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North of Mulhouse in the Alsace plain lies a potassium basin, a 2 000 km2 mining area between the Vosges massif and the Black Forest in Germany. Arguments can be brought up to demonstrate its coherent spatial identity, among them perceptions and representations relating to the landscape, which has been developed for almost one hundred years. Inhabitants of the mining quarters show in a very strong attachment to the place. This article aims at understanding more precisely how such a specific landscape creates a better place to live and why notions of landscape, identity and sustainable development are closely linked. As a result, the question of how landscape can favour a territorial sustainable development is asked. An historical, geographical, social and political synthesis shows, on one hand, the importance of the mining factory history and, on the other, the socializing role played by the Alsace Potassium Mine company in helping and supporting associations, clubs, as well as social security service. This mining landscape, visually and mentally alive (pithead, headframe, garden cities, mine dump...), is however gradually disappearing. Factors hostile to the territorial dynamic can be observed, thus proving that mining landscape is insufficient to preserve the mining territory. A regional planning imbalance can be observed between the mining cities of the Alsace potassium basin, between the mining cities and the surrounding towns or villages, out of which the landscape has come to contrast and contradict economical development and political interests. The first condition to apply a sustainable development to the Basin, thanks to the local 'Agenda 21', is to preserve a one hundred years old mining identity. The second is the emergence of a common political will to federate and to apply a political and administrative reality to the project. Thus, it is believed, identity preservation could be realized with the preservation and the increase of the value of a specific landscape.