(this article was taken from buffalorising.com)
Ditch or Embrace?
by westcoastperspective
While the debate rages over preserving or demolishing our grain elevators, it may be benefitical to investigate what another region is doing with its industrial past. Germany is a recognized a leader in reuse of former industrial properties (brownfields)and their projects are stunning. As recently as 2000, a contingent of residents, community leaders, and government officials from WNY and Southern Ontario participated in an International Brownfields Exchange to see first hand how fallow industrial properties have been redeveloped overseas.
Sound preposterous? Read on.
Emscher Park is brownfields redevelopment on a massive scale. Emscher Park lies in the Ruhr valley of northwestern Germany, once the heartland of Europe's steel and coal industries. With the restructuring of these heavy industries over the past 30 years, derelict steel works and abandoned coal mining operations spread throughout the northern Ruhr region, leaving the legacy of high unemployment, the scars of environmental contamination, and the haunting shadows of the gigantic steel plants.
Faced with such wide-spread economic and environmental impacts, the State Government of NorthRhine-Westphalia created a regional redevelopment approach – the International Building Exhibition (IBA) at Emscher Park. IBA is confronting the complex regional challenges of repairing the environmental damage left behind from these heavy industries, while also designing urban communities of the future. One of the most striking aspects of IBA’s Emscher Park are the mammoth steel plants, smoke stacks, and gas storage tanks that litter the landscape of the Ruhr region. Many of these abandoned and rusted edifices rise ten stories or higher. While a few facilities remain active, many have not been used for decades.
IBA devised an ingenious reuse strategy that preserves these enormous relics as museum pieces of its industrial past and promotes them as centers of cultural activities. The term “industrial monument” captures the essence of the Emscher Landscape Park where concerts are staged against the backdrop of a former steel plant’s framework and people hike among the hills of reclaimed coal pilings. The twelve story gas-o-meter in Oberhausen no longer stores natural gas, but is the home for many unique cultural events: concerts, parties, plays, conventions, and meetings.
At the heart of the Landscape Park is the former ironworks at Duisburg-Nord shut down in 1985. Occupying almost 200 hectares of open land between the suburbs of Meiderich and Hamborn, the ironworks and the imposing three blast furnaces of the Thyssen steelworks create an impressive skyline of industrial monuments. The natural decay and dilapidation of the site presents a strong connection with its industrial past, but also illustrates how nature itself can reclaim these industrial relics26. What was once an active colliery, coke works and smelter, is soon becoming an open space recreational area, complete with hiking trails and climbing walls.
Buffalo has the industrial relics and seed money from the NYPA settlement, do we have the will?
