Industrial Heritage: un tema complesso nella Liguria del XXI secolo.

Outside Italy the issue of disused industrial sites and their restoration has been discussed since the second half of the 1900s, while the interest in industrial heritage in Italy is only fairly recent. It stems from the evolution of the concept of heritage asset and the shift of focus from monuments themselves to the surrounding environment and cultural landscape. In Liguria, Italy, a series of studies was carried out on the history of the region’s industry, which was a key sector from the 1850s to the 1900s, especially mechanics and metallurgy as well as in the textile, nautical, chemical and food industries. Industrial buildings in Liguria are often situated in areas crucial from the point of view of their location and interesting in their surrounding landscape. These buildings were built in the 1850s under the political and cultural authorities of the time that considered Liguria a strategic region for Italy’s economic panorama and its modernisation process. The profound economic crisis in the 1950s caused great local damage to the region as a number of factories built along the coast and riverbeds were eventually abandoned. In time, demolitions, objective difficulties in refunctionalising the areas and the need to find new spaces for residential areas or shopping and recreational centres triggered a process of reutilising the territory which led to subsequent landscape modification. These changes and processes often impeded the conservation of industrial buildings, even those of higher cultural value.