Railway Networks and Industrial Heritage in the Urban-Territorial Configuration of Pereira: Intermediate City of the Coffee Cultural Landscape

This article proposes the valorization of twelve railway and industrial complexes related to coffee production in the intermediate city of Pereira, Colombia, as constituent elements of a typology of agro-productive industrial heritage, till now unexplored in the Unesco declaration of the Coffee Cultural Landscape (2011). The resignification of these cultural assets is proposed in the context of the agro-productive territory, valuing them as elements that consolidated the role of the city as mediator of flows of goods and persons between rural and urban areas, while the railway was in operation (1921-1972). Based in analysis of historical archives, interviews with local actors, urban and architectural surveys, a territorial and architectural narrative is woven along the railway, identifying spaces, actors and temporalities of the local coffee produc­tion process, from rural production areas to industrialized urban regions. We highlight the potential of this new historical reading of the territory for valuing the spatial configurations of the modernization process of the region, for understanding the urban-rural dynamics and for strengthening the social memory of the industrial coffee spaces.