Smart Post-Industrial Regenerative Ecosystem
SPIRE was an Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) project funded under the 4th UIA Call, supporting Baia Mare in testing an innovative model for the regeneration of heavily polluted former industrial and mining areas. As the only project funded under this call in Eastern Europe, SPIRE brought together a strong national partnership comprising the Municipality of Baia Mare, Indeco Soft, ARIES Transilvania, Baia Mare Metropolitan Area, the University of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca, the Green Energy Cluster, and URBASOFIA. The project supported Baia Mare’s transition from Romania’s former mining capital towards a greener, circular and more resilient urban economy, exploring how contaminated and underused land could become an asset for long-term environmental, social and economic regeneration. At the core of SPIRE was an innovative approach combining adaptive phytoremediation, productive landscapes and circular bio-based value chains. The project tested how Heavy Metal-polluted urban land could be progressively remediated through nature-based processes while generating biomass that could feed new material and energy value chains. In this way, brownfield regeneration was approached not as an isolated environmental remediation challenge, but as part of a broader process of urban and economic transformation. SPIRE developed and tested an integrated ecosystem of solutions, including: a strategic governance and multi-stakeholder co-development framework, complemented by iLEU, a local token-based incentive system designed to encourage environmental entrepreneurship and behavioural change; a Remediation Toolkit and Adaptive Site Management Application supporting the management and monitoring of contaminated sites; approaches for developing local circular and bio-based business models around recovered resources and biomass; an LCA-based assessment methodology supporting long-term decisions regarding adaptation, remediation and land reuse at urban and Functional Urban Area (FUA) level. The project demonstrated an alternative pathway for cities facing the difficult legacy of industrial and mining brownfields: gentle, progressive remediation combined with productive reuse and long-term land management. This approach is particularly relevant for cities where conventional remediation is prohibitively expensive and where contaminated land consequently remains inaccessible, abandoned or disconnected from urban development.
