My thesis explores the reappropriation and restoration of the post-industrial landscape and the visibility of power in our civic consciousness. Its’ context is the Belgian city of Charleroi, with its unique urban landscape of decaying brownfield sites, agglomeration of low-density neighbourhoods and looming slag heaps. It is these manufactured topographies, known locally as Terrils, that the project focuses its investigations on. Exploring these landmarks as undefinable urban territories through which the history, aesthetics and politics of the city can be researched forms the introduction to this thesis proposal. They stand as towering memorials to a past of deep extraction and industrial might, however, the spatial-politics of their current form resembles what Gutwirth and Stengers would term as the constructed or new commons and allows speculation on redistribution in this post industrial urban context.

The proposal addresses the Terril from the urban down to the threshold scale. Positioning interventions that re-engage the city’s fabric with its past morphology of sociability, using life in and around the Terril as the central node for this reactivation. These nodes, as historic sites of extravisist and harmful energy production, are subverted through their community reapropriation, but also through a series of district heating schemes, powered by deep geothermal heat extracted from the Terril’s disused mine shafts.

How can these energy-generating hubs respect and facilitate the plurality of informal uses that the Terrils host for the inhabitants of Charleroi, as well as provide clean energy for its neighbourhoods? The Maison Citoyenne model as a place of support and community animation, facilitating organising, socialising and administration, informs the programmatic makeup of this proposed typology. These public uses are interwoven with the industry and functionality of a geothermal energy hub, exhibiting the processes of energy in the civic consciousness and repositioning power, in all of it meanings, in Charleroi.