Competition entry Rheinpark Duisburg

AppreciationGerman Landscape Architecture Award 2007

Jury verdict: The industrial culture is being dismantled, people are moving into the neighbourhoods. What is disturbing is the contaminated soil. Sealing, forgetting and planting was yesterday. Analyzing, arranging and biologically detoxifying will be a matter of course tomorrow.

The Duisburg Rheinpark project reinterprets the relationship between ecology and design. Instead of a "green carpet", the injuries to the landscape caused by industry are made visible like a "graze wound" by using the industrial geology of the area as a starting point for the spatial arrangement. The solution is redevelopment and design at the same time.

The project owes its realization; however, it provides important impulses for the intelligent deconstruction of conversion areas: planning criteria and competitive bidding can be optimized. Geological surveys make economic and ecological sense if they are used as indicators for the deconstruction of industrial overburden. Symbolizing, visualizing the use of the earth, is better than hiding, plastic and grass as cover. Relocating is better than removing. Remove the low contaminated areas and apply to the toxic contaminated soils.