New city of Wulfen

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Fountain at Wulfener Markt with the shopping mall in the background

The New Town of Wulfen (Barkenberg) is a large housing estate in Wulfen that was planned and partially built in the 1960s and 1970s and is now a district of Dorsten .

planning

Round building by Kleihues on the Wulfen market
"Red" town of Korhonen
Catholic St. Barbara Church (design by Josef Lackner )

With the north migration of the coal industry , the shafts were 1 and 2 of the 1958 bill Wulfen geteuft . In order to create living space for the planned 8,000 employees, the aim was not to repeat the models of the colliery colonies , but to break new ground in urban planning. The mining company Mathias Stinnes AG , the Recklinghausen district , the Hervest-Dorsten office , the Ruhr coal district settlement association and later a bank and the municipalities of Wulfen and Lembeck merged to form the Wulfen development company, and in 1961 organized an urban planning competition by Prof. Fritz Eggeling from Berlin was won. The detailed planning was carried out with his employees. After his early death, the planning group was then called Grosche-Börner-Stumpfl.

implementation

In the final stage, apartments for up to 50,000 people and the infrastructure of a city (town hall, hospital, department store, bus station etc.) should be built with the involvement of (old) Wulfens. Since the mine did not bring the predicted success (only max. 450 jobs), the plans had to be reduced several times over the course of time.

In addition to new approaches such as green planning and extensive use of electric heating, the traffic management in the New City is particularly noticeable: the traffic is predominantly regulated by right-to-left and the street layout is honeycombed, so that the New City gets by without traffic lights. A priority road circles the large estate. In addition, the sidewalks are networked with underpasses and pedestrian bridges, so that most streets can be crossed without traffic lights, pedestrian islands or zebra crossings.

The Metastadt , an experimental building complex made of prefabricated steel components with around 100 residential units and 600 m² of commercial space, was demolished in 1987 after only twelve years of use due to construction defects. Another failed experimental building is the Habiflex with originally flexible interior walls. The Finnish architect Toivo Korhonen designed the Finnstadt . The controversial shopping arcade comes from Josef Paul Kleihues .

After the development company was communalized in 1985 and after the meta city was demolished in 1987, Wulfen disappeared from the headlines. The extent of the bibliography (see literature) shows what attention the project caused. Diploma theses and specialist theses are still being written about the district today.

The New City of Wulfen today

The goal of 50,000 residents was reduced to 30,000 as early as 1970; currently around 8,400 people populate Barkenberg and 5,400 Alt-Wulfen. Due to large vacancies, the demolition of part of the Marschall building group, the dismantling of a few higher houses to four floors and modernization began in 2007 (program Stadtumbau West ).

The vacant shopping mall is to be auctioned off and demolished in October 2019.

The term Neue Stadt Wulfen has only rarely been used since 1985 (municipalization of the development company), the district of Wulfen-Barkenberg, which was reclassified to Dorsten on January 1, 1975, or just Barkenberg , is mentioned more often . Officially there is only one district of Wulfen, which includes Alt-Wulfen and Barkenberg.

literature

in alphabetical order by authors / editors

  • Peter Broich: New City of Wulfen . In: Bund Deutscher Architekten, Kreisgruppe Recklinghausen (Hrsg.): Architecture in the Ruhr area. Recklinghausen district . Schmitz, Castrop-Rauxel 1986. ISBN 3-924014-01-9 . Pp. 120-134.
  • Development company Wulfen mbH (ed.): The other living. Example of the New City of Wulfen . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1980, ISBN 3-421-02557-6
  • NN: New town of Wulfen. Special issue of the series architecture competitions . Karl-Krämer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1962.
  • NN: Planning of the New City of Wulfen. 2. Special issue Wulfen of the series architecture competitions . Karl-Krämer-Verlag, Stuttgart 1965.
  • Thomas M. Wegemann: Natural use of plants and closed green space creation in the new town of Wulfen, illustrated using the example of the Poelzig, Marschall and Eggeling group . In: Die Gartenkunst  26 (1/2014), pp. 89–106.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ New town of Wulfen has been heating with a heat pump network since the 1970s
  2. ↑ RN: Wulfener Markt: After a foreclosure auction and demolition, the way is clear for a new beginning
  3. ^ Federal Statistical Office (ed.): Historical municipality directory for the Federal Republic of Germany. Name, border and key number changes in municipalities, counties and administrative districts from May 27, 1970 to December 31, 1982 . W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart / Mainz 1983, ISBN 3-17-003263-1 , p. 316 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 44 '  N , 7 ° 3'  E