The care for the industrial heritage is a major challenge. All too often the complexes are vast, the sites are contaminated by pollution or it is difficult to find a new purpose for the buildings. Ronse in East Flanders has a totally different problem.
‘The miracle of Ronse’ refers to the striking boom of the textile industry in a town that has barely 24,000 inhabitants today and lies as it were hidden in the middle of the green, rolling hills of the Flemish Ardennes. Still, the town flourished unprecedentedly from the end of the 19th century onwards. Apart from the large factory complexes many small-scale family businesses shot up like mushrooms. Just before the Second World War the small town of Ronse had no fewer than 536 mills and small factories. Because of the world-wide crisis in the textile industry the activities quickly declined and the town faced several decades of socio-economic problems. So the town was hardly able to develop and innovate and we now have a unique patrimony.
The old factory buildings, the ‘beluiken’ (typical narrow alleys with working-class houses), the first social housing projects in Flanders, the varied and at times extravagant architecture of the mansions and directors’ dwellings, the exceptional country houses in Art Deco style: if you take a walk through Ronse, you cannot fail to notice them. At the same time, the challenge becomes clear. Ronse has a unique mix of different kinds of buildings and neighbourhoods that illustrate the various aspects of industrial life in Flanders from the 19th century till the 1960s.
The mixture of all these aspects makes Ronse rich. But there is also an urgent need for a specific heritage policy to preserve what is still there today and to open up this patrimony in a meaningful way. To take up this challenge the Ename Center for Public Archaeology and Heritage Presentation is working on a set of instruments that will help the town of Ronse in developing a long-term heritage policy and that will involve the town’s population in the sustainable preservation of this particular patrimony.
