Productive Rhine-City Duisburg

The city of Duisburg, with its location on the Rhine and the Ruhr, has special potential. On the one hand, as part of the Ruhr area, it is still affected by structural change, resulting from the decline of the coal and steel industry since the 1950s, which continues to leave social, economic, and urban planning challenges. On the other hand, innercity industrial areas, particularly considering the increasing scarcity of land in neighboring metropolises at the Rhine, have enormous development potential.

Duisburg, still known as a “steel city” with the largest inland port in Europe and its position along international rail and road corridors, is strongly positioned in terms of infrastructure. It is a “productive city” in the best sense, offering significant urban development opportunities and seeking to overcome its negative image. This study examines this transformative potential specifically through the Duisburg-Hochfeld district, whose industrial area has been subject to massive transformation processes since the beginning of industrialization. The focus is initially on the question of the city’s location and strategic orientation, rooted in its history as a trading city on the Rhine and its traditional connection to the Ruhr area due to its industrial history. As part of an excursion, the analysis of the International Building Exhibitions Emscher Park and Stadtregion Stuttgart provides insights into various approaches to urban transformation and concrete project examples, as well as the current discourse on the concept of a productive city.

A spatial-structural examination of the city of Duisburg ultimately leads to an urban spatial vision, on which, together with insights from historical urban development, a design for the re-urbanization of the Duisburg Hochfeld industrial area is developed on multiple scales. The aim is to spatially and programmatically embed the industrial area in the urban context. The concept relies on methods of mixing, overlaying, and densifying instead of learned displacement models. The future vision for Hochfeld is a neighborhood that integrates energy production, industry, commerce, leisure, and housing, creating new, distinctive urban qualities for the city of Duisburg – positioning it as an attractive, affordable alternative to cities like Cologne and Düsseldorf.