The Settlement Initiatives and the 1970s in the Ruhr
Most of the workers’ settlements in the Ruhr were built during the heyday of the region’s
industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when a number
of medieval towns and villages along the old Westphalian Hellweg and the small Emscher
River transformed within a few years into large industrial cities.944 After the German unification of 1871 this part of the country experienced an unparalleled
economic boom and a direly needed influx of tens of thousands of workers. Workers’
settlements, which consisted of comparatively spacious two to four family redbrick
homes, almost identical in design, with a stable and garden for growing crops and
keeping small livestock, were built by or near the coal and steel companies. By providing
homes in an age of extremely high workforce turnover companies intended to deter their
qualified workers from changing their workplace and were able to maintain a greater
degree of social control over the private sphere of their employees.945
The coal crisis, which lasted from 1958 until 1968, fundamentally transformed the
Ruhr industries. Few of the coal mines that were sprinkled across the Ruhr survived
this period. In the early seventies, some 140,000 residential apartments belonged
to the housing companies (Wohnstätten) that had been associated with the Ruhr’s coal and steel industry since 1933. Despite
an ongoing and increasing demand for housing in the region, state authorities and
local politicians encouraged the demolition of these old buildings. In many cases,
the workers’ settlements had not been renovated or modernized for decades.946 The local authorities, companies and parts of the population perceived them as outdated,
as a symbol of urban decline, and it was hoped they would be replaced with up-to-date
and larger residential complexes. Because of the mining crisis, the North Rhine-Westphalian
government launched the Nordrhein-Westfalen Programm (1970–1975),947 which sought to re-industrialize and modernize the Ruhr region with new infrastructure,
including plans for so-called area rehabilitation. The interests of the companies
and the State went hand in hand, as the industry also saw an opportunity to valorize
underused land and replace the buildings with more profitable ones. The State government
required the city councils to prioritize the demolition of company housing estates
and to increase the density and centralization of cities through the erection of high-rise
buildings; and the local authorities sought to comply. What was often ignored by the
local authorities then was that the houses of the settlements were greener, larger
and cheaper than the average worker’s flat in the Ruhr cities. The tenants in the
workers’ settlements, in contrast, were very aware of the extremely reasonable rent
they paid:
Look at this flat. It costs a bit more than 100 deutschmarks rent per month and we
have freedom here, garden all around, shed. Behind another garden, another courtyard,
a cellar here, a cellar there and five rooms, coming and going whenever I want. Where
else do I get this? That I won’t get for 500 deutschmarks elsewhere, for five times
the rental price, and then the flat is in a high-rise building.948
Thus, some residents resisted the destruction of their neighborhoods. At the beginning
of the seventies, the first and most famous example of a campaign against demolition
was the Eisenheim initiative, which emerged under the leadership of Roland Günter
and Jörg Boström. Neither of them were originally resident of any of the settlements
or of working-class background. Both, however, acted as conservators, artists, urban
movement campaigners and university teachers.949 Eisenheim was not only the oldest workers’ settlements in the Ruhr, with parts dating
from the late eighteen-forties, it was also the first one in the Federal Republic
that was placed under heritage protection in 1972 and thus served as an example for
the following 30 to 50 campaigns all over the region.950 From 1974, protest initiatives mushroomed across the Ruhr. The initiatives gained
attention in the West German media, where they had left-wing sympathizers, as well
as the local media.951 Working groups organized public meetings with leading representatives of the initiatives
and the local churches, the council administration, the housing corporations, state-employed
conservators and academics in urban planning and social sciences, demanding a new
assessment of the historical value and the quality of life in the workers’ quarters,
and efforts to revive empty buildings.952
A comprehensive network of workers’ settlement initiatives grew across the Ruhr in
which few of the inhabitant campaigners directly participated, however. This network
was complemented by networks of broader initiatives within the individual Ruhr cities,
with foci beyond the preservation of the historic workers’ settlements. In Dortmund,
for example, a strong city-based network Arbeitskreis Dortmunder Initiativen was founded to facilitate solidarity among all urban movement initiatives.953 The settlement initiatives thus found solidarity in other urban movements and tenant
initiatives against exorbitant rents and redevelopment.
The workers’ settlement initiatives performed various »civic« forms of protest in
order to convince the housing companies, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the strongest
political force in the Ruhr communities, and local officials of their cause. Once
a settlement was saved from demolition—often after being put under preservation order
by the state heritage authorities, and as an outcome of a long-lasting communal bargaining
and decision-making process—however, the threat to the communities persisted in the
form of privatization.954 Thus, from the mid-seventies it was not necessarily the demolition order that sparked
protests among the initiatives.955 When in 1976–77 the housing companies changed their policy from demolishing to selling
the workers’ settlements, as they recognized the potential for valorization of the
properties, few tenants were able to afford the purchase of the flats and semi-detached
houses. Lower middle-class buyers and skilled workers were among the new owners. Several
further protest groups emerged seeking to maintain their settlements as rental properties.
Politicians of the major parties, unionists and workers’ representatives of the Ruhrkohle AG956 supported the idea of selling to the workers, who would thus have the opportunity
for capital accumulation. At this point a conflict of interest emerged within the
settlements and the consensual actions for the preservation of the status quo lost
ground. At the same time, however, the protest also became more organized and protest
groups more systematically trained. Activists wrote letters to local newspapers, appealed
to the local council,957 organized tenant assemblies and street festivals, distributed pamphlets and started
petitions.
In occupying the houses the initiatives also borrowed some more radical methods of
the then emerging squatters’ movement. The Rheinpreussen initiative in Duisburg from
1975 onwards was the first initiative that squatted an empty house in the settlement,
and it was probably the only one that also went on hunger strike to pressure the city
council into buying the settlement.958 The musician Frank Baier, one of the protagonists of the Rheinpreussen initiative,
then started writing protest songs for the demonstrations.959 It is worth noting that since the early seventies Baier had been connected with radical
left-wing voices outside of the Ruhr, such as the then West Berlin-based music group
Ton Steine Scherben, and he was also involved in the antinuclear and squatters movements.960 Baier, thus, not only represented the typical working-class and regional culture
of the Ruhr, but also the left-wing protest culture in the cities of the seventies
that transcended regional and national boundaries.961
The »Right to the City«: the Emergence of an Alternative Public
Since the sixties, the image of the modern city in the industrialized West has been
contested by authors calling for social protest against the often depressing Fordist
and postwar architecture.962 While »the right to the city«, deriving from Henri Lefebvre’s Le droit à la ville from 1968, has become a catchy slogan in recent years, few nowadays bother clearly
defining what it entailed.963 Few historians have used this concept,964 and it is indeed very difficult to apply Lefebvre’s holistically revolutionary ideas—including
the end of private ownership in the city and the realization of radical urban democracy—to
historical processes. It is possible, however, to identify historical moments and
movements of the right to the city. Further, the revolutionary literature of that
time should not only be seen against the backdrop of the growing urban movement activism
around the world but also be embedded in the wider protest culture of the new social
movements that developed in Western industrialized societies post-1968.
This overlap of movements at that time is well-represented in the alternative newspapers
of the Ruhr cities; for example in Bochum (Bochumer Volksblatt, later Bochumer Stattblatt),965 Dortmund (Klüngelkerl),966 and Gelsenkirchen (Emscherbote),967 which were founded in the seventies to report on the actions of local citizen initiatives.
The local newspapers were not directly linked to the workers’ settlement initiatives
but reported critically on various forms of urban change in the Ruhr cities, redevelopment
and city planning, including public transport; they informed the readers regularly
about tenant rights, exorbitant rents, the shortage of affordable housing, forced
renovation, the demolition of historic buildings, squatted houses, and homelessness;
and they reported on the establishment of youth centers and alternative cultural activities
in the Ruhr cities. They also published articles on processes of deindustrialization,
unemployment, strikes and changes in labor relations in the region. The papers discussed
police repression, conditions in prisons and reform, right-wing extremism, women’s
rights, environmental problems, including air pollution, inner-city road planning
and bicycle infrastructure, as well as anti-nuclear protests; and they generally propagated
political transparency, self-government and more participatory urban politics. These
key sources thus demonstrate that urban movement activity in the Ruhr during the seventies
cannot be studied as completely disconnected from the new social movement activities
and the New Left of that time in the region. While other German and European cities
have been identified as strongholds of the student movement and subsequently the alternative
milieu,968 the Ruhr has rarely been associated with »1968«969 and the subsequent »normalization« of protests,970 including the protests of the women’s, environmentalist, peace, anti-nuclear and
squatters movements that spread across Western Europe. However, while urban movement
actions in the Ruhr can be studied as part of a loosely connected global urban movement
that was strongly intertwined with the New Left and new social movements, the Ruhr’s
subversive media illustrate that the local urban movements must also be seen against
the region’s particular urban transformation in the course of its deindustrialization.
The Ruhr-Volksblatt (RVB),971 a newspaper published from 1975 to 1984 to represent the Working Group of Workers’
Settlement Initiatives in the Ruhr (Arbeitskreis der Arbeitersiedlungsinitiativen im Ruhrgebiet), provides an excellent insight into the dynamics and rhetoric of the Ruhr’s workers’
settlement movement. It was published every few months, with up to five issues per
year. The newspaper was designed to provide information about and for the initiatives,
to connect the initiatives across the Ruhr, to provide solidarity with and amongst
them, and to project the local concerns to the general public. The newspaper can been
seen as part of the conceptualization of a proletarian counter-public sphere in the
seventies, partly driven by left-wing intellectuals seeking solidarity with workers.972
In its first year, 1975, the Ruhr-Volksblatt listed contact details of twenty initiatives across the Ruhr.973 In the following year, Jörg Boström and Roland Günter, who were instrumental in the
Ruhr-Volksblatt, already listed 33 initiatives.974 In 1977, two years after its launch, virtually all initiatives worked to some extent
with the Ruhr-Volksblatt, although the readership of the paper was very limited among the inhabitants of the
workers’ settlements themselves. In 1978–79 the distribution of the Ruhr-Volksblatt peaked with more than 1,400 issues, despite the number of initiatives already in
decline.
The working-class tone of the protest and the local dialect of the Ruhr were endorsed
in all issues. The topics of the paper were relatively diverse, though centering on
protest. Readers were informed about the situation in the settlements and the progress
of the initiatives, and were warned of further demolition plans. The increase of rent
and privatization was repetitively discussed as well as the social and psychological
problems caused by high-rise buildings.975 While broader left-wing ideology is clearly present, conforming with the democratic
ideal of the New Left, everyday situations typical for the Ruhr, such as breeding
rabbits and carrier pigeons, also formed important topics for the paper.
A Conceptual Exploration of the Workers’ Settlement Movement
The »elective affinities« between social categories, ideologies and identities (i. e.,
social representations of identity)976 can help us better understand the urban movements within their particular context
and, thus, understand the locally variant articulations of the right to the city.
The categories correlated here are: social class, political ideology, place identity,
historical culture and aesthetic judgement. These explorative parameters shed light
on the agency of the elites within the movements and their relationship with the new
social movement ideology of the 1970s.
Social Class: Sebastian Haffner wrote in 1974 that the term Bürgerinitiative was unknown ten years before, although in principle such initiatives had existed for
a long time. 977 At the time of his writing, however, this form of protest—the local action group
or citizen initiative—was experiencing its peak in West Germany. Looking at the Republic
as a whole, workers were in a small minority among the citizen initiatives of the
1970s. The Ruhr, with its approximately 30 to 50 so-called »workers’ initiatives«
was special in that sense.978 Even though the workers’ settlements had been »discovered« by the Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie), the participants of the initiatives were almost entirely
working-class. Bürger in German means »citizen«, though the term has a strong middle-class connotation.
The term Arbeiterinitiative (workers’ initiative), as predominantly used by the protest groups for the preservation
of the company towns and miners’ settlements in the Ruhr, was a self-given name to
distinguish themselves from the more bourgeois campaigners outside of the Ruhr and
to emphasize that their protest was led by workers to protect a particularly working-class
milieu. However, not all of them did so: in Gelsenkirchen, for example, the activists
who protested for the preservation of the Zoo settlement around the former coal mine
Graf Bismarck called themselves Bürgerinitiative Zooviertel.979
The number of working-class citizens in the initiatives, nevertheless, tells us little
about the ideological and organizational effects middle-class intellectuals had on
the movement. The initiatives were strongly shaped by individual »advisors« (Berater), described by Thomas Rommelspacher as »politically engaged intellectuals, who often
had highly qualified jobs.« These middle-class activists from outside who sympathized
with the workers in the settlements often were professionals in public service and
included »architects, city planners, sociologists, social workers, art historians
as well as students of various disciplines« who had often felt attracted by the, for
them, exotic working-class culture in the settlements and sought to overcome class
boundaries.980 This is interesting, as the village-like life in the settlements in many ways represented
the petty-bourgeois lifestyle aspiration of the working classes.981 Nevertheless, despite the relatively high living standards and the many skilled workers
who had lived in the settlements, the settlements were not a prestigious place to
live in the seventies and were still perceived as places for the lower rungs of the
Ruhr society. When the initiatives emerged, many younger workers had already left
the settlements, whereas older generations—familiar with the traditional working-class
milieu of the Ruhr—stayed behind. While younger generations began aspiring to a more
individualized, competitive middle-class lifestyle, the older generations saw in the
predicted urban renewal a more comprehensive threat to their traditional working-class
lifestyle.982
Working-class identity, as the Ruhr-Volksblatt illustrates, mattered greatly in the representation of the protest. The intellectual
editors of the paper sought to downplay their role in the publication and emphasized
the linkages between working-class identity, the local dialect and the regional identity
of the Ruhr,983 which did not necessarily match the issue-focused interests of the workers who simply
wished to maintain their homes. Half of the initiatives had sympathizers from outside
of the settlements. The Flöz Dickebank initiative, for example, had four advisors,
more than the norm for each initiative.984 In some cases, the advisors acted as founders of the initiatives. They instructed
the inhabitants in public relations and provided legal advice. They assisted the settlement
inhabitants in emancipating themselves politically through protest and participation;
and, due to this middle-class support, the authorities and companies took the working-class
protesters more seriously. When Eisenheim came under heritage protection, the officials
recognized that the working-class community of the settlement and its social structure
was worth being protected.985 The impact of Roland Günter, who had previous experience in more middle-class initiatives
outside of the Ruhr and sought to transport the participatory ideology and organizational
experiences to the working-class community of Eisenheim, was remarkable.986 The son of a wealthy industrialist who had worked as a state-employed conservationist
and professor of art and cultural theory at Bielefeld University of Applied Science,
Günter, was immensely influential across at least three areas: firstly, he was instrumental
in the above-mentioned early Eisenheim campaign, which served as a positive example
for following initiatives; secondly, he was successful in networking with other campaigns;
and thirdly, he managed to promote the memory of the Eisenheim campaign and his own
agency therein.987 Günter has remained the most famous figure not only of this protest movement, but
is also commemorated in the Ruhr’s history as an initiator of the industrial heritage
movement.988
The strong role of the advisors in this struggle, volunteering to represent working-class
interests, is also partly due to the absence of the traditional organizations of worker
representation in the Ruhr which, after the Second World War, were, foremost, the
governing SPD as well as the IGBE miners’ union (Industriegewerkschaft Bergbau und Energie). The union, which owned large housing estates across the country, could not be mobilized
to resist the destruction and privatization of the traditional neighborhoods. Instead
the initiatives came to openly attack IGBE when, in 1977, the union raised the rent
of 15,000 tenants throughout the Ruhr.989 The Neue Heimat, the enormous housing enterprise that had been founded by the Nazis and since 1952
had belonged to the Confederation of German Trade Unions (DGB) in the seventies was
strongly supportive of large-scale urban renewal and criticized by urban movement
activists and their sympathizers—a key agent in producing »inhospitable« cities in
West Germany.990 Likewise, in the seventies the German tenants association (Deutscher Mieterbund) lost public trust after supporting the rent increase pushed by the housing corporations
(Wohnstätten).991 The traditional labor representatives, thus, were suspiciously seen as allies of
the social democratic city councils and the industry in endorsing destructive city
planning.992
Political Ideology: Membership in political parties was usually around ten percent
in the workers’ settlements, while trade union membership was significantly higher.993 The movement leaders certainly evoked a certain working-class identity and leftist
ideology in their rhetoric. For example, a poster of the Flöz Dickebank initiative
stated: »We workers defend our living quarter against real estate speculation and
city destroyers« (Wir Arbeiter verteidigen unser Wohnviertel gegen Bauspekulanten und Stadtzerstörer).994 The network sympathizers with the workers’ settlement initiatives also supported
the growing squatters movement in the Ruhr towards the eighties and expressed concern
about unjust city planning, empty houses, and exorbitant rents more generally.995 Surveys showed, however, that most inhabitants and campaigners had a rather »Not
In My Backyard« attitude; they did not care much about ideological ideals and demonstrated
little solidarity with other initiatives than in their own neighborhood. Their protest
was, foremost, about preserving affordable rents and living quality in their own quarter.996
The SPD youth organization (Jusos) occasionally did support—and sometimes initiated protest campaigns for the protection
of workers’ settlements,997 but the initiatives emerged predominantly as self-help organizations for workers
outside of established political institutions. As highlighted by Lutz Niethammer in
his groundbreaking oral history of the experience of fascism in the region from 1983,
regional identity and political ideology, i. e., Social Democracy, enjoyed a special
relationship in the Ruhr region during the second half of the twentieth century. He
found that »the political behavior of this workers’ and employees’ region« had been
different from the rest of the Federal Republic. »The social-democratization of the
Ruhr,« according to Niethammer, took place after the Second World War—despite most
of the Federal Republic then electing Chancellor Adenauer with an absolute majority—even
though Social Democracy during the Weimar Republic had been »surprisingly weak« in
the Ruhr as one of the largest industrial regions in Europe, lagging in terms of votes
behind the Catholic center party and the Communists.998
While the Social Democratic ideology would play an important role in Keynesian programs
to assist the deindustrialization of the Ruhr and major industrial heritage projects
over the following decades, the fact that the SPD favored large-scale urban renewal
in the seventies made it an opponent of the workers’ settlement initiatives.999 It was rather the emergence of a new political culture, i. e., the extra-parliamentary
protest culture of the New Left and new social movements, which appealed to principles
of socialism and radical democracy, together with the new »tenant consciousness«1000 that simultaneously became apparent in the Ruhr and provided the settlement movement
with legitimacy. The advisors’ political ideology was not cohesive, but it was shaped
by the practice of the new social movements.1001
Interestingly, a number of local priests also supported the demands of the movement—social
security, belonging and participation—with arguments from Christian theology. The
Dortmund Association of Lutheran Parishes, for example, strongly encouraged citizens
who were not directly affected to get organized and protest.1002 Some successful initiatives, such as the one for the preservation of the Alte Kolonie
Eving in Dortmund, were primarily led by clerics.1003 Church membership in the workers’ settlements was high and the clerics found in the
preservation of the quarters a theological justification: the New Jerusalem as a metaphor
for any city, which would require social action for social justice and the protection
of the community from anonymity. The priests linked the provision of leisure time,
place identity and worker participation in the settlements to biblical matters. The
major concern among the clerics, akin to the one among the inhabitants, was the workers’
overall quality of life that was generally seen as higher than in the new settlements
of the postwar period. The threat of demolition or privatization of the settlements
was presented as a symptom of more general problems in society: the housing corporations’
profit motif was threatening »Heimat« and »social justice«.1004 Apart from their spiritual legitimation the clerical arguments in Dortmund were thus
hardly different from leftist arguments across the Ruhr.
Place Identity: The older inhabitants of the workers’ settlements in particular had
developed a strong identification with their neighborhood where »everyone knows everyone«,1005 and this attachment supported the mobilization of the initiatives. The emphasis on
neighborhood solidarity amongst the working-class inhabitants was very pronounced
in all campaigns for the conservation and against the privatization of the settlements.
In a number of settlements the Social Democratic housing co-operation model was implemented
to prevent excessive privatization, maintain a relatively high degree of participation
and preserve the village-like community structure in the neighborhoods.1006 This communal image of the former company towns stood in opposition to the anonymous
living in high-rise apartment blocks. One could argue that this image, to some extent,
conflicts with the emphasis on the »urban« in urban movements. The initiatives in
the Ruhr, with its numerous intermediate spaces between the city quarters and relatively
low population density, therefore, rather constituted a suburban type of movement
action at the periphery that was not concerned with marginalization from the metropolitan
center or what usually is associated with movements for the »right to the city«.1007 It was a fight for a particular kind of right to the city, i. e., the right to preserve
the autonomy of an urban structure that had grown over generations.
The Ruhr-Volksblatt romantically presented the workers’ settlements of the region as a kind of idyll
that was typical for the Ruhr.1008 Beyond the localized identification with their own quarter, as mentioned above, the
movement leaders and sympathizers thus sought to use and reproduce representations
of regional identity in the Ruhr. The paper deployed the local rhetoric and dialect,
and represented typical items of the Ruhr culture. For example, it reported very favorably
on the typical working-class leisure activities, such as pigeon keeping, in the region.1009 This illustrates how the movement elite mobilized particular images of the Ruhr and
its working classes to represent a culturally cohesive image of the region. This was
also reflected in Roland Günter’s invitation of the above-mentioned activist and musician,
Frank Baier from Rheinpreussen, to visit Eisenheim and record the workers’ songs commemorating
the Ruhr uprising of March 1920 that some of the elderly people in his neighborhood
had sung.1010
Historical Culture: »Urban movements«, to follow Hans Pruijt’s succinct definition,
»are social movements through which citizens attempt to achieve some control over
their urban environment«.1011 The example of the workers’ initiatives in the Ruhr suggests that the quest for control
becomes especially pronounced when the urban environment is perceived as undergoing
deep-cutting transformations that affect the social structure and its meaning at the
local level. Since the urban environment is more encompassing than material or built
environment and often is symbolically charged with narratives about the past, urban
movements have also played a role in urban memory politics and the historical culture
that is aesthetically shaped by architecture, monuments and memorials, heritage sites
and the naming of urban places.
In the settlements—social scientist Janne Günter, Roland Günter’s wife, argued in
her study on the workers’ life in Eisenheim—the inhabitants had developed a sense
of historical identity, with collective experiences over generations.1012 Rommelspacher also found that one of the particularities of the settlement movement
in the Ruhr was that the activists here could draw on a rich repertoire of working-class
cultural experiences and patterns of behavior such as solidarity. The older generations,
who were overrepresented in the settlements by the seventies, had experienced or participated
in the labor movement of the twenties and thirties and lived the everyday working-class
culture of the previous decades.1013 Admittedly, at the time of the settlement initiatives, the workers could still draw
on a particular historical repertoire, filled with the shared memory of work, for
which there was hardly need any longer; but to what extent this memory was »collective«
and constituted »identity« remains doubtful.1014 Perhaps it was exactly this transitory period, from industrialism towards post-industrialism
and from the persisting authoritarianism of the postwar period towards a more anti-authoritarian
political culture in the seventies that assisted the formation of a more cohesive
historical culture in the Ruhr; after all, the production of lieux de mémoire (Pierre Nora) and the invention of tradition (Eric J. Hobsbawm) tends to flourish
in times of transition, when traditional communities are declining to form new imagined
communities (Benedict Anderson).
The conservationist struggles of that time indicate that the decline of the coal and
steel industries had a transformative effect not only on the urban landscape and people
of the Ruhr, but also on their historical culture.1015 As part of their protest against destructive city planning, the alternative press
in the Ruhr also began to take the industrial past of the region seriously and reported,
for example, on the (threat of) demolition of important industrial heritage sites
such as the Zeche Hannover mining complex and the associated miners’ settlement.1016 The industrial heritage movement thus overlapped with the urban movement of the workers’
initiatives in the settlements, which would ultimately help prolong the post-industrial
identity of the Ruhr as a region.1017 Thus, even though protests for the preservation of the Ruhr settlements were not
primarily driven by the intention of practically articulating a distinct historical
consciousness,1018 the settlement initiatives can be construed as fundamental to, and one of the most
crucial stimuli of, the later success story of industrial heritage across the Ruhr.
In the Ruhr’s seventies there was an affinity between industrial heritage initiatives
and urban movement initiatives from below, including the then widespread youth center
movement.1019 The establishment of the sociocultural center in Essen as part of the campaign to
prevent the demolition of the Zeche Carl coal mining complex and the destructive »area rehabilitation« in the Altenessen neighborhood
well elucidate these colorful movement relations.1020
Beyond informing the place identity of the Ruhr, the preservation of workers’ settlements
stood for a historical culture that also involved the memory of important questions
in urban planning that had emerged with the industrial age. Urban historian Franziska
Bollerey, for example, in the 1970s sought to raise historical awareness of the architectural
efforts taken since the nineteenth century to improve the living and housing conditions
of workers in the Ruhr cities. She also sought to historicize capitalism and divestment
in the Ruhr since the coal crisis of the late fifties which had triggered a process
of valorization that endangered the traditional life of the workers and the industrial
heritage of the region.1021 In this decade, a new affinity between heritage protection and left-wing thinking
transpired. The then emerging industrial heritage movement in the Ruhr contested established
discourses of heritage.1022
Aesthetic Judgment: The Ruhr’s particular urban design and historical identity are
still fundamentally based on the remains of its coal and steel industry that boomed
for less than a century. While this industry has faded, its built heritage has gained
in importance, starting with grassroots initiatives in the late sixties for the protection
of what in Germany came to be called Industriekultur.1023 In 1969 the machine hall of the coal mine Zeche Zollern in Dortmund was recognized
and protected as an industrial monument. The petition to the North Rhine-Westphalian
prime minister to save this building was predominantly initiated by artists, architects,
art historians and historians, marking the origin of the industrial heritage movement
in the Ruhr. The subsequent aesthetic interest from artists and art historians in
industrial heritage continued to be an essential element in the transformation of
the cultural landscape of the region. The heritage protection of Eisenheim can be
seen as the second major achievement of the Ruhr’s industrial movement. Roland Günter,
who then worked for the Rhenish Department of Heritage Conservation, saw the architectural
design of the settlement as worth being protected.1024 Thus, in 1974, the state conservator of North Rhine-Westphalia listed the Duisburg-Neumühl
workers’ settlements as protected heritage because he saw the buildings as »a typical
example of the garden city movement.«1025 This movement of the early nineteen hundreds in Germany had aimed at protecting workers’
communities from real estate speculation, following the belief in the workers’ right
to live in a healthy as well as beautiful built environment within industrial cities.
The initiatives of the seventies sought to remind the public of the value of this
garden city model that their settlements had followed; and it was exactly this affordable
and suburban living quality with green spaces that also appealed to the working-class
inhabitants.1026
The aesthetics of postwar reconstruction became increasingly challenged when in 1975
President Walter Scheel appealed at the Deutsche Städtetag to the city councils to ease the demolition of pre-war buildings. This historical
awareness went hand in hand with a growing realization that the postwar image of the
modern city had been »inhumane« and should not have followed primarily capital interests.1027 Towards the late seventies, the ongoing »modernization« and attempts to improve the
negative image of the Ruhr cities by supposedly »progressive« city planning was seen
with increasing suspicion.1028 In 1979, for example, the Bochum city council recognized that »since 1945 twice as
many historical buildings have been destroyed than during the Second World War« in
the Federal Republic. Nevertheless, the alternative press still criticized the council
for favoring profit-oriented redevelopment over the protection of art nouveau facades.1029 Similarly, the beauty of the old workers’ settlements remained subject to dispute:
for some they were just »eyesores« in the city.1030
