Industrial Landscapes Between Environmental Sustainability and Landscape Constraints: The Case Study of Euralluminia in the Sulcis Area of Sardinia (Italy)

In Italy, industrialization had a remarkable development in the 1950s and 1960s, and aimed with priority of ensuring economic growth and development. The location of the industrial complexes was determined by the dynamics of the production that required a territory equipped to supply specific infrastructures such as water connections, sewers, gas pipelines and the electricity grid, and above all areas where to build transport terminals capable of mitigating the costs of handling the product. This led Italy to locate industrial activities in many coastal sites, close to pre-existing urban contexts, resulting in a well-defined coastal industrial landscape especially in the areas of Southern Italy that were chosen as centers of development. Today, the determining factor for location choices is the cost of the workforce and this has made more and more frequent the processes of delocalization of the companies with worrying repercussions both for the direct and induced occupation and for the degradation of the landscape. This process, linked to the safety regulations, to the updating of the systems and to an increasingly more rigorous landscape legislation, makes critical the framework of the existing and not yet abandoned disused industrial realities. For these reasons, the main objective of this article is to evaluate the compatibility between existing industrial areas at risk of delocalization and new interpretations of the environment and the landscape to be reconstituted, in order to allow the realization of goods that maintain the levels of industrial production within a framework of ecological protection rules and recently adopted landscape constraints. In this regard, in this paper the authors use the Eurallumina industry in Sulcis in Sardinia (Italy) as a case study, in order to analyze the problem that concerns the uses in the territories with an industrial vocation and the landscape components, that deserve particular attention to safeguard not only for the economic and social context but also for the quality of the coastal environment. The case study is particularly significant because the Euralluminia industry for some years was at risk of delocalization because it needs of a conversion of some parts of the plants, blocked due to the landscape regulation imposed by the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Southern Sardinia for the expected changes in the coastal environment. Therefore, keeping in mind the theories of localization and the pushes for the delocalization of the industrial contexts, the study discusses the importance of the interconnection between economic and landscape factors paying particular attention to the coastal areas.