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The industrial city considered here is a factory-town, i. e. a city wholly created by one or several factories. The landscape approach allows to study the factory-town as a system, a set of interactive elements directly or indirectly related to industrial production. Among many recurrent landscape elements landscapes of factory-towns are fluctuating between two main categories : a tangled-landscape of slowly generated factory-towns, around rather small factories and an industrial-urban landscape otherwise very managed, born around large integrated mills, producing giant and consistent factory-towns particularly prevalent in Eastern Europe. With the end of the industrial activity, these now inherited landscapes were considered worthwhile only after a period of mourning. This period is characterized by waves of destruction in order to erase the signs of the failure of industrial era. Thus, depending on the intensity and duration of the period of mourning, the landscape of the factory-towns could be denied and destroyed, partially or fully protected. This large range of reactions is linked to the political and industrial history of the territories but mainly to the stakeholders’ strategies, between local people more and more keen on the preservation of industrial memories, public authorities who understand the interest, in terms of identity and projects, of the preservation of inherited industrial landscapes, and the private sector, which is reluctant to invest in a landscape difficult to enhance and develop.