Among the oldest of technologies, the extractive industries refer to those processes that involve the removal and processing of raw materials from the earth: mines, quarries, collieries, oil and gas refineries, cement plants, and the heavy clay industries (brick, tile,
and terra cotta). These processes transformed entire regions and markets, creating a much altered landscape with vast and deep quarries, pits, and mines; enormous furnaces, smelters, and kilns; fabrication shops and mills; and transportation networks to bring raw materials in and product out. Entire worker communities with houses, schools, churches and synagogues, pool halls, and stores were created to keep local labor close at hand. Many such sites, while rich in historical and architectural value, are also toxic environmental brownfields, thus making them especially problematic for contemporary reuse.

The intersection of geology, technology, and culture, these places were an important part of modern life, and their stories are often still accessible through the visual testimony of the land, their structures, and their machinery, as well as in the stories of those who labored there. In recent years this industrial legacy has been proposed as holding the key to regional revitalization by “regeneration through heritage,” not only in the preservation and possible reuse of these sites, but as catalysts for reviving and maintaining the social and cultural fabric of their surrounding communities and natural environment. Cultural and environmental conservation have become powerful partners in the reclamation of these complex and often compromised places through ecological and social as well as architectural concerns.

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