Production Landscapes in an Energy Transition Perspective. Industrial Heritage Preservation, Socio-Political Issues, and Potential Reuse

The paper focuses on the conservation and enhancement of the industrial heritage in an innovative sustainable key considering both the threats and opportunities raised by the new energy transition process. An interdisciplinary methodological approach focused on the reuse of the existing production sites is defined: it relies on interpreting simultaneously, unifying, and overlapping several disciplinary perspectives and different scales of analyses. It represents the starting point to understanding how the previous historic energetic transitions and industrialization/deindustrialization processes impacted the Italian territories, which are its tangible and intangible manifestations and their current status in the matter of industrial heritage acknowledgement and enhancement, e.g., listed production sites and landscapes, state of decay and abandonment, rehabilitation project, reuse. Through three case studies on different Italian regions (i.e., Lombardy, Calabria, and Sardinia), the paper aims to define a theoretical interpretative model that relies on a compelling correlation of inputs and evaluations, including sociocultural, environmental, economic, and conservation issues.