anchor
Reviving a sleeping river: 'Backyard to 'Frontyard'
- There are many cases when the city
development neglects the full potentialities of the river and the city
uses it as a backyard; specially rivers with the smaller widths. This
thesis aims to find a micro-scale design solution to bring back the
river from the “backyard” to “frontyard” by using River Emscher as a
framework.
- Since the early 1990s, efforts to restore the Emscher to its natural
state have been making progress and with that, a group of cities is
going through a shared, simultaneous and comprehensive transformation.
It is more than a hundred years since a populated agricultural landscape
was transformed into an industrial metropolitan area, and the naturally
flowing Emscher became a manmade system of open sewers. The end of
mining subsidence now also makes it possible in this region to transform
the river and it’s subsidiary waterways into near-natural bodies of
water. This transformation offers a chance to give a new face to the
urban landscape of the region. - Henrichenburg, a city in the North-Rhine Westphalia area of Germany,
transformed from a small village into a city after the beginning of the
mining of coal and the production of coke and steel within the last
hundred years. Like other cities in this revolution, the Emscher near
Henrichenburg also faced the same fate of being a sewer system. In the
present day, the river Emscher still in a process of getting cleaned and
within three years, the Emscher will not radiate anymore. So, it
creates vast opportunities to wake this sleeping river up again. Based
on these opportunities, there can be a lot of scopes for urban planning
and landscape designs. This study will aim to conserve the potentials
and challenges to create a connection between the city and the river.
Status: School Project
Location: Essen, DE
My Role: Master's Thesis
Additional Credits: Prof. Dr. Nicole Uhrig
M.Eng. Marvin Baggen
