ABSTRACT
The Borsod Industrial Area was a major heavy industrial region in Northern Hungary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Modern industrialization, however, unfolded only from the last decades of the nineteenth century, due to the advantageous political and economic conditions created by the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. Accelerated industrialization brought about major changes also in regional urban development. Although deep coal mining started to decline as early as the 1960s, deindustrialization became the distinctive feature of economic development only in the 1990s in Hungary. Studying the production of industrial heritage sites in the Borsod Industrial Area, there can be no doubt that there are substantial differences among the initiatives regarding motivation and intention. Although former proponents kept making initiatives for the preservation of the regional heavy industrial heritage, their propositions were henceforth rooted in the traditional appreciation of the industrial past instead of implementing Communist ideology.
