Conference Arrangements

The Ruhr and the City of Gelsenkirchen
To a foreigner the Ruhr is a place of transit but in all Germany there is no region richer in contrasts, more varied, more exciting. Nowhere else has a landscape been so dramatically transformed in the course of a few generations, and even a foreigner senses that it is changing again. Up to the 19th century, the Ruhr used to be a sleepy, mainly rural region, little different from other areas. The commercial and farming towns along the Hellweg, the main East-West route, were little more than provincial nests. Around 1815, when the Ruhr became part of Prussia, Duisburg had 5.700 inhabitants, Essen 4.000, Bochum 2.100 and Dortmund 4.300. Meantime, slumbering below ground, lay the treasure which was to make these figures explode: coal. For in the Ruhr Valley the coal-bearing strata rise to the surface, whereas towards the North they gradually disappear deeply underground. For hundreds of years, on both sides of the Ruhr, coal was extracted by open-cast mining. In the 17th and 18th centuries people went over to tunnel and gallery mining, which repeatedly gave rise to drainage and ventilation problems. In the years that followed, engineering advances made deeper shafts and bigger mines possible. In the mid-19th century the railways were a mainstay of the industrial revolution in the Ruhr. These were the days of the industrial barons, industrialists like Franz Haniel, Leopold Hoesch, Alfred Krupp, Mathias Stinnes and later August Thyssen who were to write economic history. Around 1870 industrialization reached the Emscher region. Gelsenkirchen, the main destination for migrant workers from Poland and Masuria, expanded by leaps and bounds: whereas in 1805 it had 600 inhabitants, by 1903 it was a city with a population of 147.000. When the crisis in the coal and steel industry threatened to plunge the whole region into the abyss, stuctural change has begun. Technology instead of heavy industry, high tech instead of heavy labour. The know-how for the transformation does not have to be imported. Today there are 150.000 students studying at 14 universities and institutes of higher education, and research is conducted in numerous technology centres and at the Max Planck and Fraunhofer research institutes.