Industrial Legacy and Unfinished Transformation in Germany's Ruhrgebiet

Germany’s Ruhr region – the Ruhrgebiet – is the largest urban agglomeration in the European Union’s most populous country, yet it remains absent from international debates on metropolitan transformation. Home to over five million people across 53 municipalities and lacking a dominant central city, it bears the legacies of two centuries of upheaval – both material and symbolic. Contaminated land, mining subsidence and fragmented governance coexist with listed collieries and carefully curated industrial heritage.Bringing together economists, historians, geographers, planners, sociologists and climatologists, this volume examines what these transformations have produced. Its chapters explore memory politics, the knowledge economy, social inequality and superdiversity, polycentric governance, environmental justice, climate adaptation and sustainability transitions – from river restoration to the hydrogen economy. Together, they resist both the celebratory narrative of a region that transformed coal dust into culture and the dismissive view of a permanent problem case. What emerges instead is an unfinished metropolis, where each transformation opens onto the next rather than reaching a settled state.Students, researchers and policymakers in urban and regional planning, human geography, regional studies and environmental policy will find the Ruhrgebiet treated not as a singular anomaly but as an archetype for old-industrial regions negotiating their futures.