Next year, that era will come to an end when this mine closes. The Ruhr Valley is in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Coal and steel plants have fallen quiet, one by one, over the course ...

It’s the Ruhr’s only UNESCO World Heritage Site and has been called the world’s most beautiful coal mine. A trip up a long escalator brings us to the former coal washing station.

Next year, that era will come to an end when this mine closes. The Ruhr Valley is in the midst of a remarkable transformation. Coal and steel plants have fallen quiet, one by one, over the course ...

Bottrop sits in the Ruhr Valley, a dense stretch of towns and suburbs home to 5.5 million people. Some 500,000 miners once worked in the region’s nearly 200 mines, producing as much as 124 ...

In the drab coal-mining towns of the Ruhr and the Saar, the mood was as grey as the fall weather that lay over the countryside in a chill and foggy blanket. The roll of muffled drums echoed ...

In March, I traveled to Germany’s Ruhr Valley (Ruhrgebiet) as a teaching assistant for an urban planning studio at Columbia University. The purpose of the studio was to look at a small site in ...

It’s part of the wider Emscher Park initiative, a multi-billion-euro project to restore, create and connect green spaces along a 300-square-mile (nearly 800-square-kilometer) span of the Ruhr that was ...

Essen’s enormous coal mine, the Zeche Zollverein, which had been shut since 1986, had been converted into an arts centre: several galleries, a concert hall, and a cutting-edge design museum ...

The Ruhr region is called the Ruhrpott in Germany, an affectionate and deprecating term that translates as something like “Ruhr Rust Bucket.” It’s known for mines and factories, s… ...