Regenerating the Ruhr.

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.

With local unemployment rates significantly above the national average and traditional industries still in decline, the region is also trying to encourage a shift towards service industries and new sciences to attract investment. High architectural quality is a visible sign of this, and the new IBA buildings include high-profile design projects such as the Rheinelbe Science Park in Gelsenkirchen by Kiessler + Partner (AR September 1996), or the Innenministerakademie Mont-Cenis in Herne-Sodingen by Jourda & Perraudin with Hegger-Hegger-Schleiff; consciously modern buildings with a focus on ecological sustainability. The project at Mont-Cenis, for example, is innovative in its design as well as in its use of alternative technologies. An enormous timber-framed glass envelope, 176m long, 72m wide and 15m high, creates a 'Mediterranean' microclimate round a number of smaller interior buildings which house a training academy for the Ministry of the Interior as well as public municipal facilities. The glass cladding incorporates a photovoltaic installation with an output of 1 megawatt, the largest of its kind in the world. Nearby, a small power station has been built above one of the old mine shafts, converting gas escaping from the abandoned mines to power and heat both for the academy and for a neighbouring housing development.

Though the demand for housing is not a major problem as recent decline has led to a reduction in the local population, it has none the less been another important way for the IBA to change people's image of the potential of the region. The IBA projects have worked towards increasing the quality of existing housing areas as well as providing new housing. Projects such as the Siedlung Kuppersbusch by Szyszkowitz + Kowalski, refurbishments of old workers' housing and new self-build projects are intended to persuade the local population to stay in the region, as well as enticing outsiders. In all, 26 new 'garden city' housing developments are in planning or under construction, providing 3000 new flats, of which 75 per cent are public sector rented accommodation.

Lastly, the IBA is trying to find new uses for old industrial structures. The Ruhr region contains a great many derelict industrial buildings, some now classed as historical and architectural monuments. These are being redeveloped as commercial, cultural and leisure facilities, in an effort to find contemporary uses which will also allow them to retain their industrial identity. Splendid constructions in their own right, examples of early Modernism such as the Zeche Zollverein in Essen (Schupp/Kremmer 1929-31) are being prepared for new use with only a minimum of alteration to the old fabric. A gas tank is filled with water and becomes a new home for a diving club. Youngsters are practising rock-climbing on the concrete sides of a redundant furnace. International names such as Foster & Partners, who have turned the former boilerhouse of the Zeche Zollverein into a design centre (AR August 1997), are involved as well as local architects and artists. Late at night, the Landscape Park Duisburg Nord fills with the voices and distant laughter of people disappearing on mysterious torch-lit guided tours through the gargantuan installations of the former Duisburg-Meiderich steel works, only dimly lit by Jonathan Park's coloured light installation.

The IBA Emscher Park is a unique project in planning and architectural terms not just because of its 10 year mandate and long-term visions, but also because of its focus on the local organizational structures rather than on simply erecting model buildings. How can any physical redevelopment plan change the vast scale of all that human activity, understood and remembered through the backbreaking work, drilling, shifting, crushing, smelting? How can one change the operations of a whole local culture from the scale of coal and steel to the scale of a future not yet known? Faced with the vast scale of the Ruhr region, and the many uncertainties still attached to its future, the IBA Emscher Park has worked with the scaleless structures of collaboration, altering priorities, encouraging intelligent choices. The main product of this IBA is experience: the people in charge of local developments have been given direct experience of how to achieve the required quality in the individual projects, as well as a possible way to make those projects part of a larger qualitative change. The buildings, with all their innovation, are the physical markers of a new body of local knowledge. INGERID HELSING ALMAAS

The end of the IBA Emscher Park is being marked by several events during the course of 1999. The exhibition Das Finale, presenting the IBA and its projects, opens in Kraftzentrale Meiderich on 24 April. Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation The Wall opens in Gasometer Oberhausen on 30 April. The exhibition Sonne, Mond und Sterne, portraying the natural, cultural and mythological aspects of coal and natural energy, opens 13 May in the old coking plant in Zollverein Essen. The European Planning Biennale is being held in the Innenministerakademie Mont-Cenis in Herne-Sodingen 13-17 September. A full programme of events is available from the press office, IBA Emscher Park Gelsenkirchen, on + 49 209 1703 131. The IBA Emscher Park also arranges guided tours of the various projects of the region, for information and booking call + 49 209 1703 110.