Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Exploring ruination through the ethnographic case of an alpine mining town where extraction endures alongside urban decay, this paper examines ruins as material remnants and immaterial legacies entangled in post-mining transition and future-making.

Paper long abstract

This paper focuses on ruins in the context of resource extraction and post-mining transition in the Alpine region. Since the 1980s, de-industrialisation has led to a significant decline of mining in many Alpine valleys. In Eisenerz, a mining town in the Austrian Alps, iron ore extraction has remained operative with a drastically reduced workforce, resulting in sustained outmigration, an ageing population, and vacant buildings. More than thirty years of development projects have sought to reinvent the town. While the mine has been reframed as industrial heritage and secured as a long-term landmark, Eisenerz itself continues to face uncertain post-extractive futures.

Drawing from ongoing ethnographic research, this paper analyses ruins as material remnants and immaterial legacies of a changing mining industry in relation to industrial endurance, urban decay, and future-making. Although mining remains economically viable, it is no longer aligned with the town’s demographic and urban realities, even as it continues to shape local and regional identities and urban and alpine landscapes. Mining remnants and legacies range from decaying infrastructures and empty houses re-used for cultural events, to mining festivities structuring the annual calendar, re-purposed industrial sites such as the underground mine turned museum, and the open-pit mine preserved as a landmark of an anticipated post-mining future. Rather than marking closure, ruination materialises polarised temporalities in which secured extractive futures coexist with prolonged urban uncertainty, revealing ruins as sites through which post-mining transitions are negotiated.