This paper examines the negotiation of degrowth in specific territorial contexts. Focusing on La Doganaccia, a winter station in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, we explore conflicting narratives surrounding a proposed cable car project. Drawing on Watkins’ typology of spatial imaginaries, we analyze how actors invoke degrowth either to support infrastructural adaptation or to advocate for a rupture with tourism-led growth. Based on qualitative fieldwork, the study highlights the situated, contextualized and negotiated uses of degrowth in peripheral mountain areas. We finally argue that degrowth is best understood not as a fixed program but as a constellation of spatial imaginaries, revealing how regions navigate development amidst environmental and economic uncertainty.
Following a period of strong growth in the 1960s and 1970s, winter sports resorts now find themselves in diverging situations: while some are recording all-time highs in visitor numbers, others face major economic and snow cover challenges against the backdrop of climate change. Some resorts are therefore embarking on transition processes that have as yet been little studied. In parallel, certain public, academic and civil society actors are increasingly interested in the perspective of degrowth, for both the economy as a whole and the tourism sector more specifically. However, the practical implementation of the concept of degrowth at the level of the territoires remains underexplored. Does the concept of degrowth provide us with a way to better define the transition trajectories of mountain resorts?This article examines the trajectory of the Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse/Le Planolet ski resort and its territoire through the lens of degrowth. It highlights the importance of mobilising an analytical framework that incorporates multiple dimensions, levels and thematic elements (the ski area, tourism and the territoire). While degrowth ultimately appears to constitute a relevant interpretative framework for exploring the dynamics involved, we also show that degrowth in skiing does not necessarily mean degrowth in tourism and/or the local economy more broadly, and highlight the presence of fragile, non-linear ongoing processes.
Degrowth in the tourism sector is a recent field of study. And for the moment, little research has focused on degrowth in tourism in mountain areas. This article conducts a systematic literature review on this topic, considering both publications with a conceptual approach and empirical studies carried out on different types of destinations (urban, coastal, island, rural, etc.) in order to identify avenues for research in mountain areas. The results show that the number of publications has increased significantly since 2019. These publications draw on various disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, which can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of the subject of tourism. After detailing the conceptual approaches, the analysis focused on empirical studies. It appears that mountain destinations are studied in 17% of publications, which mainly deal with European destinations. The scale of analysis is mainly local and the methods used are essentially qualitative. The Structural Topic Model was used to highlight five themes (overtourism and social movements, degrowth management and planning, community tourism, the role of entrepreneurs and resource dependency). The results of the studies referring to each of these themes were detailed. Subsequently, the application of the results of these case studies to mountain areas made it possible to establish a research agenda, focusing on the notion of trail dependency, the implementation of transport decarbonisation policies, the effectiveness of visitor management measures and rebound effects, and a comparative analysis of protest movements around tourism developments.
Ski tourism is severely threatened by climate change, primarily due to reduced snowfall, shorter ski seasons, and an anticipated shrinkage of the market. These changes are increasingly dividing ski resorts into so-called “winners” and “losers”. Artificial snowmaking, although still widely used as the main adaptation strategy to climate-related impacts, faces growing challenges due to resource limitations and rising costs. Additionally, diversification, which is often promoted as the most sustainable solution, appears insufficient to compensate for the substantial losses resulting from disappearing ski seasons. In this context, fostering resilient and sustainable development in climate-impacted ski resorts calls for alternative approaches, with degrowth emerging as a potential pathway. This research attempts to investigate how and if degrowth is a desirable solution to address ski resorts struggling with severe climate change impacts, using the Swiss municipality of Lungern as a case study. Semi-structured interviews with key municipal stakeholders were conducted to explore the destination’s transformation. Following the bankruptcy of its ski resort, Lungern transitioned toward a downsized, more sustainable, and niche tourism offering, which has prompted a redistribution of ecological, social, and economic value, predominantly positive for the population. The municipality has demonstrated its ability to mitigate climate-related impacts and has strengthened its resilience in the face of broader crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Although Lungern may be classified as a typical “loser” in the context of climate impacted ski tourism, it is perceived both by local stakeholders and through this analysis as a “winner” in achieving a sustainable transformation. This study further provides a practical example of a grassroots movement, contributing to the predominantly theoretical discussions in degrowth literature and offering an alternative narrative to what is often framed as a hopeless situation.
The Argentinean Mining Code (1887) guaranteed the extraction of minerals to promote investment in the country's mining development, and moderate progress was observed since the end of the 19th century, especially in metalliferous mining, until the First World War. Subsequently, as a consequence of the discoveries of hydrocarbons and minerals suitable for steelmaking and the impact of World War II, the industrialisation process that the country was going through acquired a significant acceleration, forcing the National State to assume a leading role in the evaluation and exploitation of non-renewable natural resources, since private enterprise was neither prepared nor determined to face the significant emerging risks of this type of activity. Our study area, located in the south of the current territory of the province of Mendoza, Argentina, has been a political and cultural frontier zone. The rugged mountainous terrain of the area favoured the deployment of renewed resource appropriation logics by the dominant elites from the mid-19th century onwards. Specifically, in the current departments of the south of the province (San Rafael and MalargUe) a large number of mining ventures were developed at different scales according to a geology equally diverse and rich in mineral resources, both in the Andes Mountain Range. The exploitation of these deposits, which exceeds the traditional metalliferous variety, led to diversification of extraction and, in some cases, the transformation of minerals, within the socio-environmental historical context of the capitalism of the 20th century.
How is the mountain landscape transformed by the dispersed development of industrial production? How can productive areas be rethought within complex orographic contexts? This article addresses the project-related challenges posed by scattered industrial areas in alpine urbanities through a case study in Trentino. The diffusion of productive settlements in the Alps is interpreted as part of a broader condition that also characterizes dispersed urban forms in lowland areas, where the proliferation of productive fragments – underutilized spaces, abandoned buildings, unsold industrial sheds, vacant plots – contributes to the construction of an “urban countryside” shaped by processes of peripheral urbanization and incremental land consumption. The project challenge concerns the need to rationalize settlements and to repair the landscape by initiating processes of environmental and functional regeneration. The specific characteristics of the orographic context, its “territorial anisotropy” and the richness of its diversities, make it possible to recognize heterogeneity and discontinuity as values: resources for a project of coexistence among dissimilar elements configured as productive “archipelagos”. Low- and mid-altitude mountain areas thus represent a sensitive testing ground for rearticulating industrial zones as components of a territorial architecture in transition. This approach entails intervening in neglected, marginal, or discarded areas that escape common perception and are often considered insignificant. Understanding these spaces and reinterpreting their relationships with broader contexts anticipates project elements and logics that enable productive settlements to be reconsidered as constructions capable of generating ecologies and landscapes, thereby contributing to a reflection on emerging urbanities and the future configurations of the “landscape-city”.
Post-industrial transformations of Alpine territories represent a crucial challenge for understanding the evolutionary dynamics and sustainable regeneration prospects. This study analyses the relationships between extractive activities, forest management, and territorial transformations in Valsesia, contributing to the debate on post-industrial Alpine territorial regeneration through the identification of specific forms of environmental legacy. The research employs an innovative methodological approach, integrating diachronic data from exceptional historical sources, particularly the 1759 Topographic Map of the Sesia Valley, with contemporary forest data from the 2016 Piedmont Forest Map. The analysis highlights how historical mining activities generated a specific form of environmental legacy that permanently reconfigured forest management through three transformation levels: regulatory-normative, physical-productive, and territorial. Results show the transition from 10,884 forest hectares censused in 1759 to 48,792 hectares in 2016, with significant qualitative transformations from the predominance of beech (49.60%) oriented toward charcoal production for foundries, to the current prevalence of chestnut groves (36.47%) inserted in more articulated but fragmented supply chains. The study demonstrates that mountain post-industrial processes do not follow urban models of abandonment and reuse but rather generate systemic transformations that persist through functional reconfigurations of semi-natural environments. The research contributes to the international scientific debate by providing a replicable methodological framework for the diachronic analysis of Alpine territorial transformations and identifying an unprecedented category of post-industrial legacy that extends its impact beyond abandoned physical structures alone, toward the permanent reconfiguration of territorial systems.
This paper revisits and explores one of the themes investigated during the broader research project “Analysis and strategic scenarios for inland areas of Lombardy” conducted by a team of researchers, including the two authors, from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at the Politecnico di Milano. The project analysed 14 areas included by the Lombardy Region in the 2021-27 European programming cycle. They are explored here specifically considering the significant presence of manufacturing activities and spaces, currently undergoing transformation, in the pre-Alpine valleys of Lombardy. Often capable of draining the population from the highlands, but also of providing them with supra-local facilities and services, the pre-Alpine areas are also characterised by low altitude, mobility infrastructure, and rich natural capital, which is often undervalued. Pre-Alpine areas combine traditional and emerging production, with both small, medium-sized and large businesses, including the presence of dynamic and innovative multinationals. This paper relates these different activities and their spaces to the more general development of the territories, and of the quality of life and work in these mountain contexts, framing them in relation to the rapidly changing economic geography of Northern Italy. Furthermore, the study describes the current and potential role of the pre-Alpine areas with their intermediate location between the inland mountain areas and the metropolitan areas at the foot of the mountains. They are studied in the context of a territorial rebalancing process at both regional and provincial level adopted to support some areas and decongest others. Final recommendations suggest how the “desirability” of pre-Alpine contexts can be increased by adopting strategic plans. In the face of the climate crisis, these could provide attractive living and working environments where development and environmental protection can be combined. Disused production spaces and those undergoing expansion can play an important role within this framework, if they are redesigned in a sustainable manner, and integrated into the environmental networks of the mountain landscape.
Dealing with mountain territories does not only mean dealing with a disused vernacular heritage: conducting research and design in these complex territories weakened by recent history pushes us to deal with the theme of production -a pervasive and strongly characterizing dimension of the entire Alpine arc- understood on the one hand as large physical legacies linked to old industries, which require reflection on possible forms of spatial recovery; on the other as a challenge of the project to imagine new forms of production to reactivate territories in crisis, in the process of abandonment and depopulation.The definition of a design strategy for the recovery of these areas is necessary not only to foresee a new use, but also to outline development prospects on a local, territorial and cross-border scale, capable of encouraging cooperation, returning the site to the surrounding territory, enhancing its identity places through processes of reuse, reappropriation and re-signification of the space.This paper –situated in the field of architectural studies– intends to use the recent process of rethinking the former metallurgical factory of Pechiney, located in L'Argentière-la-Bessée (FR), as an emblematic case through which to start a reflection on the potential resources and fragilities that characterize these complex territorial palimpsests, and consequently the processes that try to settle there, articulating around the following questions: what does it mean to reactivate abandoned industrial sites by finding new forms of production, not only of material goods but of culture? What potential cross-border relations do these new forms of production based on the principles of sustainability and valorization of local resources introduce? How can we return these intrinsically closed spaces to the surrounding landscape and community, creating hybrid uses between welfare and production? What is the role of time and participation?
Taking the period of industrial decline from 1970 to 2025 as a frame of reference, the article analyses the landscape trajectories of heavy industry, taken here as the branches of electrochemistry and electrometallurgy, in three valleys in the French Alps: the Val d'Arly, the Tarentaise and the Maurienne. While the landscapes may initially appear to be a visible impression of the economic and territorial changes that have occurred in these valleys over the past fifty-five years, careful observation of the industrial sites – both closed and still active – only partially validates this idea. The landscape trajectories of industrial sites are multiple. They reveal periods of inertia as well as moments of intense transformation. Observation of sites that remain in operation shows that these productive landscapes are relatively stable over time, without being entirely fixed. Transformations occur more in the urban landscape of the valley floor, into which these industrial sites are integrated, and tend to be blured. The observation of closed sites during this period reveals trajectories dominated by their progressive erasure from the landscape. However, this erasure occurs at different times, and the resulting post-industrial landscapes are mixed. This analysis of industrial decline through the landscape ultimately highlights broader territorial dynamics that have shaped the valleys studied between 1970 and 2025, and questions the real and symbolic place left to industry in mountainous areas.
Mountain regions are increasingly recognized as contested socio-ecological spaces where global development agendas, environmental concerns, and local livelihoods intersect. Although there is growing scholarly attention to mountain regions as sites of conflict, this remains largely fragmented and case study-based. This paper offers a systematic analysis of socio-environmental conflicts in European mountain regions, a term widely used in the literature to describe collective struggles over the use, control, and distribution of environmental resources and harms. The analysis draws on 182 cases identified by combining the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas) with the European Environment Agency’s delineation of mountain areas. The study characterizes the main types, drivers, and actors involved and explores their spatial patterns in relation to land use, urbanization, and protected areas. Findings show a predominance of conflicts over energy production, water management, extraction, and waste, which often involve local communities opposing corporate actors. These conflicts frequently centre on landscape degradation and the erosion of local identities, reflecting tensions between external resource demands and local territorial values. Geographically, significant clusters emerge in the Balkans, the Iberian Mountains, and the Carpathians, underscoring the need to move beyond the traditional Alpine focus of mountain research and the value of a broad spatial perspective. Overall, the study highlights European mountains as both extractive and disposal frontiers, underscoring the importance of integrating environmental justice perspectives and local agency into mountain governance and territorial policy.
In recent decades, the Carpathian Mountains have experienced substantial changes, with the transition from large-scale natural resource exploitation and processing during the communist era to the closure of most mines and processing facilities in the post-communist period. This research focuses on a case study from the Apuseni Mountains in the Western Carpathians, which are a well-known site for the exploitation of subsoil resources, including gold-silver deposits, which have been mined there since ancient times. The study uses a multi-stage methodology to analyse the transformative changes and related conflicts that have taken place in the post-communist period. We highlight national policies, programmes and projects designed to foster the socioeconomic development of areas affected by mining sector restructuring or dedicated to the Apuseni Mountains. The analysis of socioeconomic indicators reveals significant population decline and demographic ageing in this area, as well as economic restructuring. The landscape has undergone substantial transformation due to decades of large-scale extraction and processing of ore deposits. A significant part of the study focuses on the conflict surrounding plans for cyanide gold and silver mining at Roșia Montană, which have unfolded over several decades. We present an overview of the key events, main actors, impacts and management of these plans. A civic movement of unprecedented scale in post-communist Romania emerged to oppose this project, which has ultimately been halted due to public pressure. Efforts to preserve the Roman-era mining works, among others, also led to the inscription of the Roșia Montană Mining Landscape on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021, prohibiting any future mining activities in the area. These findings highlight that mountain regions are frequently seen as a strategic resource that is subject to central decision-making, in which they are often treated as peripheral. They also illustrate the struggle between resource exploitation and preservation, and between globalising pressures and local resistance, prompting multi-level mobilisation to preserve mountain heritage.
This article examines the socioecological ‘fractures’ emerging from lithium extraction in the Atacama Salt Flat, a massive, high-altitude saline formation on the Chilean Andean Mountain Range, and one of the world’s richest lithium reserves. Conceptualized as an ‘oasis of contradictions,’ the Atacama’s territory—defined by its hydrological basin—is simultaneously, a site for the global ‘green’ transition and a space of deepening dispossession—where transnational demands for lithium collide with Indigenous territorialities. Grounded in political ecology and based on extensive fieldwork with Lickanantay communities, our study imagines ‘fractures’ as multidimensional disruptions—ecological, cultural, and political—driven by extractivist dynamics. By unpacking the socioecological fallout of ‘green’ mining—foregrounded by Indigenous resistance and territorial claims in the Andean Highlands—our research challenges dominant development logics and calls for governance frameworks grounded in socioenvironmental justice and community resilience.
This paper elaborates on the concept of water grabbing in the Global North—an area where scholarly literature remains scarce. Grounded in the United Nations’ international water conventions and Sustainable Development Goal 6.5, it reviews the factors and power imbalances that facilitate water grabbing even in high-performing regions, using the case study of the Ticino-Lombardy cross-border basins of Lake Maggiore. By analyzing the 2022 drought, this work investigates how hydrological stress linked to multi-objective water use (e.g., energy supply crises, agricultural water demand, tourism, etc.) and uneven governance, power and infrastructural capacities can undermine established cross-border water-use arrangements, leading to water grabbing. The study presents a six-step taxonomy of transnational water grabbing tensions and control levels in the pre-Alpine and Alpine region: Mild, Latent, Open, Heightened, Critical and Conflict. Based on an empirical study, it argues that the tensions between Ticino and Lombardy in 2022 can be considered a form of water grabbing, albeit of a mild-latent nature. It highlights the need to strengthen integrated transboundary water management policies in view of increasingly frequent and severe climate-related events in the Alpine area to reduce the risks of tensions. Several policy responses emerge, including the reassessment and reinforcement of joint planning processes and cooperation mechanisms, early crisis detection systems, institutional cooperation robustness, joint financial mechanisms based on win-win principles, and participatory approaches.
