• Citer

Poetics of Care from a Mining Landscape: Contested Environmentalisms at the Martinet Slag Heap

par Declève, Marine ;Grulois, Geoffrey
Référence European Association for Urban History: City Networks in Europe and Beyond (17: Septembre 5-7 2026: Barcelona)
Publication Non publié, 2026-08-24

Communication à un colloque

• Accès en ligne
• Détails
• Contenu
• Statistiques

Résumé :

This paper argues for a history of the Martinet slag heap in Charleroi, Belgium, written as a poetics of care attentive both to the successive and contested environmentalisms that have shaped the site and the affective and material forms of attachment and renunciation through which those environmentalisms were composed and disputed. Located at the heart of the former “Black Country,” the Martinet belonged to the dense network of collieries of the Caroloregian coal basin. From the 1970s, it became a site of citizen mobilization against continued extraction. Based on fieldwork walks, interviews, collective workshops, and multi-scalar cartography, the paper resists assembling this history into a single heroic narrative of dispossession followed by ecological redemption. Drawing on the theory of agonistic pluralism, it foregrounds instead the frictions of the environmentalisms through which the site has been cared for: an early-twentieth-century working-class environmentalism concerned with the social and bodily costs of coal extraction; a popular ecology that emerged from the 1970s citizen mobilization and expressed itself through photography, poetry, and theatre; and the practices of ecological reparation and landscape care that followed the site’s protection. Each of these environmentalisms is in tension with the others over what count, on the Martinet, as environmental concern. This paper reads this plurality through place attachment theory not solely in relational lens in which care multiplies bonds between humans and non-humans but in tension with Alexandre Monnin’s theory of renunciation and dismantling: an ecological redirection that starts from a cartography of attachments not to celebrate their proliferation, but to negotiate, democratically and without brutality, what has been, or must still be, renounced. Set against the site’s ongoing redevelopment around a new entrepreneurial ecosystem for sustainable food production, this tension between attachment and renunciation accounts for the site’s ruins and the poetics of care through which residents have decided, and continue to argue over, what of the mining landscape to keep, to repair, or to let go. Poetics of care thus names the repertoire of expressive and cartographic practices giving form to contested environmentalisms. This notion, irreducible to either relational ecology or an ethics of renunciation alone, is what a history of a post-mining landscape like the Martinet should aim to write.