SPIRE has the ambition of  starting a long-term environmental, social and economic redevelopment in Baia Mare, facilitating its transition from Romania’s ex-mining capital to a leader of environmental design and production. It will achieve this through the co-development of new adaptive and productive landscapes, integrated into a circular ecosystem of cascading material and energy value chains.

The project proposes a revolutionary approach to adaptive phytoremediation and ecosystem creation on urban Heavy Metal-polluted land, as a strategy for long-term (2050) land use management and economic re-profiling. It leverages on the potential for cascading value chains presented by the bio-based material flows, and supports its translation into new economies and social entrepreneurship through a system of incentivization via a local token value system creating a circular environmental bonification system. The approach brings radical and innovative improvements to the burdensome way in which cities are currently forced to deal with the complex negative externalities of brownfields.

SPIRE experiments with land (re)use planning, renaturing and adaptive high-value biomass reuse, addressing the needs of a vast share of EU cities, through:

At Baia Mare Metropolitan level, 627 ha of mining and heavy industry brownfields could potentially be recovered and reused as renatured productive landscapes, in a cost-effective gentle remediation process. Without municipal hard remediation resources, taking ownership has not been a viable option to date for Baia Mare and many other mining cities in Romania and beyond – SPIRE can finally offer the missing solutio. This is why our strategy for scaling up is embedded in the project workplan and coordinated by URBASOFIA, the Integrated Metropolitan bio-based Strategy and Masterplan 2050.