Evolution
With the last runoff from Blast Furnace 5 in 1985, production at the Thyssen blast furnace works in Duisburg Meiderich came to an end. At the same time this was the start of an extraordinary story of development.
If you set off today to climb to the viewing platform of the blast furnace, which is 70 metres high and accessible to all, you will be astonished by the panorama that confronts you. Continuous remodelling of the surroundings has converted an industrial waste land into a unique adventure park for both young and old.
The vision of a new kind of natural and cultural Landscape Park incorporating industrial features first emerged in 1989. With the support of private sponsoring and with an eye to the Internationale Bauausstellung Emscherpark [Emscher Park International Construction Exhibition], the Duisburg City Council resolved to implement the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park project.
Based on the designs of Professor Peter Latz and Partners, a Landscape Park that is neither a park nor a landscape in the original sense of those terms has been created on an area measuring over 200 hectares in the north of Duisburg. If you take a tour of the site, familiar descriptive concepts will not take you very far. Here you will find natural vegetation growing alongside deliberately designed green spaces and garden areas, all on a ground base that has been shaped by the industrial past - disused railway tracks, for example. This gives the visitor the opportunity of observing Nature from a completely new angle.
In the summer of 1994 the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park was presented to the public and opened to visitors for the first time. Already on this occasion of the park's official opening, there were more than 50,000 visitors. Ten years later, the park is now being visited by more than 500,000 people every year..
