rapid transition from Alpine heavy industry to small-scale, flexible and clustered light industries (Gebhardt 1990). By considering as main discontinuities the introduction and diffusion of hydropower (ca. 1880–1900) and the shift to light and specialised industry (ca. 1950–1960), three main ‘layers’⁴ of industrial development can be identified across the XIX and XX centuries.

The upgrade of proto industries (1850–1900)

The first phase of industrialisation comes along as result of the joint action of two interwoven processes. On the one hand, the gradual introduction and diffusion of new technologies—developed outside the Alps—causes a deep transformation of pre-industrial manufacturing systems, fostering their modernisation through competitive upgrade as well as a functional relocation (Raffestin and Crivelli 1988). Two manufacturing activities once widely diffused in mountain valleys, i.e. metal smelting and domestic textile production, are first and heavily affected by this radical transformation. In the case of metal smelting, the increasing extra-Alpine concurrence of coal-based metallurgy (i.e. iron production in coke-fired blast furnaces) pushes the local smelting sector for a quick abandonment of the rudimental charcoal-based process. The structural conditions for the growth of a modern metallurgical industry are changed. The abundance of wood and water loses fast its relevance, replaced by the proximity to high quality and profitable ore deposits—able to compensate the lack of major hard coal deposits in the Alps (Kopp 1969). The cases of Donawitz (coke blast furnaces established in 1889) and Eisenerz (1901), both located in Upper Styria nearby the Erzberg ore deposit, are exemplary of this transition (Fig. 3.2). A similar process occurs also in the textile sector, whose shift from a craft activity to an industry turns successful in some Alpine regions thanks to the integration between existing resources, new technologies and availability of skilled workforce. A great advantage for the local textile craftsman systems is provided by the introduction, in the first half of the XIX century, of automatic spinning machines and pulley-belt systems for waterpower transmission—the latter allowing the intensive (industrial) exploitation of very small water courses. In this process, the initial extra-Alpine dependency of the local textile industry is gradually replaced by the rise of local entrepreneurship, both in terms of investments and technical improvements. Two of the most exemplary and early cases of the transition experienced by the Alpine textile sector are the Glarus cotton industry in Switzerland and the wool district of Biella in Piedmont. A second, crucial input to the first industrialization of the Alps is provided by the rapid expansion of the railway network, and to the new geography of trades and transport which follows (Gebhardt 1990). In the time frame here considered, the opening of major transalpine railway lines⁵, as well as of many lines of regional or national importance along the main outer and inner valleys⁶ takes place. The resulting new accessibility pattern fosters the spatial reorganisation of the existing and developing industrial activities. To better link the production sites to the railway network, industry relocates from its birthplaces in side valleys or remote areas to the flat valley floors acting as transit corridors. For example, the late XIX century relocation of the Austrian iron and steel industry from the mountainous Eisenwurzen region to the Mur-Mürz valley is largely due to the opening of the Vienna-Trieste railway (Südbahn) via the Semmering pass. At the turn of the century, the first industrial regions of the Alps are already formed: Upper Styria and Vorarlberg in Austria, Glarus and St. Gallen in Switzerland, Grenoble and the Arve valley in France, the prealpine arc from Turin to Brescia in Italy.

Fig. 3.2

The ÖAMG blast furnaces in Eisenerz, 1921

Hydropower and heavy industries (1900–1960)

The second industrialisation phase coincides with the large-scale exploitation of the Alpine hydroelectric potential. Besides the establishment of a new and specifically ‘alpine’ energy sector (Bonoldi and Leonardi 2004; Dalmasso, Gouy-Gilbert, and Jakob 2011), the spread of hydropower leads to the rapid development of new energy-intensive heavy industries, as well as to the upgrade of the existing ones. However, this process does not occur with the same intensity everywhere in the Alps—despite the similar geological and hydrogeological conditions –, but it affects first and especially those regions where national and political interests, flows of capitals and skills from nearby scientific centres and local entrepreneurial initiative successfully merge together (Kopp 1969). It is the case of e.g. Savoie (France) and Valais/Wallis (Switzerland), where the great impulse given to the promising sectors of electrometallurgy and electrochemistry leads to the establishment of several big-sized production facilities in the span of just a decade (Fig. 3.3). Based on innovative, energy-intensive industrial processes such as electric arc smelting⁷ and electrolysis⁸, the Alpine heavy industry is now able to cover several key production chains such as secondary steelmaking, ferroalloys, aluminium, calcium carbide and derivates (acetylene, nitrogen, ammonia, fertilisers), chlorine and derivates (caustic soda). In the first twenty years of the XX century, the lack of cost-efficient technologies for energy transport obliges most of these new industries to settle in proximity to hydropower production sites, thus mainly in upper valleys and remote rural regions (Veyret and Veyret 1970). Soon, however, the increase of size and capacity of hydropower installations leads production to exceed the needs of local industries. In addition, the gradual improvement of long-distance energy transport goes now in favour of the outer areas and the peri-Alpine lowlands, where the major industrial agglomerations are located. These new conditions foster the optimisation of industrial production in the Alps, often resulting in alliances between energy producers and industrial companies aiming at the creation of larger production facilities in which hydropower generation is fully integrated—either on- and off-site. A further, relevant impulse to the intensive industrialization of inner Alpine regions is provided, during the 1930 s, by political arguments and national strategic interests. In Fascist Italy, for example, several energy-intensive heavy industries are established in the multi-cultural ‘border’ provinces of Aosta Valley—steelworks in Aosta, combining local ore deposits and hydropower, and chemical industries in Châtillon and Verrès—and South Tyrol—steelworks, aluminium industries and chemical plants between Bolzano and Merano, all hydropower-based (Gebhardt 1990). A significant growth is also registered in the pre-war years by national relevant sectors such as the mining and steelmaking industry of Upper Styria (Austria) and Upper Carniola (Slovenia), as well as by electrochemistry (chlorine and derivates) around Grenoble. The Western Alps are in general much more affected by this second wave of industrialization than the Eastern Alps, mostly because of the early and more developed energy infrastructure and the better accessibility to lowland industrial centres (De Rossi 2016). Energy-intensive industries are established especially in the Northern French Alps—Maurienne and Tarentaise valleys in Savoie, Grésivaudan and Romanche valleys in Isère –, in south-western Switzerland—Rhone valley in Valais, in the Lepontine Alps between Ticino and Grigioni –, and in north-western Italy—Aosta valley and Ossola in Piemonte. In the Eastern Alps, a punctual development characterized by few isolated facilities disconnected from the regional industrial structure takes place in Trentino, North- and South-Tyrol, Salzburg, Carinthia and partially Slovenia. The advantages of hydropower are also successfully adopted by already established and well-developed sectors, often leading to a substantial upgrade of local production systems and facilities. It is the case of textile industry in the Bergamo valleys and in Kranj, or steel industry in the Brescia valleys, in the upper Sava valley in Slovenia and in the Styrian district of Liezen. Between 1945 and 1960, the rapid change of framework conditions (resources, energy, productive models, political situation, etc.) slowly brings this long and complex industrialisation phase to an end.

Fig. 3.3

Overview of the Lonza electrochemical works in Visp, ca. 1930

Light industries (1960–1980)

The third and last phase is that of light industries, whose rapid and geographically uniform development brings the secondary sector at the top of employment shares in the whole Alpine region⁹. In the post-war phase, the positive economic conjuncture characterised by market liberalisation and flexible manufacturing systems (as response to the increased international competition) favours an unprecedented industrial growth in all the Alpine countries, especially in Western Europe. The related Alpine regions also profits largely from these developments. The regional industrial system, until then based on resource-intensive heavy industries, is expanded and empowered through the widespread development of SMEs, i.e. small-scale industries highly specialised but mostly focused on low added value sectors (mechanics, electric appliances, apparels, food, etc.). This process occurs mainly in two forms: branch plants and industrial districts. In the former, secondary production sites without management and R&D departments are established by mother companies through a process of externalisation of production chains, or part of them. In the Alps, branch plants of this kind are usually opened in low-cost labour areas and/or border regions, either with a strong industrial background (e.g. Vorarlberg) or not (e.g. South-Tyrol and Ticino). According to the location of the mother company, the establishment of branch plants can be inner-oriented (if both the headquarters and the branch plant are located within the same region) or outer-oriented (if the headquarters are located elsewhere) (Gebhardt 1990). In opposition to externally developed branch plants, the rise of industrial districts is mostly fed by internal (or local) factors, such as the private initiative, the entrepreneurial capacity and cohesive local community. Developed as an innovative response to the dissolution of Fordist production models, industrial districts make use of flexible specialization to replace the existing vertically oriented production (one large plant incorporating all production phases) with a horizontally oriented version (a density of small-sized plants specialised in one specific phase). Hence, the key characteristics of industrial districts which differentiate them from branch plants are the local origin of firms, their territorial and relational proximity (clustering) and the close relationship with locally-relevant social and institutional structures (Becattini 1991). Starting from the 1970s, similar developments occur along the southern prealpine rim in Italy (Fortis 1999) and in Haut-Savoie (Courlet 2002), but also in eastern Switzerland, Vorarlberg and Tyrol. A significant example of the influence of branch plants and industrial districts on the existing Alpine industrial system is provided by old textile manufacturing regions, which gradually convert their raw textile production into specialised sub- or side-sectors such as apparel industry (e.g. Biella, Vorarlberg and St. Gallen, Annecy) or textile engineering (Bergamo, Vorarlberg). Another Alpine dated industrial sector, steelmaking, also experiences a similar transformation/diversification, with big differences however between private-oriented systems (e.g. Brescia district) and state-funded ones (e.g. Upper Styria). The ubiquitous development of light, clustered industries across the Alps is also due to the increased road accessibility of many core and side areas. A substantial difference between these new industries and the previous traditional ones is indeed in the meant of transport and accessibility: while the latter required the railway to be productively efficient, the former prefer capillary road networks, able to sustain spatially fragmented production systems and high production flexibility. As a consequence, light industry tends to concentrate along the prealpine fringe, at the entrance of main valleys or along transnational transit corridors, thus leaving the innermost regions of previous industrialization (Chabert 1978). At the same time, traditional heavy industries are challenged by the fast changing global economic framework conditions, among which the 1960s nationalization of energy markets and the rising energy, transport and labour costs (Veyret and Veyret 1970; Raffestin and Crivelli 1988). As response, many energy- and labour-intensive Alpine industries try to increase their competitiveness by specialising in niche sectors (e.g. chemical and pharmaceutical industry) or through concentration and restructuring (e.g. steelmaking, metal smelting industries, cement production).

Widespread decline and concentrated growth after 1980

After 1980, the changes already visible at the end of the previous phase become structural. These transformations partially reflect, or follow, the current trends and ongoing processes in European western economies, such as the increasing tertiarization and the replacement of resource- and labour-intensive industries with knowledge-based ones¹⁰. In the Alps, those sectors and activities established in the early phases of industrialization—heavy and manufacturing industries strongly attached to exclusive location advantages (raw materials, energy, transport, workforce, etc.)—are particularly hit by the new economic framework conditions at the global scale (Fig. 3.4). The relocation of raw material extraction industries from developed to developing countries causes the decline of the related processing industries, once widely present across inner mountainous regions (Modica and Weilacher 2020). It is the case of mining-based metal industries—lead, zinc and copper smelting in the southern and eastern Alps –, ore-based steelmaking—which only survives, heavily downsized, in Upper Styria—and cement industry—that, in reverse, maintains most of the extraction activities in the mountains while moving production facilities in the forelands, due to better accessibility, space availability and improved long-distance transport. Electrochemical and electrometallurgical industries, which made the economic fortune of many Alpine regions at the turn of the century, are also severely affected by the deep transformations within the energy sector. The increasing competition of fossil fuels and nuclear power, as well as the influence of state monopolies on energy pricing, bring quickly to an end those location advantages connected to the self-generation of cheap hydropower (Raffestin and Crivelli 1988). Consequently, many energy-intensive industries (aluminium, alloys and raw chemicals) are delocalised from the inner Alps to the new energy production and distribution hubs, such as seaports or gas/oil pipeline terminals—e.g. aluminium industry moved from Trentino and South Tyrol to the industrial harbour of Venice-Marghera, carbon industries from inner Savoie to the zone industrielle et portuaire (ZIP) of Fos-sur-Mer and Port-de-Bouc, near Marseille. In terms of accessibility, the scale-up and speed-up of transport and trade at the global scale lead also to the selective decline of rail freight transport across many Alpine valleys—while favouring only the few key European corridors (Brenner, Gotthard, etc.). For traditional Alpine industries, this meant the disappearance of the previously competitive advantage of being connected to the railway network, and thus to halve the high transportation costs in favour of on-site resource exploitation. The dismantling or downgrading of many inner Alpine railway lines acts either as a cause for and an effect of the abandonment of certain industrial activities, e.g. in the cases of the Aosta valley, the Tarentaise and Durance valleys, the Seriana and Camonica valleys, or the Erzbergbahn in Upper Styria. In a few cases, the pursuing of cutting-edge specialization and relevant investments in technological and structural upgrade allow a successful restructuring and thus the survival of some basic industries—e.g. aluminium industry in Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne and Sierre, chemical industry in Villadossola. Light industrial districts and SMEs cluster developed in the 1960 s and 1970 s are also pushed through a process of adaptive specialization, to face the increasing global competition. Within the districts, the horizontal distribution of production chains among single-phase small firms is inversely replaced by concentration in few, larger firms (district leaders), able to better sustain the spread of innovations as well as to reach a stronger international placement (De Marchi and Grandinetti 2012). In the Italian Alps, a successful example of the latter transition is that of the eyewear district of Belluno-Cadore, whose downsizing in terms of number of firms is balanced by increasing exports (around 80% in 2008) and the development/integration of design, prototyping and branding phases (Bramanti and Gambarotto 2009).

Fig. 3.4

The carbide silos of the former Rhodiatoce-Montedison chemical plant in Villadossola, 2007

Parallel to the restructuring and/or decline of the existing traditional industrial activities, the Alpine region experiences from the late 1980 s a significant growth of advanced industries in knowledge-intensive sectors such electronics, nanotech, biotech, and ICT (Bartaletti 2011). Driven by the increasing functional and economic integration of the Alpine region with the surrounding metropolitan areas and global networks, this process is locally sustained by the successful interaction between higher education and research institutions, dynamic entrepreneurial networks and innovation-oriented policies. Not by chance, these new industries tend to concentrate within or around the major inner- and pre-Alpine cities and agglomerations, highly accessible and equipped with a critical mass of knowledge and political institutions as well as urban amenities and services (Perlik and Messerli 2004). In a few notable cases, the collaborative coexistence of medium-large university campuses (5.000–20.000 students), research centres and business incubators (e.g. science and technology parks¹¹) supports the development of highly innovative and specialised clusters, often regarded as “Alpine Silicon Valleys” in regional promotion activities. Among the most relevant innovative clusters there are the Grenoble-Chambery metropolitan area (nanotech, microelectronics, molecular biology, ICT), which is the second innovation centre in France after Paris/Île-de-France, the Insubria Region between the Lombardian provinces of Varese and Como and the Swiss canton of Ticino (biotech, life sciences), the Rhine valley between St. Gallen and Dornbirn (nanotech), the Inn valley from Innsbruck to Kufstein (biotech, life sciences), the Adige valley with centres in Trento-Rovereto and Bolzano (microelectronics, ICT, greentech, foodtech) and the Klagenfurt-Villach conurbation (microelectronics).

In the first decade of the new millennium, the spatial and development polarisation between ‘quaternary’ industry poles (including successful SMEs districts) and declining old industrial regions becomes clearly evident. In the context of the heavily industrialised Northern French Alps, Anne Dalmasso (2009) distinguishes between “territories of continues industrialisation” (the former) and “territories of deindustrialisation” (the latter). In the first case, ancient industrial regions such as the Grenoble area, Annecy and the Arve valley have successfully managed the transition from the existing industrial mono-structure (replaced or partially upgraded) to a more diverse, innovative and specialised productive system. In the case of deindustrialising regions, which are mainly found in inner Tarentaise, Maurienne and Romanche valleys, the decline of energy-intensive heavy industries is not counterbalanced by any further development in the industrial sector, nor by tourism or the service sector—which indeed remains very limited in these contexts. The territorial divergence between upgrading and shrinking industrial regions also implies a delocalisation, or shift, of industrial activities and related services from the innermost areas to the outer borders of the Alps (Modica 2019). Besides the French Savoie and Isére, this process can be observed in Valais (from the mid-upper to the lower Rhone valley and the Métropole lémanique), in the Lombardian Prealps (from the uppermost valleys to the foreland gateways in Varese, Lecco, Bergamo and Brescia provinces), in Styria (from Leoben and the Mur-Mürz valley to Graz in the south and Wiener Neustadt in the west), in the Tyrol (from the upper to the lower Inn valley), in the Salzburg region and in north-western Slovenia (from the upper Sava valley to the urban area of Ljubljana).

3 An economic challenge

In such a strongly polarised context, where to the emergence of a few successful economic clusters it opposes a widespread decline of traditional industrial activities, brownfield redevelopment ‘naturally’ assumes a strategic economic relevance, both locally and regionally. Yet, the transformation and reuse of derelict industrial sites is confronted, in the specificity of the Alpine context, with rapidly changing economic conditions and emerging new paradigms of territorial development. It can be noticed, just as an example, how two of the activities traditionally associated to mountain landscapes, agriculture and tourism, are steadily losing their traditional ‘economic’ relevance due to external socio-economic factors (e.g. the market predominance of intensive food production or the globalisation of the travel industry) and environmental transformations as well (e.g. the impact of climate change on soils, vegetation and precipitations) (Bartaletti 2011; Bätzing 2015). At the same time, new promising sectors are emerging, such as distribution logistics in relation to expanding transnational trade and transport corridors (Convention 2007), while others are being revived, such as small-scale hydropower production fostered by the renewables transition (Svadlenak-Gomez, Tramberend, and Walzer 2015). The spatial distribution and thus the territorial influence of these economic activities are also extremely uneven, being closely linked to specific environmental and socio-cultural conditions such as morphology, climate, demography, accessibility, cultural landscapes and level of urbanisation, legal and policy frameworks. As an economic space, the contemporary Alps are indeed a complex patchwork of obsolete and innovative, growing and declining economic activities, whose relative fate is strongly determined by both local conditions and global trends and dynamics (Boesch 2005)—as demonstrated by the specific case of industry itself, previously discussed.

In this scenario, the overall and long-term sustainability of this heterogeneous yet strongly ‘localised’ mountain economy depends on the capacity to overcome the regional mono-structures¹² (inherited but also emerging), by pursuing an innovative and integrated use of the existing territorial capital (Camagni and Capello 2013). Defined as the sum of biophysical and human factors, of given environmental conditions and socio-cultural capabilities of a certain territory, the concept of territorial capital is particularly meaningful in setting future economic perspectives for fragile mountain regions, especially since it implies a shift in meaning and usage of what can be considered a resource. Traditional mountain economic activities, at the base of the aforementioned weak mono-structures, relied mostly on natural resources, on their direct exploitation and even on the commodification of those (e.g. in winter tourism). Instead, future mountain economies, sustainable and self-assured, are expected to take increasingly into consideration the local and regional human capital—the networks of stakeholders, capabilities and know-how—and especially to foster its development in connection to a wise use of given environmental resources (Perlik 2019). To realise this change, and to make its achievements durable, it is essential to ensure that locally generated innovation (supported by adequate education and knowledge structures) is transferred to the regional economic and productive system. While this growth-through-innovation process works smoothly in economically advanced and dynamic regions, such as global cities and core metropolitan areas, in marginal regions such as inner Alpine areas, lacking significant knowledge hubs and innovation transfer systems, it does not (Convention 2017). An alternative approach, suitable for mountain contexts where the territorial capital is significantly shaped by environmental resources¹³, is that of territorial innovation (Zanon 2018). Based on Raffestin’s TDR model (Raffestin 2012), which explains how collectivities constantly transform space to their own needs and purposes through cyclical processes of territorialisation-deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation, the territorial innovation approach postulates that innovation can occur in socially and economically weak contexts only through the “activation (or re-activation) of strong links between the local communities and the space involved” (Zanon 2018: 5). With the support of three concrete cases from the Alpine region of Trentino (Italy), Zanon explains how a revived interaction between local actors and specific territorial features¹⁴, fuelled by proximity-based learning processes, has fostered innovative and alternative economic developments in previously ‘critical’ contexts. Although the effects of these new developments are still limited in terms of GDP, the resulting increase of local networking, mutual learning and capacity-building is definitely strengthening the future perspective of once marginal areas.

In this framework, mountain brownfield sites gain their position as an actual territorial resource, a ‘latent’ yet promising one, capable of supporting innovative territorial developments both in terms of ‘immaterial’ networking and ‘material’ available space (Fig. 3.5). Depending on the sites conditions, location and accessibility, and highly influenced by the regional economic structure and the spatial planning system too, Alpine brownfields can be proactively turned into experimental platforms for setting-up new ‘productive ecologies’ (Sega 2017) at the local and regional scale. As a concrete ‘space of opportunity’, former industrial sites can indeed support the emerging mountain green economy (Convention 2017), foster the ‘smart specialisation’ of regional clusters (Dax 2019) and even contribute to shape new ‘brandscaping’ strategies for regional development (Boesch, Renner, and Siegrist 2008). The perspective of mountain brownfields as an economically productive resource finds a fertile ground in Aldo Bonomi’s concept of ‘Alpine productive platform’ (Bonomi 2010), a polycentric and integrated system of innovative micro-economies based on the specificity of the mountain territory, on its environmental and socio-cultural infrastructures, capable of “repositioning the Alpine territory […] beyond the idea of touristic resort or green oasis of well-being at the edges of the metropolitan model”¹⁵ (Bonomi and Masiero 2014). A productive-oriented reuse of brownfields can embrace, in this sense, a wide range of programmatic options, from ‘traditional’ regional business parks hosting locally based activities to more innovative business incubators connected with existing and emerging clusters at the regional scale. Also, industrial architectural ensembles having a particular historic or symbolic value can be creatively repurposed as cultural and artistic production centres, thus contributing to foster multi-seasonal tourism through a diversified cultural offer¹⁶.

Fig. 3.5

Empty halls of the former SISMA steelworks in Villadossola, 2016

From an economic perspective, the challenge of brownfield redevelopment in mountain regions is therefore linked to the re-integration of the physical, spatial and ‘built’ resource within the wider network of territorial development, i.e. the system of local/regional social and economic actors and assets. In other words, it means to ‘capitalise’ the already there through a process of territorial, community-led re-appropriation (Zanon 2014). Especially in the mountain context, characterised by extensive geographies yet a very high human proximity, the economic challenge of brownfield redevelopment and transformation is, certainly, also a social and environmental question.

4 A social challenge

In geo-economic peripheries such as the Alpine region, the social and cultural impact of deindustrialisation can be extremely significative and hardly manageable on the long-term. Since the number of regionally relevant industrial sites is very limited there, the closure and dismantling of just one single site usually bears social consequences on a larger scale, triggering socio-demographic processes that largely exceeds the mere ‘brownfield problem’. This is especially true for those mountain contexts long characterised by the aforementioned mono-structures, where entire valley communities used to rely on industry as the main economic source, thus having shaped their societal structures accordingly (Combal 2018). Compared to the early replacement of mountain farming with modern industry and energy production—a rapid transition, widely accepted by Alpine people as an alternative and promising future –, the recent withdrawal of the same industry, meanwhile turned obsolete, often leaves these territories without a concrete perspective of long-term habitability. In many documented cases, industrial decline is the reason for continuous depopulation of mountain communities (Migliorati and Veronesi 2020), increasing disparities at the regional level (Bätzing, Perlik, and Dekleva 1996) and the worsening of already existing conditions of socio-economic marginality (Čede et al. 2018). At the same time, however, the end of the “golden age” of Alpine industrialisation and the following transition to an uncertain post-industrial phase activates, in the affected local communities, a process of review and/or redefinition of their own social identity (Migliorati 2021). Brownfields, as the most significant and tangible legacy of the previous industrialisation, are often directly involved in this collective appraisal. Rediscovered and reinterpreted as material cultural heritage, these sites or at least part of those, are charged with strong identity-related meanings, thus paving the way, in the best cases, for a long-term cultural-oriented reuse. In the mountain context, however, this ‘heritagisation’ process is not so immediate, but instead rather difficult in its actualisation. Two main reasons can be found for that. At first, Alpine communities often perceive brownfields very pragmatically as an open economic and social question, a concrete problem whose solution entails the survival of the community itself. In the framework of the already mentioned Interreg project “trAILs”, the majority of local inhabitants interviewed on the meanings associated to their own brownfield have clearly underlined the dysfunctionality of the site—related to the current state of abandonment or underuse—over its potential value as cultural heritage¹⁷ (Migliorati and Veronesi 2020; Migliorati 2021). This lack of cultural acceptance of industrial leftovers can be somehow explained with the difficult coexistence between industry and the mountain context, fostered by the recent origin and the transient presence of heavy industrial activities as well as by a certain ‘culturally-established’ view on the mountain realm (Fig. 3.6). On the one hand, and as already seen, the industrialisation of the Alps was mainly fostered by exogenous economic processes. The disruptive introduction of industry into a traditional and closed socio-cultural environment, shaped by centuries of human adaption to the mountains, has impeded in many cases its acknowledgement as an integral part of the mountain culture (Lorenzetti and Valsangiacomo 2016). This cultural detachment was largely sustained, also, by the historical yet persistent Romantic view over the mountains as natural and pastoral idyll, a picturesque leisure landscape in which industry clearly stands out as a true ‘atypical object’. The local inhabitants, although conscious of their industrial past and the origins of their everyday landscapes, are often influenced by this view. In the context of the current deindustrialisation of mountain regions, the vestiges of industry, and especially of heavy and ‘modern’ industries (Combal 2018), are usually questioned and evaluated as less relevant (less useful) than other, more ‘Alpine’ cultural and natural heritage (Lorenzetti and Valsangiacomo 2016). The collective assessment of local industrial heritage has a direct influence on brownfield transformation, as it can enable or block potential conversion strategies and development pathways.

Fig. 3.6

The old Italcementi cement factory overlooking the town of Albino, 2014

Tied to the issue of social identity and heritage, which mostly deals with the present view over the past, there is also a future-oriented perspective on social cohesion at the local and regional scale. It is now widely acknowledged, and widely documented, that the contemporary Alpine space is anything but homogeneous from a social, cultural and especially economic point of view. Driven by global dynamics, several processes of regionalisation are sharpening the spatial polarisation between growth areas, highly accessible and capable of building functional relationships outside their own territory, and marginal areas, economically uncompetitive and socially in decline (Perlik 2010, 2019). This scenario, by many considered as extremely problematic for the sustainable development of the Alpine region (Price et al. 2011; Bätzing 2015), is directly reflected in the social matrix of the territory. The growth areas, i.e. the Alpine edges in close contact with the nearby lowland metropolitan regions as well as the main valleys acting as transit corridors, attract social groups such as young creatives, skilled workers and multi-locality residents that, by transferring urban social structures and lifestyles into the mountains, foster Alpine gentrification (Perlik 2011). Marginal areas, characterised either by geographical remoteness or poor economic competitiveness¹⁸, are not only failing in attracting such innovative social groups, but especially they keep losing those segments of local population (youngsters, working age groups) capable of keeping the territory socially and economically alive (Corrado 2010). The impacts of these profound societal transformations reach out on the territory itself, on its economic performance as well as on its environmental character, including the land use structure and the landscape appearance too (Pfefferkorn, Egli, and Massarutto 2005). In this context, former industrial sites make their appearance as sites of transformation. Considering the regional relevance of mountain brownfields, their redevelopment can directly influence social and territorial cohesion at the local and regional scale, exactly by managing, on a long-term perspective, the flow of certain social groups. Depending on the specific location and the socioeconomic contextual conditions, brownfield redevelopment can help to prevent depopulation and social desertification in marginal areas as well as addressing a more sustainable ‘gentrification’ in growth areas. This particular issue is worth to be investigated, as most of the current research on the link between the reactivation of disused spaces and the improvement of social cohesion in mountain regions is solely focusing on deprived rural contexts.

Either seen from the perspective of social and territorial cohesion or considered in terms of identity and heritage, the social relevance of Alpine brownfields is a complex and disputable matter. From a socio-cultural point of view, the challenge connected to the transformation of mountain brownfields seems to lie in the equilibrium between the expected performance of redevelopment in terms of social cohesion (i.e. how the site conversion responds to social and territorial dynamics) on one hand, and the preservation of social and cultural identity connected to the material and immaterial legacy of industry. Facing this challenge calls definitely for the direct involvement of local communities in the site transformation.

5 An environmental challenge

The social and economic issues connected to the redevelopment of Alpine brownfields cannot be properly addressed without considering the specificity of the living environment to which these sites are interfaced. Mountains are dynamic natural ecosystems, characterised by an outstanding biodiversity and a rich ecological stratification due to morphological and bio-climatic factors. But being also inhabited territories, mountain regions and their complex yet vulnerable ecosystems are constantly subject to various forms of anthropogenic influence. In the Alps, the scale and the impact of human-driven transformations have dramatically increased in the last one hundred and fifty years, as result of the combined action of local and global processes (Bätzing 2015; Perlik 2019). In the first case, the new intensive economic uses of mountain natural resources, such as water, wood, rocks and soil, have strongly impacted on existing and well established eco-cultural equilibriums. Locally, the effects can be seen in biodiversity degradation due to extreme land uses (overuse versus abandonment) or in the permanent fragmentation of large-scale ecological networks due to mobility, tourism and energy infrastructure development (Chemini and Rizzoli 2003). As highly dynamic natural systems, mountain environments are also reacting very sharply to global processes such as climate change (Grabherr, Gottfried, and Pauli 2010; Cherisch et al. 2015). The effects of global warming are already visible and well documented in mountain regions. The occurring and prospected significant changes in yearly temperatures and precipitation are causing permafrost retreat, the rise of snow line and the increase of drought frequency, with cascade effects on freshwater supply, vegetation types and coverage as well as habitats. Furthermore, natural disastrous events such as floods, landslides and avalanches are also directly associable to changing climate conditions, though in many cases these are ‘empowered’ by environmental-unfriendly land uses and urbanisation models (Kruse and Pütz 2014). Under these changing environmental conditions, the human-nature equilibrium which allows the habitability of these Alpine territories is increasingly put under pressure, thus also negatively influencing the availability and the quality of ecosystem services provided by mountains to the surrounding regions.

In this dynamic environmental context, industrial brownfield sites obviously represent a problematic condition. At the same time, however, their transformation does also advance potentially valuable solutions for large-scale environmental regeneration (Fig. 3.7). A first dimension to consider is that of the former industrial site itself, an abandoned or underused portion of already developed land resulting from a prolonged and intensive production activity. Depending on the previous industrial activities, the environmental impact of Alpine brownfields can be extremely significant and challenging to be addressed: it can include soil and underground water contamination (e.g. chemical industries, paper industries, steelworks, etc.), increased geo-morphological instability due to uncontrolled erosion (e.g. mining industries, cement production) and the fragmentation or permanent loss of habitats due to deforestation, soil sealing and land degradation (common to most brownfields). In certain cases, some of these processes have already emerged during the previous industrial activity, as in the infamous cases of heavy mercury pollution from aluminium smelting in Martigny/CH, Mori/I and Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne/F, the DDT outflow into Lake Maggiore from chlorine industries in Pieve Vergonte/I, or the accumulation of heavy metals around the lead and zinc smelting complex of Arnoldstein/A. But more often, exactly the condition of prolonged and uncontrolled abandonment of previously industrial sites let these critical ecological situations to emerge. In this case, the ecological rehabilitation of brownfields is the only way to be able to implement, later on, a transformation process and thus enabling the reuse and redevelopment of the site itself. However, as a costly and time-wise operation, the reclamation of contaminated industrial sites can be only achieved, in the specific context of mountain regions, if financial and technical support is provided to affected regional and local communities by higher level institutions—as occurred in some of the previously mentioned cases¹⁹.

Fig. 3.7

The IRO steelworks in Odolo, 2010

The management of the site-specific environmental impact of Alpine brownfields is without any doubt a problematic and challenging issue, yet rarely tackled ‘holistically’ through a wider ecosystem service (ES) -based approach (Grêt-Regamey, Walz, and Bebi 2008; Schirpke, Tappeiner, and Tasser 2019). In most cases, mountain brownfields are located at critical nodes of the regional ecological network, that is, at the confluence of water streams into larger rivers or even directly into riverbeds, on alluvial fans at the narrow intersection of mountain slope and valley ecosystems, in the centre of ecologically impoverished valley floors or at the edges of vast biotopes. These locational conditions are not sufficiently considered when dealing with the environmental regeneration of brownfields, with the result that major environmental and ecological concerns are not tackled at all. However, right the integration of these contextual aspects with the aforementioned site-specific issues can foster an appropriate environmental framing of mountain brownfields, thus improving the effectiveness of their transformation. By ‘ecologically’ consider brownfields as key nodes of hybrid artificial-natural mountain ecosystems, as they actually are, their transformation and redevelopment can be also understood as a way to increase the environmental resilience of mountain areas by providing (or enhancing the provision) of relevant ES (Mathey et al. 2015; Cortinovis and Geneletti 2018). In this way, the transformation of a brownfield site intercepting (also negatively) a regionally relevant river ecological corridor represents the occasion to implement a large-scale restoration of the same, or at least of those sections ecologically compromised as within the brownfield itself. Or, again, a disused industrial site interlaced with extensive former mining surfaces or waste deposits can serve as starting point for a vast operation of reclamation and ecological rehabilitation, leading to significant positive impacts on mountain biodiversity at the regional scale or even beyond. In synthesis, it seems useful to consider, during the transformation and redevelopment process, the potential benefits of brownfield transformation for the wider mountain environmental context, that is, to highlight and enhance the ecological value of the site for the intercepting ecosystems.

Considering this latter perspective, the environmental challenge for Alpine brownfield redevelopment does not only lie in their ecological rehabilitation, in fact unavoidable, but more and especially it embraces their ecological relevance for the hosting territorial ecosystem (Svadlenak-Gomez et al. 2014). In this regard, the environmental regeneration of mountain brownfields needs to be considered and implemented necessarily beyond the mere site perimeter. Only in this way brownfield transformation can substantially contribute to increase the resilience of highly vulnerable and rapidly changing mountain living environments.

6 Deindustrialising mountains: landscape as infrastructure

For over a century, the Alps have constituted the breeding ground for a certain form of exogenous industrialisation, one aimed at taking advantage of the mountain environment and its precious resources. A multitude of heavy and manufacturing industries began to multiply in once remote rural regions, deeply and permanently transforming rooted regional economies and societal structures as well as cultural landscapes (Crivelli 1998; Dalmasso 2007). From around the 1980s many of these industries entered in crisis, as the changing economic conditions at the regional and global level suddenly turned the previous location advantages in inner Alpine areas obsolete and counterproductive. However, compared to other European regions of old industrialisation, the Alps never experienced such a dramatic decline, due to the much lower industrial density and the regionally diverse economic structure (Bätzing 2015). The ongoing structural change is causing the emergence of many brownfields, derelict or underused former industrial sites that, while telling the epic yet controversial story of Alpine industrialisation, are posing an enormous challenge for the future sustainable development of mountain communities and regions (Fig. 3.8). The redevelopment of these sites, their physical and functional transformation, is undoubtedly a complex planning task, strongly influenced by the framework economic, social and environmental conditions of the contemporary Alpine space. From an economic point of view, mountain brownfields can be considered as an outstanding space of opportunity, an emerging type of territorial capital requiring innovative cooperation models to be successfully (re)developed and reintegrated in regional economic networks. With regards to the Alpine society, brownfields as material legacy of the past industrial age are bearing a certain social and cultural identity, whose preservation has to meet the expected contribute of the site transformation to social and territorial cohesion. In terms of environment, finally, the mandatory ecological rehabilitation of heavily compromised derelict sites might be the chance to foster an extensive reclamation of altered mountain ecosystems, and thus to improve the environmental resilience of the Alps, or at least of their mostly inhabited parts.

Fig. 3.8

The former INDEL ferrosilicium factory in Domodossola, 2007

Based on these arguments, Alpine brownfields can be realistically and proactively viewed as supporting infrastructures for their own economic, social and environmental contexts. This aspect, still largely undervalued, is determinant when it comes to deal with the challenging redevelopment of these sites. As already advanced in the introduction, and further clarified in this chapter, these mountain brownfields are indeed at the centre of complex territorial systems under deep transformation. Originated and developed along industry, these deindustrialising mountain territories are now questioning the role of its material and immaterial legacy in view of an alternative, sustainable future (Migliorati and Veronesi 2020). Such a strong yet underrated condition of territorial centrality—shared especially by those large-scale brownfields derived from traditional resource-intensive heavy industries—is particularly striking while considering the strategic relevance of most of these sites in terms of regional development. As a long-term spatial planning challenge, the physical and functional transformation of mountain brownfields should then take advantage of this specific infrastructural quality, enhancing its potential in terms of territorial spillover on economy, society and environment too. In doing so, this condition of territorial centrality of brownfields has to be evidently transposed into the physical space, i.e. underlining also the spatial centrality of these sites with regards to their own related landscapes. Alpine brownfields are indeed strongly influenced by their dual condition of strong spatial embedness in the context on one hand, and a total functional disconnection from the same on the other hand. The brownfield site is the fulcrum of a specific mountain landscape altered by the historical presence of industry, an environmental, economic and social presence that due to deindustrialisation becomes ‘negative’—not meant as problematic (it obviously is), but more in terms of a leftover, redundant superstructure. The disused industrial site exists and persists embedded into its own territorial structure, yet it is increasingly disconnecting from the social and economic dynamics that occur within the same territory, flowing through the same space, regardless of the site itself. Yet, in the previous pages it was clearly evidenced how the brownfield site, as a highly receptive ‘awaiting space’, does actually constitute a unique opportunity to intercept and concretely influence these new territorial flows and dynamics. The interpretation of spatially well-integrated yet functionally disconnected sites leads to advance the image of Alpine brownfields as true territorial infrastructures: a very special form of ‘territorial capital’ whose biophysical component already exist—the brownfield site as an architectural ensemble at the centre of a vast, altered ecosystem to be regenerated—while the human one has yet to be (re)formed—by means of interacting cultural identity, economic development and social cohesion -related issues. The real challenge lies therefore in rendering in space and time this potential role of Alpine brownfields as platforms for development, that is, to enable their transformation and redevelopment.