In late June 2025, artists and activists from three of Europe’s coal regions gathered in Eastern Wielkopolska, Poland, for a Just Transition Culture week. Alongside the Polish hosts came delegations from Western Macedonia in Greece and the Jiu Valley in Romania (CEE Bankwatch Network), and anyone who knows HI-EURECA-PRO will notice that these are precisely the alliance’s three “widening” countries.
The programme read like a manifesto for retiring an industry without erasing its people: art workshops, exhibitions, murals, concerts, study visits, and the ceremonial painting of a mining locomotive. The gesture captures the deeper challenge. Coal was never only an energy source; it was the scaffolding of identity and community for generations. When the pits close, the danger is not only economic but cultural. Across the EU, coal still offered direct employment to around 200,000 people earlier this decade, and the EU’s Coal Regions in Transition initiative and Just Transition Fund exist precisely to soften that shift.
This is where digital transformation earns its place. Photogrammetry and 3D capture can preserve headframes and machine halls before demolition; oral-history archives can hold the voices of the last shifts; Living Labs can convert disused infrastructure into spaces for creativity and green enterprise. The three-region encounter shows that heritage-based innovation is most powerful when it travels: a solution piloted in Konin can inspire others, and vice versa.
