Since the 1970s, the Ruhr area, Germany’s former industrial heart, is in a painful process of economic transition. Having grown up there I was alway interested in initiatives for rehabilitating derelict industrial sites, combining landscaping with the protection and preservation of the cultural heritage of the industrial past.

The Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord was one of the lighthouse projects of the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park (IBA) aiming at the ecological, economic and social renewal of the Ruhr area from 1990 to 1999, and devising new uses for former industrial wastelands.

An inspiring article titled “The Ecology of Unpredictability” published by Matt Dallos, a garden designer and a Ph.D. candidate in history at Cornell University, on placesjournal.org reflects on how landscape architects have used the existing vegetation of birches, at typical tree at derelict sites, as starting points and key elements for transforming and reshaping these sites in an ecologically sustainable manner.

A birch trunk is a slash of light. Even people who typically ignore trees tend to notice them.

One of the examples of such projects in this article is the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, where existing birches were allowed to continue colonizing areas of disturbed and polluted soil around the abandoned metalworks, forming thickets and creating a new quality of open spaces. The other two examples described in the article are the more recent projects Tate Modern in London, England, and the Jardin des Étangs Gobert in Versailles, France.