International building exhibition Ruhr City
The International Building Exhibition Ruhr City was a twenty-year but prematurely terminated instrument of large-scale urban development in the northern Ruhr area .
The IBA , initiated in 1956 by the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia , was intended to create forward-looking structures in the sense of a democratic, progressive society through comprehensive as well as local urban development and infrastructure projects in the northern Ruhr area. In the course of the IBA Marl , the Neue Stadt Wulfen , the Forum Castrop-Rauxel , the inner city of Gelsenkirchen and the Ruhr University Bochum emerged as outstanding centers of the planned development projects . A high-speed train network was to connect the locations that emerged from the projects to form the Ruhr City .
The recession of 1967 called the basic concept of the IBA into question, which was based on the fact that a further increasing economic power of the Ruhr area would go hand in hand with a growing population. Against the background of changing social and economic conditions, the IBA shifted its focus towards residential construction and lost its importance until it ended prematurely with the 1973 oil crisis .
The IBA Ruhr City, whose overarching spatial design goals were never realized, was considered to have failed, was no longer mentioned by the state government and was forgotten. It was only processed in the summer of 2017 as part of the Ruhrmoderne exhibition in Marl.
literature
- Philipp Oswalt , Theo Deutinger: The forgotten IBA 1967 Ruhr City. In: Ruhrmoderne 1967/2017 - A short summer of utopia. kassel university press, 2018, ISBN 978-3-7376-0486-4 .