Ruhr 2010

REDEVELOPMENT:An innovative project is underway to transform Germany's post-industrial ruins into a new metropole with innovative technology and renaturing projects

IF YOU go down to the Ruhr today you’re in for a big surprise. For decades, the Westphalian plains between the Rhine and Ruhr rivers in western Germany was the worst of all possible worlds: a smoking, post-industrial slag-heap with its best days behind it.

The well-oiled engine of the post-war West German economic miracle in the 1950s and 1960s was, by the early 1980s, a sputtering, filthy mess. The coal mines that had powered industry were closing down, the steel mill furnaces extinguished, leaving behind soot-coated cities and scarred landscape of chimneys and coal rigs.

Worse, there seemed no escape from the endless industrial sprawl that had grown up to support the coal and steel industries. Even today, visitors to the Ruhr watch in alarm as one city runs into the next without warning. Starting in Duisburg, slipping down the A40 Autobahn until Duisburg becomes Essen, which eventually becomes Dortmund then Bochum. So many cities, so many people that, after Paris and London, the Ruhr is Europe’s largest urban conurbation, home to 5.3 million people.

After decades of identity crisis, the 4,000km square region is ready for a renaissance in the guise of “Ruhr 2010”. For the first time, a region and not a city has been awarded European Capital of Culture status. Sharing the stage with Istanbul and Pecs in Hungary in 2010, the Germans are hoping to use the expected boost in visitor numbers to reposition the industrial heartland as a new “Ruhr Metropolis”.

“For us it’s about taking individual cities in the Ruhr and bringing them together to create a new metropole,” says Fritz Pleitgen, a well-known journalist and chief executive of Ruhr 2010.

Time will tell whether the €350 million project will encourage the perpetually warring neighbouring cities to pull together. Organisers are banking on the uniting power of culture, as is clear from the slogan for the year’s events: change through culture, culture through change.

There’s no shortage of culture: the region has scrubbed up nicely and many of its most striking industrial landmarks are now breathtaking new museums – 4,000 in all. The latest, the Folkwang Museum built by star architect David Chipperfield, opens later this month in Essen. On the theatre front, six dramatists – including Ireland’s Enda Walsh – have been asked to provide a modern version of Homer’s Odyssey, spread over six theatres.

In addition, the “Ruhr 2010” festival has allowed the region become a leading light in innovative, transformative technology – and one of the greenest places in Europe.

To look forward in the Ruhr, it’s necessary to look back. The Ruhr was at the heart of German history long before Germany even existed. In the 9th century, Karl the Great installed a “Königsstrasse”, a King’s Street trade artery through the valley. By the time of German unification in 1871, the Ruhr was already home to the twin steel empires of Thyssen and Krupp. Economic migration had, by 1905, pushed up the population by a factor of ten in just a few decades to 2.5 million. The Ruhr was Germany’s industrial heart and a cornerstone of its military megalomania.

From the disaster of war, the Ruhr contributed to European peace with the agreement by its coal and steel works to pool their resources with French neighbours to form a coal and steel union, the precursor to today’s European Union.

This year’s events are focused on showing visitors how the Ruhr has built on its industrial tradition to create something new. The efforts can be seen in small, innovative projects like the creation of ice rinks and swimming pools in former coal mines. But the biggest events are focused around two key Ruhr arteries. The first is the A40 autobahn, the Ruhr’s concrete artery from Dortmund to Bochum that carries 120,000 vehicles daily. On July 18th next, the Ruhr residents will bring some 20,000 tables and line them up over 60 km of Autobahn for the world’s biggest ever picnic: the Guinness Book of Records awaits.

The second artery is the Emscher River, once a black, treacly river-cum-dumping ground for industrial waste. Today the rivers has been rescued, sewage redirected and its waters cleaned. The 35km-long river banks are being redeveloped and by the time the rescue project finishes in 2020, some €4.4 billion later, one of the most poisonous places in the Ruhr will have become an entirely new green lung. To highlight the transformation, and encourage locals to artists have been commissioned to develop installations on an artificial island in the river.

The Emscher redevelopment project will, by its completion in 2020, comprise one of Europe’s largest green spaces covering an incredible 450km square through the Ruhr region.

The Ruhr 2010 visitors’ centre has been housed in the Zollverein colliery, a former “cathedral of mining” built in 1932 and closed in 1986. “We want to turn the northern Ruhr, an area most people try to avoid, into an area that attracts not just visitors but also people back to live here,” said Dr Simone Timmerhaus of the Emscher Arts project.

“Improving the quality of life means we can attract back families, companies and creative industries to give the region a boost in the long term.”