"Neue Mitte" in the Middle of Nowhere

The German Ruhr Area is an outstanding symbol for structural change – this process led the area twice to an economic powerful status: The first time during industrialisation and the second time during the post-war economic miracle. In the 1960s the whole sector came into a crisis. Massive unemployment and economic downfall shocked the Ruhr Area. Today a lot of cities have passed the process of structural change already and the Ruhr Area has a chance to become as economically powerful as it has been.

From Rise to Relegation

Economic boom in the former rural area started in the 1860s with the process of industrialisation. Coal and steel mining and producing were the “heartbeat” of the area. Workers migrated to all cities in the Ruhr Area from all over Germany. The area increased in size, population and importance. Boarders of the region are not that easy to determine. A saying from the end of the 19th century explains: “The Ruhr Area reaches as far, as coal and steel reach.”5 Today this sentence is changed into past tense, as the importance of these sectors can only be regarded as historical.

The second boom period of the Ruhr Area passed off in the time of the economic miracle in Germany after the Second World War. To build up Europe again the demand for coal and steel rose tremendously. Germany was embedded in the European Coal and Steel Community, the starting point of the European Union. Coal-and ore-mining and steel producing were the driving forces of the whole area – and that was at the same point the starting of the crisis. An economic mono-structure led the area to an immense dependency upon coal and steel. Mono-structures are – as briefly explained in the methodology part of this paper – unlikely to cope with shocks. The crisis already started in 1957. Cheap oil accessed the energy markets – the coal crisis was born (demand-crisis). Ten years later technological change in the steel producing sector initiated the same for the steel sector (productivity-crisis). The Ruhr Area’s means of existence were “destroyed”.