Delineation of post-industrial landscapes of the Upper Silesian corridor in the Basin of Ostrava

Abstract

Abstract The post-industrial landscapes represent a legacy of the industrial revolution. There have been gradually formed numerous enterprises of various industry branches on the territory between Czech-Polish border in the North and Moravian-Silesian Beskydes Mts. (a part of Carpathians) in the South (the western border follows the foothills of Hercynian Bohemian Highlands). In the given study, there are demonstrated examples of the post-industrial landscape in the concerned area of Ostrava, which is a part of the so called Upper Silesian industrial corridor that is intensively linking industrialized region of Upper Silesia in Poland and the Czech Republic with other developed regions of Europe to southwest through the Moravian Gate to the Danube region. This paper demonstrates the procedure for defining the post-industrial landscapes in general, their classification and standardization using the available data sources and GIS technology. For the processing the data of the deployment of brownfields, contaminated sites, industrial constructions of architectural heritage, mining points and areas, human made landforms, industrial and landfill sites etc. were used. They document the genesis, the territorial shape and the geographic position of the post-industrial landscape in the study region. In the concerned area of Ostrava four “rural” post-industrial landscapes were identified and classified into three different genetic types. This paper also presents a methodology for identifying, mapping and classification of post-industrial landscapes on the basis of publicly available and state-managed databases.