Workshop report:How do we want to dealwith the landscape in theRuhr region?

The landscape in the Ruhr region is heterogeneous. It is characterised by industrial wastelands, the juxtaposition of city and countryside, small green oases in urban spaces. Just as diverse as the five million human inhabitants who benefit from the landscape. An important question that we as the lala.ruhr team want to address is how we deal with this special landscape in the Ruhr region. At the Festival of Landscape, we discussed this very question with Frank Bothmann from the Department of Landscape Development and Environment of the Ruhr Regional Association and Dr. Ilka Mecklenbrauck from the Faculty of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University. Jan Bunse, a spatial planner from Urbanisten, led the discussion.

It is clear that specifications and measures are needed to protect the landscape from encroachment and to preserve its value. At the moment, compensation and replacement measures for interventions in nature are primarily determined with the help of concrete balancing and eco-accounts. Depending on the intervention, these C+R measures must be of a certain quality and are credited with eco-points to the eco-accounts of private and public land owners. This very calculative approach to the landscape leads, on the one hand, to a “standardised landscape” and, on the other hand, to an actual business with the landscape that is determined by developers and landowners.

On the other hand, we are confronted with a shortage of land, which is not only noticeable in the inner cities, but also in the rural areas of the Ruhr region – highly emotionalised debates and ever greater pressure on open spaces are often the result. Farmers in particular are often faced with the problem of a double loss of land: agricultural land is affected by settlement expansion and is built on in the process. These developments are in turn subject to compensation, and arable land is used for the necessary compensatory measures. Since the ecological improvement potential on agricultural land is very large, the developers receive a lot of eco-points on their eco-account for compensation on such land.

“The field is crying out for new ideas.”

In the discussion and through the contributions of the workshop participants, it is obvious against the background of the status quo in dealing with the landscape that planners, landowners and developers must rethink and that politics must enable innovative solutions. Frank Bothmann put it in a nutshell: “The field is crying out for new ideas.

How exactly these solutions and, above all, far-reaching changes in the way we deal with landscape can be realised is still an open question. For this, legislative changes at the federal level are necessary, which are usually preceded by a long process. Nevertheless, there are already ideas and proposals from planners, researchers and practitioners.

These include, for example, the integration of landscape into urban space, the further development of the economic valuation of nature and the focus on ecosystem services, temporary and flexible structures for open spaces, the productive management of landscape or the understanding of landscape as a cultural and integration space. As attractive as such ideas sound at first, it is important in the discussion to also consider the pitfalls. In this context, Ilka Mecklenbrauck argues that potential conflicts of use should be considered from the outset in the planning process and that the landscape should not be overburdened with the desired multifunctionality of areas. A particularly interesting concept – in our eyes – is the democratisation of the landscape. For unlike settlements, landscape planning is currently not preceded by a democratic process and the space outside settlement areas is viewed in a very functional way. Among other things, this approach can lead to frustration among activists who feel that they are not perceived and taken seriously, and from whose point of view climate and nature protection are strongly neglected. Other approaches to solving the problem include more education in building culture for children and young people, but also optimising teaching at colleges and universities and thinking integratively about architecture, ecology and climate.

In order to bring these ideas and new approaches forward, lobbying is needed in the coming years, above all, to anchor the treatment of landscape in the political discourse. Starting points for this are, of course, the discussion about climate and nature protection, but also urban transformation and urban-rural relations. In addition, according to Ilka Mecklenbrauck, small steps can be taken before the realisation of the big vision and temporary approaches can show success. An important aspect is also social communication and persuasion via images instead of bans, in order to prevent the emotionalised debate and break up old images.

Text: Annette Bathen
Photo: Ravi Sejk