Foreword: For a Contemporary Inhabitability of the European Alps

Fields of investigation and leading studies of important processes of industrial decommissioning have focused almost exclusively on cities and/or urbanised metropolitan contexts. They tend to reveal and prevail the urban dimension of regeneration programmes, projects and actions. Far from heavily urbanised and infrastructurally developed contexts, a host of different territories situated along the arc of theEuropean Alps have been silently modelled by heavy industry (steelworks, mining, electrical and chemical plants). Far from heavily urbanised and infrastructurally developed contexts, a host of different territories situated along the arc of theEuropean Alps have been silently modelled by heavy industry (steelworks, mining, electrical and chemical plants). With an ecological and functional footprint much broader than their actual dimension, they modified different layered landscapes, almost always immersed in contexts of a rich history and beauty, inhabited by often closed communities, in many cases a result of their challenging topography and accessibility. Manufacturing activities and processes, together with a prosperous social era of factories-communities that generated and benefited from a robust social and charitable welfare, heavily conditioned local economies, societies and environments. Similar to urban systems, they were slowly exhausted over time, leaving behind decommissioned and abandoned landscapes, relics of a vast, broad and complex industrial modernity; the legacy of these decommissioning processes presents limits and problems for the adaptive reuse of contexts with varying conditions of fragility: economic (the closure of company-towns), social (the spaces of shrinkage) and environmental (polluting waste from manufacturing processes).The European research Alpine Industrial Landscapes Transformation (trAILs), funded within the Interreg Alpine Space Programme between 2018 and 2021, investigated this specific typology of decommissioning.