Protection of Hungarian Industrial Heritage and Possibilities for its Reutilization at the Turn of the Millennium
INDUSTRIAL CULTURE AND IDENTITY
The culture of manufacture has its roots in everyday life. In the guild manufactories renowned in history, and later within industrial working-class families, traditions of expertise, working methods and special techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Beside the concentrated placement of factories, capitalist industrial development also brought about residential colonies. The residents of the workers’ settlements formed autonomous communities, where closeknit of life involved a strong feeling of togetherness, implying that cultural conventions generally remained within the community. Consequently, it could be interesting to examine these enclosed workers’ settlements, since in this way more information can be obtained about the larger industrial area and its operation. The collective memory of traditional industrial towns holds a wealth of still unknown knowlege that could be lost in a short time in case of the closure of the industrial building or factory zone, and without conscientious collecting work it could vanish /1/. The exact knowledge of the applied processes and mechanization was linked to specific towns or regions, thus determining their identity for a long time. Industrial heritage protection pays concentrated attention to the protection of immaterial factors alongside protecting the physical manifestation of industrial activity, the building stock. The importance of such factors has grown significantly due to the rapid technological and social change of the 20th century. The memory of the people plays an important role in this study, since the abandoned buildings and machines are difficult to interpret without written or authentic pictorial sources, and provide a less informative picture regarding their use. Authentic heritage protection covers not only the protection of the localized material remains, but also takes the mobile and spiritual heritage into account. Thus the industrial area and the industrial building in the narrow sense – compared to other types of monuments whose usage still haws a living culture – require the application of significantly more complex criteria to be taken into consideration…
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