In 1988, the government of the region decided to organize the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Emscher Park, which took place between 1989 and 1999, in order to take measures regarding the urban, social, cultural and ecological development of the area, to face a situation that eventually any industrial area must face.
The Ruhr has been one of the most important industrial areas of Germany, the industrial facilities in the area covered approximately 200 hectares between the coal mines, the production facilities of coke and the steel factories as well as deposits of material and the rail network. The industry began disappearing from the area, with the closure of the Thyssen plant in 1983 as a critical point, leaving behind a big amount of areas in decline and with high levels of pollution, of both soil and water.
The large-scale performance that has meant the Emscher Landscape Park has been based on previous plans by the Ruhr Regional Association, that thought of the creation of a green spaces network in order to structure and organize the territory between the cities of the Ruhrgebiet. To cover a space as large as this one with a unique performance would have been almost impossible, but the International Building Exhibition (IBA) was thought as a "workshop for the future of former industrial areas" to promote, with limited interventions, the improvement of the people's living conditions within the region.
The IBA served to give a major boost to the territorial project, which involved collaboration between the 17 local communities through wich it spands, with the independent development of various projects among which are the creation of an extensive network of pedestrian and bicycle paths, the construction of an underground water channel, the reconversion of industrial spaces in venues such as the Landscape Park Duisburg Nord or the Zeche Zollverein Industrial Complex, and the location of panoramic view points on top of the mine dumps.
