Community-Driven Initiatives for Heritage Acknowledgement, Preservation and Enhancement in European Marginal Area. The case of Rosia Montana (Romania)

By briefly reviewing community-driven approaches for the preservation of widespread heritage, the paper poses some reflections on the role of bottom-up approaches as triggers for top-down recognitions of properties set in marginal areas. In the Romanian context, mining activities have significantly contributed to designing the territories. When the extraction activities cease, the traces of production remain as parts of what might be considered a difficult but extraordinary legacy, which should be interpreted as a system. The material inheritance concerns not only the buildings but also the systems of relations with the environment and the memory of those who lived in these production places. The debate around recognizing these sites as “heritage” is long and strongly discussed at the international level. The preservation of the heritage and environment of these sites has been at the centre of civil mobilization in the last twenty years, which in time has raised national and international attention. Such propositions completely fit in the case of Ros,ia Montana Mining Landscape, the most recently recognized “cultural landscape” property in Romania by the World Heritage Centre (UNESCO). Based on literature review and research within the field of mining heritage, the paper is a first attempt to analyse the case of Rosia Montana Mining Landscape as part of a nationwide territorial constellation of former gold mining sites, which in the last decade are going through deindustrialisation simultaneously with the acknowledgement and re-signification processes as heritage.