Only when the investor is a client, the developer is a local planning director, the buyer an owner, the architect a master builder and the property a house, only when the city authorities understand that building culture is more important than jobs at any price, when residents and employees feel like citizens, feel at home, and stay for a long time, do new buildings emerge that also become cities.
Roland Günter
The Ruhr area
The Ruhr area is one of Europe’s largest high population-density areas and the largest in Germany, with an area of 4,500 square kilometres and 5.3 million inhabitants.
The Ruhr area, which has grown together out of a multitude of smaller and larger cities, is a metropolis. Many don’t know it yet, others don’t want to know it. This metropolis has more future than many other of the world’s metropolises, because it consists of networks. This means that the ‘Ruhr metropolis’ has a chance of not exploding due to a massive urban “pile-up”. The modern concept is a decentralised one.
The Ruhr area sees itself as a novel; a novel about one of world’s the most exciting landscapes. Everything converges here. The terrain is a cosmos.
The IBA first provided the Ruhr area with a way of dealing with its history. An engagement with this history developed into social and cultural history. History workshops developed and witnesses to this history wrote their own stories.
The Ruhr area has many natural attractions. What is attractive about the region? First and foremost, and this is often forgotten, but it is the most powerful, the atmosphere.
The Ruhr area is exciting. There is plenty of beauty there – but it’s not the stuff of ordinary clichés.
