Duisburg Inner Harbour Masterplan

Duisburg, in the heart of the Ruhr valley, is a city in the process of reinventing itself following the decline of its traditional heavy industries. In 1991 an international competition was held to establish a masterplan for the urban renewal of the Inner Harbour - the largest inland harbour in the world. It provided an opportunity to test, at a larger scale, ideas about mixed use and sustainability then being developed for the nearby Microelectronic Park.

The Inner Harbour occupies an 89-hectare site close to the city centre. The masterplan aims to draw the life of the city to the waterfront, combining new construction with the selective refurbishment of existing buildings to provide housing, offices and light-industrial uses together with a wide range of social and cultural amenities. A guiding principle was to create a flexible framework that would allow individual elements to be developed independently over time. New infrastructure and public amenities were put in place first to establish the harbour as an attractive place in which to live and work. A tree-lined promenade was created along the waterfront and new watercourses were excavated as armatures for new housing development. Arranged in five-storey terraces, the new housing blocks face on to the water or inland on to the streets where they enclose communal gardens.

Future developments include the landmark Eurogate, situated on the harbour's northern bank. It will provide five levels of public facilities with terraces at the water's edge, together with parking for the entire harbour area. It incorporates a south-facing photovoltaic wall that will be able to supply the new buildings energy needs or, with the advent of electric cars, recharge parked vehicles. The practices work in the city demonstrates that, given the trend towards clean, quiet industries, the potential exists to reinvigorate declining urban areas and create sustainable communities for the future, which combine places to live, work and play. In place of the zoned and functionally segregated city of the twentieth century, it offers a new twenty-first century paradigm of mixed use in the inner city.

Client: City of Duisburg/IDE Competition Consortium
Consultants: Kaiser Bautechnik