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In the last 10–15 years, a variety of bottom-up initiatives have emerged in Romania as a result of civic action, focusing on the safeguarding and enhancement of the cultural heritage despite the lack of legal support and an appropriate national strategy in the field. From the multitude of these initiatives, this article will focus on several developed in the former mining areas which, due to the standardized industrial production, display similar territorial and built environment features. Moreover, these case studies were considered during the 1945–1989 period as representing a particular urban typology, that of small sized mono-industrial towns, which in the socialist urban theory was considered the base of an evenly distributed urban network, with all its economic, social and cultural implications. During the post-1989 political and economic shifts, while facing the deindustrialisation process, these towns passed through similar shrinking phenomena, proving to be extremely vulnerable to the challenges of deindustrialization. Therefore, this article will illustrate the cases of several former mining towns such as Baia Sprie, Anina and Petrila from the perspective of recent civil society initiatives directed towards the post-industrial revitalisation through the enhancement of the cultural heritage.

On 18 October 2007 Senators Joseph ieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA) introduced the Climate Security Act of 2007 on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Among other things, this act would aim to regulate some 2,100 industrial facilities that produce significant greenhouse gas emissions--power plants, refineries, and industrial factories. This act--along with countless political discussions of climate change-reveal that the ecological challenges of the twenty-first century require us to confront the socioecological transformations wrought by expanding patterns of urbanization, industrialization, and fossil-fuel combustion. Geographically speaking, these processes unfold in particular places and spaces constructed as highly unnatural due to the dominance of the built environment, high levels of pollution, and dependence on societal metabolisms of waste, water, materials, and energy (Fischer-Kowalski 2003), From the narrow disciplinary perspective of geography, principally its Anglo-American variants, it is also interesting to note that most of these sites remain under the purview of the more spatial side of human geography, particularly urban and economic geography (Hanson 1999; Angel 2000). (1) Despite fleeting calls for a "critical industrial ecology" (a term credited to Jody Emel in Bridge and Jonas 2002, 764) and an "industrial geography of the environment" (Gibbs and Healey 1997), it is still safe to say that, by and large, "few geographers have been involved in the study of industrial ecology" (Liverman, Yarnal, and Turner 2003, 273). This gap persists in spite of the fact that, since 1990 multitudes of geographers have answered influential calls for research on nature-society questions (Kates 1987; FitzSimmons 1989; Turner 2002). Critical geographical work on nature has exploded to what Noel Castree described as a "deafening noise" (2002, 112), and human-environment geography continues to expand its interdisciplinary connections (Zimmerer 2007; Turner and Robbins 2008). Yet, as evidenced by the recent proliferation of calls for nature-society analyses of urban (Heynen, Kaika, and Swyngedouw 2006), First World (McCarthy 2005), and economic geographies (Gibbs 2006; Soyez and Schulz 2008), scholars are rediscovering the need to understand the social, spatial, and ecological relationships embedded in urban industrial capitalism (for example, Cronon 1991; Gandy 2002; Colten 2005; Kaika 2005; Rock and Angel 2005; Robbins 2007). In this article I offer an explanation of nature-society geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism in the history of geographical thought within the Anglo-American context. My central argument is that geographers have been too narrowly focused, both empirically and conceptually, on those domains constructed as close to nature, consequently limiting their engagement with denaturalized geographies of socioecological consequence such as transportation systems, power plants, and households. Following Matthew Sparke's discussion of the hyphens in "nation-state" and "geo-graphy" (2005), I have found it particularly useful to engage the semiotic marker of the space between nature-society: the hyphen. I argue that the ways in which geographers read this hyphen sets epistemological limits on the object of their analysis. Indeed, as Billie Lee Turner II forcefully argued (1997), the different readings of the hyphen informed by divergent epistemological and methodological perspectives have led to many more introverted tunnels of nature-society research than bridges within the discipline and beyond. On one hand, the hyphen can be read as a uniter, denoting the mutual relationships between nature and society. In this sense the hyphen can be conceptualized as containing the myriad forms of interchange between human and nonhuman beings, resources, and the ecological processes that support the extraction, distribution, and consumption of matter and energy. …

This essay examines the ways that Chicagoans commemorated or ignored their working-class past and looks at Pullman, Haymarket, and the “Back of the Yards” as particularly apt examples of this remembering and forgetting. When heritage is associated with the built environment, as in Pullman, a carefully planned company town and the site in 1894 of one of the most famous labor conflicts in the US history, the emphasis is usually on the architecture and preservation of tangible reminders of the industrial past. In many evocations of industrial Chicago, however, the people themselves are lost, overwhelmed by the giant machinery and plants. Sometimes, it is contention over the appropriate commemoration of events involving class conflict that causes important sites to go largely unmarked for decades, as was the case with Chicago’s famous Haymarket Square, the site of the great strikes of 1886, commemorated as the international workers’ celebration of May Day. But the need to remember, along with the increasing physical deterioration and the erasure of the working-class past through gentrification and deindustrialization, requires that we find the means to mark, preserve, and interpret aspects of working-class heritage and the historical significance of places like these.

Every city has an environmental story, perhaps none so dramatic as Pittsburgh's. Founded in a river valley blessed with enormous resources - three strong waterways, abundant forests, rich seams of coal - the city experienced a century of exploitation and industrialization that degraded and obscured the natural environment to a horrific degree. Pittsburgh came to be known as "the Smoky City," or, as James Parton famously declared in 1866, "hell with the lid taken off." Then came the storied Renaissance in the years following World War II, when the city's public and private elites, abetted by technological advances, came together to improve the air and renew the built environment. Equally dramatic was the sweeping deindustrialization of Pittsburgh in the 1980s, when the collapse of the steel industry brought down the smokestacks, leaving vast tracks of brownfields and riverfront. Today Pittsburgh faces unprecedented opportunities to reverse the environmental degradation of its history. In Devastation and Renewal, scholars of the urban environment pose questions that both complicate and enrich this story. Working from deep archival research, they ask not only what happened to Pittsburgh's environment, but why. What forces - economic, political, and cultural - were at work? In exploring the disturbing history of pollution in Pittsburgh, they consider not only the sooty skies, but also the poisoned rivers and creeks, the mined hills, and scarred land. Who profited and who paid for such "progress"? How did the environment Pittsburghers live in come to be, and how it can be managed for the future? In a provocative concluding essay, Samuel P. Hays explores Pittsburgh's "environmental culture," the attitudes and institutions that interpret a city's story and work to create change. Comparing Pittsburgh to other cities and regions, he exposes exaggerations of Pittsburgh's environmental achievement and challenges the community to make real progress for the future. A landmark contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, Devastation and Renewal will be important to all students of cities, of cultures, and of the natural world.