Comprehensive Management of Industrial Heritage Sites as A Basis for Sustainable Regeneration

Abstract

When discussing sustainable development, it is essential to equally consider all of its aspects: environmental, economic, and social. The experience in Slovenia shows that the third dimension, the social one, is often neglected, even though it is essential to integrated implementation of sustainable development.Industrial heritage sites are highly complex structures, which are an important part of our social, spatial, cultural, and technological past. Their complexity is the main reason that they need to be tackled through a specific interdisciplinary approach to research and evaluation and, moreover, as this text points out, also through a specific heritage management approach, which has to start right after the production stops. Many negative consequences of the closure of production, e.g. loss of jobs, social problems, economic issues, affect both individuals and communities as a whole. So it is very important to approach the problem also from the social aspect and make sure that interested stakeholders including former employees are involved in heritage management. Such an approach would have various positive aspects; beside the fact that the industrial site in question would be recorded immediately after closure, the involvement would send an important message to others who are negatively affected with the closure, loss of jobs, and social distress. All of this would positively influence and accelerate the site's and community sustainable regeneration process. The proposed approach will be presented on the case study of the coal mining heritage in town Hrastnik in Slovenia.