Project description
Coal’s hidden legacy in modern Europe
As Europe moves away from coal, it is closing the door on an industry that fuelled the continent for centuries but left deep environmental scars. Coal mining has polluted landscapes, contributed to climate change and affected countless lives. Yet, while its damage is undeniable, coal’s history also includes lesser-known, complex legacies. With this in mind, the ERC-funded ACME project explores how coal mining shaped architecture, creating innovative networks and systems. By examining former coal mining sites in Belgium, France, Poland and the United Kingdom, ACME re-evaluates these structures as ‘ecologies’ that influenced Europe’s social landscape, including the welfare state and early EU foundations. This fresh perspective highlights the unexpected role of coal mining in Europe’s modern development.
Objective
After centuries coalmining is ending in Europe. Few will be sorry to say goodbye to an industry that epitomises the causes and effects of climate change. But while its environmental impact is now starkly and painfully obvious, Architectures of Coal and Modern Europe (ACME) explores another side of coalmining whose legacies and residues remain in various and often unexpectedly progressive forms. It argues that, responding to the unique conditions of coalmining – underground working practices, labour struggles, economic primacy, and social and environmental degradation – architecture emerged as both site and transmitter of an intense and unprecedented level of technological and social innovation where advanced definitions of the social contract were developed and tested. ACME will provide a new synthesis of methodologies including architectural visualisation to reappraise their significance by exploring and establishing the architectures of coal as ecologies: forms, systems, networks and connections that existed both within and across the buildings and landscapes coalmining created. It argues that these ecologies were pivotal to the creation of what needs to be recognised as a coalmining épistémè – the coalscape – a pervasive, interdependent network of beliefs and practices that enfolded geologies, energies, bodies and space to exert a significant influence on the social and spatial foundation of modern Europe, including its welfare state projects and the origins of the European Union. By examining this overlooked and mostly disappeared collective of architectures and landscapes in Belgium, France, France, Poland and the United Kingdom, ACME will not only reveal how it represents a neglected but fundamental contribution to modern Europe but also provide a crucial new piece of intellectual infrastructure with which to rethink the critical intimacies between our energy sources, cultural and social lives and built environment that have contributed to the Anthropocene.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental engineering energy and fuels fossil energy coal
- natural sciences biological sciences ecology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-ADG
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4 Dublin
Ireland
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