Seen from the air it looks radiant: Satellite images of Europe by night show the Ruhr region as a large and brightly illuminated conurbation. Only the metropolises of London and Paris emit a similar level of light. This perspective, and it is one long since being used by city and regional marketing strategists, is deceptive. On closer inspection, reality does not stand up to the flattering comparison.
Germany’s largest city is not a city. To exaggerate slightly, it is this paradox that typifies the Ruhr region. 5.3 million people, or one and a half times as many as in Berlin, live here, across a total area of almost 5,000 square kilometers, or almost five times the capital’s footprint. And can choose from five opera houses and five universities, whereas in Berlin there are ‘only’ three of each. And as at February 1, 2010 the Ruhr had three teams in Germany’s top division, the Bundesliga, and they were all doing better that Berlin’s Hertha BSC. However, none of this definitely makes the Ruhr region a city, as it is far more an agglomeration of suburbs that grew swiftly and largely willy nilly in an attempt to meet the needs of heavy industry; indeed, the suburbs are not grouped around an historical town center and many of the town boundaries seem quite arbitrary.
It was the industrialization of mining in the early 19th century that defined the region and caused such upheaval, which ensured it glory and continues to shape its face today, with the equipment it has left behind. Yet the Ruhr had a history before coal, as in Medieval times the clergy and secular lords battled for control of the thinly populated farming country: Essen was founded as long ago as 852, when a convent
was opened, Dortmund was a powerful Hanseatic city, and in the 16th century mapmaker Gerhard Mercator reinforced the reputation of “Duisburgum” as a “doctum”, the “learned Duisburg”. Like islands from a past age, the castles and monasteries stand in the industrial surroundings.
There were minor mining operations in the Ruhr Valley, where the coal seams ran up to the surface, as early as the Middle Ages. Industrialization commenced in the early 19th century, not building up steam until the 1830s, driven by Prussian reforms; then founding pioneers such as Haniel, Harkort, Stinnes and Krupp prioritized technological innovation and gradually built huge corporations – as did Thyssen or Hoesch at a later date. The linkage of mining coal and iron ore laid the foundations for a powerful industrial heartland that erected its own efficient transportation infrastructure in the form of railroad tracks and inland waterways, thus gaining access to the world’s markets.
This expansive growth peaked as early as the late 19th century. The result was corporate groups with widespread international operations and an inflow of hundreds of thousands of workers, mainly from the East. For many years, technological innovation and rationalization kept production levels high, with heavy industry standing tall through the First World War, the French Occupation, bouts of labor unrest, sharp inflation, the Third Reich, the Second World War, enforced disassembly, and emerging as the engine driving reconstruction and the German economic miracle. Until, in 1957, the end of coal subsidies and the import duties on mineral oil sounded the beginning of the crisis. Mines died and companies merged. Since then, the agenda has largely been defined by structural change, and it has turned the Ruhr region with its two legs of coal and steel into a centipede. Whereby Duisburg remains Europe’s largest steel producer to this day. The vast numbers of immigrants turned the Ruhr region into a veritable “melting pot” that today is home to 170 nations and has given rise to a unique outlook on life. Yet to this day it has been prevented from construing itself as a unity; it is administered from outside like a “colony”, the term the steel barons of yore used to give their mining grounds. It is both cut up and held together by three administrative districts and two different regional authorities. By contrast, the scope of the regional association, Regionalverband Ruhr (RVR), with its 53 member towns, is fairly modest. There is neither a directly elected Ruhr parliament, nor does the region have a say over its own finances.
Writer Joseph Roth, who traveled round the Ruhr region back in 1926, asked himself in amazement in an article penned for the ‘Frankfurter Zeitung’: “So why do they need Essen here and Duisburg, Hamborn, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Elberfeld, or Barmen there? Why all the names, all the mayors, all the municipal councilors for what is one city? And to top it all, a state line runs through the middle. The inhabitants imagine for some reason that if they are on the right they are Westphalians, and if they’re on the left they are Rhinelanders. But what are they really?” It is no coincidence that the idea of the Ruhr as one administrative unit received new impetus in the run-up to the European Capital of Culture Ruhr 2010, with the region somewhat arrogantly deeming to term itself a metropolis. At the end of 2008, the symbolic foundation stone was laid in Gelsenkirchen for “Germany’s largest city”. The initiators are members of a generation whose identity revolves less around the mines and the smelters and more around that past reality having been successfully overcome.
“Smoke connects the cities”, or so the title of Jospeh Roth’s article back in 1926 would have it – and yet the smoke has long since stopped, as coal has moved north, and by 2012 the last mines will have closed down. However, the towns, housing estates, transport links and structures that mining brought with it continue to shape the face of the Ruhr region: an irregular series of towns each with its own center and limits, commercial estates and greenbelts, industrial zones and wastelands, these are the new coordinates that seek to come together in a new structure. The industry that ate into so much space has been and gone, leaving free areas that radiate a new appeal and are fast becoming the nodal points of a possibly insular and ephemeral urbanity that could generate new opportunities and working spaces for start-ups and creative minds. In this respect, the Ruhr region holds great potential for social change, as already indicated by the International Construction Fair held at Emscher Park (IBA). The ecological and economic strategy for modernization practiced there gave rise to 120 model projects between 1989 and 2000; perhaps its greatest achievement was to find an aesthetic appearance for the industrial heritage that led to it being reinterpreted and accepted. Zeche Zollverein in Essen, which discontinued operations in 1986 and has since 2001 been on the UNESCO World Heritage list, is rapidly morphing into a cultural center, the Jahrhunderthalle in Bochum has become a festival hall, the minehead at Duisburg-Meiderich has become the beacon of a landscaped park.
It can hardly fall to an individual city to take up the ideas broached by the IBA and move the process of urbanization forward, just as it cannot be for one city alone to set up a local passenger transport system or create an image with global appeal. None of that can be achieved in just one year, but the European Capital of Culture could help the Ruhr region to gain a stronger identity and (e)merge as a polycentric metropolis. Then we might see what Joseph Roth regarded so critically becoming a thing of the past: “Each city has its own theater, its souvenirs, its museum, its history. But none of that has a sustainable resonance. Because things of a historical (or so-called ‘cultural’) nature thrive on the echo that feeds them.”
