LOST & FOUND:Reclaiming the Post-Industrial Landscape
by Mike Jacobs
A landscape of concrete and rubble is all that the bulldozers and wrecking balls have left behind. This wasteland with the remnants of deep rooted foundations and rusting scraps serves as a constant visual reminder of drastic economic change. Its scale and presence envelops the riverbanks which cut through the heart of the city. Past the banks on the north side of the river the village center has been able to sustain its 18th-century charm. Main Street and its vicinity, as a result of intensive preservation efforts, continue to attract visitors, and annual cultural events emphasize the strong awareness of the area's ethnic roots. On the south side however, the blue-collar neighborhoods of rundown rowhouses and boarded-up storefronts more aptly reflect the economic hardships. Only the college, with its transient population, remains a constant in the midst of this decay.
Is
this the future of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the latest American casualty
in the continuing industrial collapse? Why should we believe otherwise?
Today the image of the rust belt stretches well beyond the confines of
the Midwest. From the urban to the semi-rural, traces of industrial abandonment
are visible. As the 21st Century approaches, we as designers must realize
the potentials in resurrecting these de-industrialized cities. To what
degree do these landscapes become reinhabited? Can public space be reclaimed
and redefined? Strategies aimed at economically revitalizing these areas
encompass issues of architecture, planning and preservation. Sustaining
the local character of the past is integral with providing an economically
stable future.
The economic trends that have affected the American steel industry, have occurred similarly in modernized countries around the globe. Its relocation and downsizing has created identical landscapes and similar physical consequences. These sites, latent with the potential for new planning, are currently being addressed at a regional scale in the German Ruhrgebiet. The realized efforts of the IBA Emscherpark project have focused on an integration of heritage, reuse and new use.
For almost 200 years,
the Ruhrgebiet has been home to the majority of the German coal and iron
& steel industries. Today, the mining and steel industries in this
region have disappeared. Aside from the economic distress, what remains
are vast brownfields and the decaying traces of industrial existence. 
The large mine and mill structures, which are densely organized along the
70 kilometer industrial spine of the Emscher River, mark this region's
proud industrial past.
The IBA Emscherpark project addresses the economic crisis of this region with an attempt at integrating new use and new identity into a new reading of public space. Intervention into the region's deserted industrial infrastructure is rooted in issues of ecology, economy and reuse. At a regional scale, public space is being reclaimed in the form of purified water channels and 'rails to trails' projects which provide the conceptual and physical links between the more localized interventions. For decades, the Emscher and its tributary links have sustained unfiltered industrial waste. The reversal of this contamination as well as new infrastructural water waste managment is the major environmental focus of the project. At the local scale, urban parks as well as preservation / reuse projects have begun a process of redefining the cities of the Ruhrgebiet and projecting a future within a context of the past.
National,
regional and local interests have come together to construct a new model
for future urban renewal. The success of Emscherpark as a sustainable concept
is already visible in the environmental reversal and preservation / conversion
of the 'contextual' infrastructure of the region. While the success of
incorporating new economies into the region still remains to be seen, the
emphasis thus far on cultural and communal programs, together with the
continuing industrial presence, has helped to renew this region's identity
and provide stability during a time of tremendous transition.
An American landscape comparable to the Ruhrgebiet exists in Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley. Until recently, the steel industry had defined this region. In the Eighties, the landscape of this region fell victim to the wrecking ball and ten years after steel production, very little has been done to physically alter the brownfield conditions. The majority of the rivers' edges, extending for miles outside Pittsburgh, are spotted with large tracts of bulldozed land. As a result, this land along the rivers, which has tremendous potential as public (or buildable) space, has been rendered inaccessible.
The fate of the Bethlehem site is presently undecided although demolition has begun on some mill structures. This city, although an insignificant urban entity, can be understood as a microcosm of a larger urban problem. If land and infrastructure are becoming accessible in the post-industrial city, how can new and appropriate program be imposed? Does opportunity exist for redefining the boundaries of public space? Can clues from Germany be applied to Bethlehem or must this city be subjected to a bulldozed condition that has proven only to exacerbate a condition of the present post-industrial urban landscape? Programming new public space is central to any incorporation of new use into urban sites at the scale of Bethlehem Steel. The ubiquitous presence of infrastructure already provides the physical extensions beyond site boundaries and implies to some degree a notion of public domain. Preservation / reuse in this case provides a meaningful conceptual framework into which new programs can be injected and grounded in the history and memory of place.
Mike Jacobs holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Lehigh University and is a candidate for a Master of Architecture 1997 at Columbia University.