Coal and Culture: A Tale of Two Cities
From Germany’s Ruhr Valley to the Hunter Valley in Australia. Why structural change needs to look different in countries with a colonial past.
I grew up in a mining city in Germany right in the heart of the Ruhr Valley — an amalgamation of municipalities that make up the largest urban area in the country. Germans often refer to this region as der Kohlenpott, literally meaning the coal bucket, in a nod to the area's long history in coal and ore mining.
When we were kids, we travelled to the Baltic Sea for our annual family summer vacation. When people learned about our hometown, they would often jokingly ask my sisters and me if we enjoyed finally being able to see the blue sky.
We never got the joke.
As far as we were concerned, the sky at home had always been blue since the structural change of the region was well underway in the early 90s. We had no memory of a time when coal dust and smoke from belching blast furnaces filled the air.
Given the region's history though, it's no wonder it was struggling to shake its grimy image. At the height of industrialisation, nearly 300 mines were operational in the Ruhr Valley, which became the country's industrial heart. After World War II…
