Industrial decline and local development policies in the steel area of Piombino

In some places, the short season of Italian steel industry has ended with the demise of the factory and the dismantling of its production sites: the full take over a vast emptiness that is at once urban, economic, social, as well as symbolic and cultural. But what happens when, as in Piombino, a city founded and developed around the mills, they will enter into crisis, are firsly privatized and then multinationalised pass on an international owner pass from the State to Russian and Indian owner, lose much of their capacity to absorb labor, and yet not go away? The purpose of this paper – dealing with a decades of research experience involving different components of local society- is to analyse the strategies adopted in the process of re-industrialisation in the Piombino steel area