Regenerating the Ruhr - IBA Emscher Park project for the regeneration of Germany's Ruhr region

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1999 by Ingerid Helsing Almaas

An ambitious 10-year project for the regeneration of Germany's Ruhr region, Emscher Park, is now drawing to a close.

Photographs give a poor impression of the Ruhr region. Not only does any run-down industrial area in itself make a pretty grim subject, but the minuscule frame of a photographic image cannot capture the sheer scale of this vast district of northern Germany. A train ride from Dortmund to Gelsenkirchen rattles through what seems like one enormous tract of developed land: a dense fabric of coal mines and steel works, factories blending into housing and small commercial centres, criss-crossed by autobahns, railways and sewage channels; and though it all the Ruhr and Emscher rivers run to join the Rhine at the huge sprawl of harbours at Duisburg. Photos become absurd snippets, haphazard fragments of an overwhelming reality.

The Ruhr area has been dominated by coal mining and heavy industry for more than a century, and was left with enormous ecological and social problems after the industrial decline of the 1980s. Faced with a legacy of contaminated land and a redundant workforce, the federal Land of North Rhine-Westphalia announced its plans for an international building exhibition in May 1988, as an attempt to stake out a different path for the development of the region. The IBA Emscher Park was launched in 1989. However, rather than taking the form of a traditional assembly of building objects such as in the previous IBA in Berlin, the IBA Emscher Park is not primarily about buildings. Under the directorship of Karl Ganser, the company IBA Emscher Park GmbH has been the co-ordinator of a 10-year long initiative which brings together local authorities, national and European funding and professional expertise in over 100 projects spread over an area of 800 square kilometres along the river Emscher, from Duisburg in the West to Hamm and Bergkamen in the East. It has aimed its efforts at providing new aims and values for the municipalities of the region, forging new links and constructing new channels for the redevelopment funds streaming into the area. This huge undertaking is now in its final year.

The IBA Emscher Park projects range from re-naturalization of watercourses to building new housing, business parks and research centres. The IBA administers no project funds of its own: all its projects make use of existing private and public funding available through regional, national and inter-European subsidy programmes. The IBA also has no direct influence over local developers and municipalities. IBA staff may suggest projects to the local authorities, or a municipality will apply for one of their own initiatives to become an IBA project, the incentive being that the Land North Rhine-Westphalia will give an IBA project funding- and administrative priority. To accept a project, the IBA has to make certain that it reaches a certain level of quality in respect of their overall aims, which include social, aesthetic and ecological criteria, and a contract is signed to ensure that the required level of quality is achieved. At the end of the 10-year project period, around 5 billion DM will have been channelled through IBA projects in the region.

The second Memorandum of the IBA Emscher Park, issued after the half-time exhibition in 1994, sets out five main project categories: remedial work on the industrial landscape, cleaning up the Emscher river system, new-build commercial- and educational facilities, housing developments, and re-use of derelict industrial installations. The name 'Emscher Park' is very consciously chosen: when the IBA staff talk about parks, they really mean it. Regaining the industrial landscape has been a primary mechanism for allowing local people new ways of identifying with their surroundings. The need for conscious management of the green areas of the region was recognized already in the 1920s, and the 'Emscher Landscape Park' is a concerted long-term effort to connect the parks and green public spaces of 17 towns along the Emscher, a total of 300 square kilometres, into one green corridor through the region. It is laid out for recreational use, complete with pedestrian signage and landscaped cycle paths. This work uses the specific challenges and characteristics of the industrial landscape as a resource. Of course there are problems with contamination and industrial pollution, but the landscape also has an eerie beauty: the soil blackened by coal dust, the light veil of virgin forest sprouting in the abandoned steelworks and the first bright plant growth spreading across the man-made mountains of low-grade coal deposits, several of which are now crowned by public works of art such as Richard Serra's sculpture on the Schurenbachhalde or Mediastadt and Jurgen Lit Fischer's Tetraeder at Bottrop.

The landscape work also includes the Emscher river itself. Due to the risk of subsidence around the still existing network of mine shafts, the Ruhr district has until now not been able to construct an underground sewage system, and the Emscher and its tributaries are still in part simply concrete-lined open sewers. However, as only 13 pits of the 150 operating in the 1950s are still being worked, these open channels are in the process of being replaced by underground pipes, local water treatment plants are being constructed and the concrete embankments are removed to encourage rainwater seepage into the streams. This part of the project is expected to take 20-30 years and so continues after the end of the IBA under direction of the local municipalities. Design projects such as the four silver eggs of the sewage treatment plant at Bottrop become visible symbols of this mundane but important activity - through the control of the often toxic open sewers, ground which was previously a dangerous no-man's land is regained for public parks.