We believe we have infected (almost) all participants we brought from outside Reșița to the “Workshop for the Discovery and Ideation of Reșița's Industrial Heritage” with a seed of ‘I will invest a part of my professional time and skills in this city’. Well, some seem to have been infected already :) We are very happy, we are looking for co-investors and will continue to do so. Reșița truly has a unique mix in the country of industrial and natural heritage wealth, and a local community, involved and competent people in the city hall and in the local civic and entrepreneurial environment, and newcomers who fell in love with the city (including us), who will together put the city on the European map of good urban regeneration practices.

Thank you all for your participation, the Reșița Municipality and the Amateur Filmmaker Museum for their involvement and support in organizing, and the companies Altrom Steel Tubes (formerly Reșița Steel Combine), UCMR, and TMK Hidroenergy for their openness in hosting and guiding our visits.

We were almost 40 participants from the professional spheres of architecture and urbanism, cinematography, digital arts and photography, museum design, community development, environment and biodiversity, from Reșița, Timișoara, and Bucharest. We walked through the industrial sites, the hills, and the streets of the city. We clashed our electrifying mix of ideas, visions, and personalities in intense working sessions. And we opened avenues for work and collaboration that will bring us, together, back to Reșița, in the coming years.

A few impressions gathered from the participants:

>> The industrial heritage of the city is vast, overwhelmingly so, and extraordinary in its scale and complexity. It is precisely the ensemble that makes it unique in the country. The fact that we are not talking about a disparate building, but an entire universe, encompassing a great variety of structures: the blast furnace and the funicular, production halls, parks, factory greenhouses and villas, underground shelters, locomotives and former railway access routes, the system of hydrotechnical facilities.

>> The involvement of the local authority is inspiring: representatives of the city hall, including the mayor, were with us either throughout the workshop or at key moments.

>> Coexistence with production - still ongoing - makes this process all the more sensitive. We are not talking about museum buildings, but about factory complexes that are still producing, still employing hundreds of Reșița residents, still generating income. The pride of the director-engineers who guided us on the factory visits was also inspiring. The steel furnaces are still burning, after 253 years of unextinguished fire. Steel production - in the context of technological advancement - is almost similar to that of a few decades ago.

>> The surrounding nature, exploited for centuries, is now reclaiming the city. Where the factories once completely deforested the surrounding hills, using wood as charcoal in the furnaces, the forest has returned and now presents a natural setting that very few cities in the country can compete with.

On the occasion of this workshop, we are launching Reșița 250 LAB, an urban innovation laboratory that will act as a catalyst for a co-creation, testing, and implementation ecosystem of urban regeneration actions in Reșița, centered on the city's industrial heritage. Stay close!

Photos by Bella & Flo Photographers and MKBT