Launching a Regional Development Initiative: The Experience of IBA Emscher Park

IBA Emscher Park was a development program which ran between 1989 and 1999 in the northern part of the Ruhr Valley. IBA stands for International Building Exposition, a traditional approach to innovative urban development which was interpreted in a very innovative way: It was not just urban but actually regional development, and it was not just about buildings but also about redeveloping brownfield sites, developing industrial heritage sites, cleaning up highly polluted rivers and contaminated estate, and improve the environmental quality and the quality of life. Emscher Park stands for the overall objective of the program: to convert the region along the Emscher river into a park-like urban landscape.

One of the key decisions in launching IBA Emscher Park was to avoid strategic planning, and indeed an overall coherent plan. IBA Emscher Park was based on a project approach. It started in 1989 with a Call for Projects. Before that, the key stakeholders involved in the IBA had defined a set of criteria for the selection of projects. Basically, these criteria addressed two issues: quality and viability.

• Quality was about architecture, urbanity and ecology. It was agreed that only projects which tried to attain a high architectural standard, contribute to substantial upgrading of urban quality and improve the environmental situation were to be accepted.

• Viability was about being able to start a selected project right on. Initially, IBA Emscher Park was supposed to run for five years, so there was no time to be lost. Accordingly, all those project proposals were to be rejected where major obstacles stood in the way of quick implementation. One typical obstacle were property issues, for instance projects where a piece of real estate was to be redeveloped which belonged to various proprietors with diverging interests and agendas. Another typical obstacle where legal issues, where a given project would have involved highly complicated and protracted permit processes.

Another key decision regarding the set-up of IBA was to run it in a decentralised manner. A small secretariat was created, with about 25 professionals who were hired on a fixed-term basis. Each of the projects which were selected by the IBA Secretariat was run by a local organisation. Often this was a legally independent development corporation set up by local government, frequently with co-ownership of state government. Occasionally, it was public-private partnerships, private developers, or other non-governmental organisations. The IBA Secretariat was represented in the governing body of each project organisation. Moreover, IBA Secretariat often played a very important role as a moderator and facilitator in stakeholder fora which were created around many projects in order to involve and mobilise the local community and make sure that a given project was firmly embedded into local administrative and community structures.

The IBA Secretariat turned out to be an organisation which reconciled the accumulation of power with a participatory approach. It was very powerful because it had the full backing of state government, which was the source of most of the funds needed for project implementation. If a local government could not convince the IBA Secretariat to accept a given project, it was highly unlikely that it would find any other way of getting state funding. However, the IBA Secretariat did not use its power to enforce its ideosyncratic ideas on how to implement a given project. It rather organised a process where both local knowledge and involvement where mobilised and where external know-how and creativity where introduced, usually via International Competitions which frequently involved internationally renowned architects and planning bureaus.

In the end, the explicit absence of strategic planning lead to projects which would not have been conceivable at the beginning, and which would not have happened if the IBA had, at the outset, been squeezed into the corset of a fixed strategic plan. In particular, this applies to the re-use of abandoned industrial installations, such as a huge steel plant or the largest cokery plant in the region. In the course of the IBA, an increasing number of stakeholders in the region accepted that these sites were not only scrapyards but also monuments of the industrial history of the region, and as such comparable to more conventional monuments such as churches. Re-defining abandoned industrial installations led to the creation of locations for cultural, recreational and business purposes. The re-definition involved an extensive learning process, and a profound change of mindsets, neither of which could have been planned strategically at the outset. At best, some people were able to formulate a vague vision which envisaged something like this. This is what perspectivic incrementalism is about: Try to formulate a perspective, a vision, so that you know where you want to head, and then try to get there step by step, without planning the fifth step before you have done the first one.

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