The UNESCO evolving and living heritage of the Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin: Postindustrial landscape heritagization as a territorial healing process

International audienceThe Nord-Pas de Calais Mining Basin of France is characterized by a landscape shaped by two centuries of intensive coal mining. This includes large-scale neo-natural sites such as slag heaps but also canals and railroads, industrial buildings, community facilities and miners’ housings.The shutdown of the mines in 1990 left behind it a post-industrial landscape in decline and a state of change, whose conservation raised many questions: the living dimension of this heritage, still inhabited and in full mutation, being hardly compatible with a conservative approach. In 2012, this mining area of 3,943 hectares became a World Heritage Site, listed as an “organically evolved and continuing cultural landscape”: an example of the scalar and typological turning point in the global heritagization process, and of the emerging topic of post-mining sites in the world.Ten years after the UNESCO nomination, this essay aims to analyze the specificities of the heritagization of this postindustrial landscape, and the issues and the stakes of management and preservation that this raises for the stakeholders and professionals of the conservative sector. This case study illustrates that a dynamic approach to heritage can participate in the repair of the living