Le bassin minier du Nord-Pas-De-Calais pris dans les rets de l’aménagisme généralisé

Abstract

The Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin cannot be considered outside of its wider context. Did it ever exist, if not in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the various mining concessions in the North and Pas-de-Calais were grouped into a single national hand (Les Charbonnages de France), which was only dissolved in 2007? The mining basin is therefore a construction that fully found its status once acknowledged as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2012, more than two decades after the closure of its last well. “Repairing post-mining territories” can only be conceived and be effective if done in close interaction with the territory’s various scales, which is the topic of this article. It shows how the very notion of “repairing” can be understood in different ways: as conserving a heritage, both by preserving its memory, its continuity and its new customs; as well as a necessary response to the deep trauma that mining inflicted upon a rural and natural territory, and that the cessation of mining activity inflicted upon those who were dedicated to it. Indeed, beyond just the miners, the departmental inhabitants as a whole continue to endure the consequences of this trauma today. Another similarly destructive process can be seen in the general processes of “everything by car”, urban sprawl, etc. A conjunction existing between the two fields thus requires repair: those specific to the mining basin as well as those specific to the various forms of territorial occupation. As a state consulting architect, having worked on files related to the mining basin, I wish to bring my personal testimony and my own conviction here: the repair of the mining basin must be done by contributing to a wider repair at the territorial scale, in the same way that every improvement at the territorial scale contributes to those of the mining basin’s various geographical, economic, material and social entities.

Keywords

• Heritage
• Evolutionary Cultural Heritage
• Landscape
• Mineral Mining Pool
• Mining Village
• Territorial Planning