Garden and Park Landscape of the Ruhr

The garden and park landscape of the Ruhr area is part of the region’s heritage of industrial culture. Like the impressive buildings of industrial architecture, historical gardens and parks reflect the history of settlement and the social and economic history of the area.

The gardens and parks around castles, monasteries and manor houses from the pre-industrial phase of the Ruhr area were all conceived as geometrical Baroque complexes and are examples of the region’s early garden and park history. At the beginning of the 19th century, these “French style” gardens were changed into “English style” landscape gardens in accordance with the type of design fashionable at the time, which reflected a spirit of education and liberalism.

In the middle of the 19th century, advancing industrialisation changed the appearance of the landscape between the Ruhr and Emscher rivers. At that time, new “temples of industrial power” were built along with suitably impressive gardens or parks. An impressive example of this kind of development is Villa Hügel and its park.

The economic and social strength of the prosperous and cultured middle classes had grown and they too created impressive parks and gardens. It was not long before such green spaces in the Ruhr area became municipal parks. The rising industrial towns of the first highly-industrial phase at the close of the 19th century also created their own municipal parks.

Democratisation of urban green areas is today’s term to describe the ensuing Volksgarten (People’s Garden) movement of that time. The people’s park was social (democratic) in that all social classes had the right to use it; it was also social (hygienic) for living conditions in that it balanced out poor hygiene and dangerous air pollution. The Bundesgartenschauen (Federal Garden Shows) in the 1950s caused new green areas to sprout from bombed-out cities, but they did not link up with the achievements of the democratic urban green areas. Rather, they contributed to the temporary revival of the citizens’ parks until the structure of the pluralist leisure society began to make itself felt in the 1960s. The creation of the “Revierpark” marked the development of a new kind of park in the Ruhr area.

In 1984, a novelty was boldly attempted at the first Landesgartenschau (Regional Garden Show) in North Rhine-Westphalia on the →Gelände der Zeche Maximilian (Terrain of Maximilian colliery) in Hamm. For the first time, a slag heap and an abandoned mining area were included in the planning of a park and “processed” artistically within the park design as part of the industrial cultural landscape.

This approach was later (from 1989) used as a matter of course at the Internationale Bauaustellung Emscher Park (IBA) (International Building Exhibition Emscher Park) and even became part of its programme.

The new parks which have been created since the 1990s are characterised by the way they take account of and emphasise the remains of the industrial past. At the same time, an attempt has been made to include the existing natural aesthetics of waste ground and disused patches of industrial land in their design as part of the Route Industrienatur (Route of Industrial Nature). The Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord and the Nordsternpark in Gelsenkirchen are examples of this type of park.

Parks and gardens are more than just important open spaces for the population of the region. They are also “bearers of identity”, are of major significance for tourism as elements of the →“Route der Industriekultur” (Route of Industrial Heritage) and are not least a sign of a dynamic and forward-looking mood in regional development, which does not deny its periods of prosperity and crisis but uses these actively as unique assets.

Today, the development of the landscape in and between the towns in the heart of the Ruhr conurbation is part of a new, long-term programme of development in which industrial culture and industrial nature are, among other things, starting points for a new appropriation and authentic shaping of the region. The →Emscher Landschaftspark 2010 (Emscher Landscape Park 2010) programme is a firm part of structural policy in North Rhine-Westphalia. The park is structured as an integrated project which brings together environmental development, cultural landscape design and urban and economic development.