Colliery colony
The typical mining settlements built in the 19th and 20th centuries , which are grouped around the sites of the mines, are called colliery colonies in the Ruhr area . In other mountain areas there were also factory settlements that were given different names. The term colliery was not common everywhere.
Industrialization in the Ruhr area
Today's Ruhr area (between the rivers Rhine , Ruhr and Lippe and crossed by the Emscher ) was, as the map from 1830 shows, only sparsely populated before industrialization at the beginning of the 19th century.
Only on Hellweg , one of the most important trading routes of the Middle Ages , were some cities with Duisburg , Essen , Bochum and Dortmund , whose beginnings go back to the early Middle Ages. The Emscherniederung north of Hellweg was largely swampy, so that it was hardly suitable for settlement. Since the Emscher formed the border between the southern county of Mark and the northern Vest Recklinghausen , a number of castles (including Horst , Crange ) were built along the Emscher , which formed the nucleus of smaller settlements.
On the southern edge of the Ruhr area ( Muttental ) there were small mines and charcoal-powered ironworks early on , whose workers came from the local rural population and lived in rural structures.
With the introduction of the steam engine , this situation changed within a short time. In the 1830s, the first large ironworks and mechanical engineering companies emerged, the need for workers increased rapidly, and the first so-called single dormitories were built, barrack-like accommodations ( barracks of the Paulinenhütte ) for single industrial workers and miners.
Housing estates
To provide housing for married foremen began 1844 Gutehoffnungshütte in Oberhausen as the first industrial plant with the colony " Eisenheim " with the work of housing . Each of the houses was two-story and consisted of two apartments separated by separate entrances.
The typical house type of a colliery colony, which later shaped the Ruhr area , the house in the "cross floor plan", was first built in Mulhouse (in Alsace ) for the potash mining workers and shown in 1855 at the World Exhibition in Paris . In 1858 a first settlement according to this scheme was built in Bochum - Stahlhausen in the Ruhr area. The houses were two-story with four apartments, and they had a garden with a shed as a stable and toilet.
When the economy continued to flourish in 1871 after the victory in the war against France , over the next 40 years more than 700,000 immigrants came in several waves to the Ruhr area, primarily land workers from West Prussia , East Prussia , Silesia and Poland .
The colliery settlements could hardly cope with the influx of workers, so that many families shared an apartment and took in boarders or sleepers . This development was taken into account when building new houses by turning the kitchen into the eat-in kitchen and bringing the access to the other rooms forward. This enabled the sub-tenants to reach their rooms without having to enter the family rooms. A further development was the creation of "apartment corridors", which act as sluices to control access to the houses.
Further developments
After exclusively monotonous row settlements without any vegetation in the form of closed rows and later row settlements with front and house gardens were built in the second half of the 19th century, the construction of workers' garden cities began around 1905 (see garden city ). The Krupp settlements in Rheinhausen, Datteln ( Beisenkamp ) and Bochum-Hordel ( Dahlhauser Heide ) designed by Robert Schmohl are prime examples. The best-known examples, however, are probably the Margarethenhöhe Krupp estate in Essen, designed by Prof. Georg Metzendorf , and the Hüttenau garden town of the Henrichshütte in Welper, built by the same architect .
The urban planners of the Neue Stadt Wulfen pursued a broader approach in the 1960s. Here, a complete city with infrastructure for up to 60,000 inhabitants was designed on the drawing board. Due to the lack of productivity of the largest employer, the Wulfen colliery , the plans had to be reduced to 20,000 residents.
The strong dependence on arbitrariness became apparent in the case of Göttingerode , a steelworks and miners' settlement built as part of the Rammelsberg project on the northern edge of the Harz in the area of today's town of Bad Harzburg : Harz-Lahn-Erzbergbau AG offered employer loans to the mostly destitute workers who moved in, which tied the settlement to the company at the same time. Increasing mining damage caused by the expansion of the Hansa mine could often not be repaired or only with a very delay, as bureaucratic hurdles were set by this bond and at the same time the scope for action is very limited due to the dependency of the residents.
From the 1960s onwards, the shrinking of the German coal and steel industry led to the privatization of the company housing stock, which led to social problems for the residents of these settlements and sometimes fierce resistance. In addition, the closed character of urban development was often destroyed by the “design frenzy” and excessive individual diversity of the new owners. In some cases, however, by placing the settlements under protection as a monument area, the original settlement character and a touch of the lost charm could be saved.
Examples
Colliery settlement with typical knee-high houses
Compact construction, Section VIII in Kaiserau approx. 1978
Göttingerode , miners' settlement outside the Ruhr area around 1936
See also
literature
- Moritz Grän: Memories from a miners' colony in the Ruhr area. 1983 ( lwl.org PDF, full text) - on the Scholven colony in Gelsenkirchen
- Wilhelm and Gertrude Hermann: The old mines on the Ruhr. Past and future of a key technology. With a catalog of the "life stories" of 477 mines. (= The Blue Books ). 6th edition, expanded to include an excursus according to p. 216 and updated in parts relating to energy policy. Langewiesche publishing house, Königstein i. Ts. 2008, ISBN 978-3-7845-6994-9 (after the 5th, completely revised and expanded edition 2003, post-processing 2002: Christiane Syré, final editing 2007 Hans-Curt Köster, with evidence of listed miners' settlements).
- Gerhard Kaldewei : garden cities and colliery colonies. Examples in the Ruhr area and in northwestern Germany from 1850 to 1918/2015 . Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 2018, ISBN 978-3-402-13275-3 .
- Andreas Koerner, Klaus Scholz, Wolfgang Sykorra : You were never a stranger. The Essen mining colony Schönebeck and its district. Edition Rainruhr, Essen 2009, ISBN 978-3-9811598-9-9 .
- Gabriele Unverferth (ed.): Life in the shadow of the winding tower. The Holstein colony in Dortmund-Asseln. Regio-Verlag, Werne 2005, ISBN 3-929158-18-3 .