The starting point for this chapter is the contemporary situation in Europe and North America where focus is more on reusing already urbanized areas than on expanding cities and the challenges and thinking about heritage and urbanism are changing. This situation calls for substantiated knowledge about industrial landscapes and for a reflection on how we intervene in them in the present. A biographical research strategy can be a starting point for developing such knowledge and I will show how this book draws from an emerging cluster of international scholarship around the notion of landscape biography. The end of the chapter shows how I adjust landscape biographical research strategies to a new study area: industrial open spaces during redevelopment, and lays open the investigatory techniques and the sources that I used.

Urban transformation and the need for new heuristic strategies

During the twentieth-century, industrial production plants were built in a spirit of urban expansion while humans increasingly urbanized new territories. Today, such expansion of existing cities is often no longer possible, because the surroundings are already defined by specific functions, be it as roads, agricultural land or built-up space. The modern conception of spatial development as a concentric expansion from the city core outwards to virgin land is increasingly replaced by a recognition that every new urban development implies transforming an existing area. This is tied to a growing awareness that the construction industry is resource hungry and that adapting and reinventing existing areas in cities, including former industrial sites, also involves ecological concerns and a sustainable way of dealing with resources. Adaptive reuse may be easy when it comes to old and spectacular warehouses and brick factories, while other parts of the urban landscape, such as remnants of the industrial period after 1945 are often less likely to be taken care of with the same interest.

The scientific advisor to the influential International Building Exhibition (IBA) Emscher Park in the German Ruhr district, planner and architect Thomas Sieverts, has stressed the importance of recognizing explicitly the expansive young urban landscapes that make up our environment ‘where we live now’ – such as suburban shopping malls, train lines, suburban housing districts, industrial sites – which are often perceived as ‘nameless’ and seemingly indistinct.