Structural change has been changing the cities of the Ruhr area for decades. It’s a slow process that’s still going on. Who lives here, experiences this change very closely.

If you look at the district from the outside, it is difficult to see this development, because change is a slow phenomenon that only becomes visible in the boundary views between then and now.

In fact, the structural change describes the transformation of the Ruhr area, dominated by coal and steel, into the „Metropole Ruhr”. Once the coal and steel industry was the region’s leading economic sector.

With the change, many thousands of jobs have been lost, while more have been added outside the coal and steel industries.