Industrial Heritage Reloaded Patrimoine industriel rechargé

Industrial heritage, while a regular focus of public policy, is in some respects suffering from a growing neglect. While heritage studies have seen a definite multi-disciplinary upsurge, this critical renewal tends to fragment industrial heritage (for example, issues relating to the presentation of memory are considered independently and research into intangible dimensions has yet to conquer this field). The penetration of increasingly scarce university research and non-university research into the civilian sector remains a marginal phenomenon, despite the general intentions of public policy, and even though this industrial heritage is claiming an increasingly important significance at ground level and in the collective imagination (albeit dysphoric) of the general public, particularly those groups suffering from the ravages of deindustrialization.

This book, which brings together the proceedings of the 2022 congress of The International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage (TICCIH), held in Montreal (Canada), sets out to bridge some of these gaps by jointly discussing the effects and issues of industrial heritage, including from the usually more materialistic considerations of its composition, its design or its appearance, for example, taking advantage of the fact that the marked obsolescence that normally affects it remains a privileged springboard for exchanges on its role and use in contemporary society. The hope is that industrial heritage - and its bearers - will be an agent rather than a victim of change, in the spheres of economics, politics, society, law, and environmental management, to name just a few.