New Labour

The Ruhr district, former backbone of Germany's post-war industrial recovery, is undergoing a process of redefinition. At this year's International Tourism Fair in Berlin, the area was presented enthusiastically with slogans like 'NY, Tokyo, Ruhr district'. This optimism underlined the fact that, given Berlin's fragmented history, Germany hasn't had a central metropolis for 50 years: it has been rural sites that blossomed as tourist spots, providing cultural and historic landscapes, natural attractions or idyllic old towns and villages. But the shrill voice of a concerted image-improvement campaign is propelling the Ruhr towards structural change. CentrO, allegedly Europe's largest shopping mall is there, along with the world's biggest sculpture of an elephant - and Andre Heller's Meteorit, a 35 million DM museum-as-theatre of the senses. This is on a par with the monumentalism celebrated in the area's cultural legacy, the dinosaurs of the industrial age: an agglomeration of vast mines and collieries which, now defunct, are being refashioned as museums.

While travel agencies with names like Tour de Ruhr are more concerned with presenting the region as thematic slices entitled 'tradition', 'structural change', or 'water and energy', the International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Gelsenkirchen has been assiduously restructuring whole regions devastated by industrial progress. Its centrepiece is Emscher Park, an industrial themepark stretching for 100 square kilometres - an area that includes 17 cities. It is as much a tourist attraction as a testing ground for the future of landscape planning, offering people the opportunity to work in former industrial sites and live in remodelled labourers' housing.

The Ruhr is not just being repackaged along ecologically correct lines, it is also being recodified on a highly ideological level, its rhetoric suspended between the grammar of Pop and the vocabulary of corporate culture. After decades of embodying Utopia (simultaneously serving as a projection space for the political left and right) the Ruhr district came to nurture the dystopian imagination. Dilapidated industrial complexes, poisoned nature and the rise of unemployment meant that the Ruhr coal basin came to represent the dark side of Germany's tedious transition from industrial to post-industrial times. Now the IBA is looking to the future, turning the decaying architecture into a Utopian adventure playground.

While one aim is to tackle the area's own history through catharsis (former workers from the region are being targeted as potential visitors), an equal emphasis is being placed on universal themes. In fact, there is a sense that the regional is being elevated to universal importance. With shows such as Christo's project for the defunct gasometer of Oberhausen (visible from CentrO) or Richard Serra's single 2001-style Monolith on top of a lunar-looking slag heap, Mankind's process of civilisation is filtered and made palatable through art. When, back in 1989, the IBA/Emscher Park planning bureau initiated a competition to develop a logo embodying the Gestalt of this temporally and spatially dislocated project, the prize-winning design had a modular quality: like parts of a jigsaw puzzle. The logo - three elements of the same shape but differing in size and colour, manoeuvring as if attempting to plug into each other - sheds light on what so-called New Industrial Culture is supposedly all about: the tripartite relationship between intelligent machines, immaterial goods and sensory perception. But perhaps the Ruhr district's process of transformation is best grasped if seen against the background of our changing notions of work.

This shift is epitomised by Heller's Meteorit in Essen. Heller, known for his highly successful touring circus as much as his multidisciplinary funding techniques, was commissioned by the RWE energy company to conceive a museum for the firm's centenary. RWE, one of Germany's five largest industrial groups, invited Heller to stage his magical world on company property. The artist/clown with a 60s-Vienna-coffee-house-chansonnier past answer-ed the call by digging deep into the ground: where once workers and machines extracted energy, now strolling visitors dive into world (art) history. The labyrinth is a downward spiral more than twelve metres deep, in which sounds, interactive experiential laboratories and ambient rooms become the intoxicating stations en route to the futuristic past of mankind.

The message of Meteorit is clear: post-industrial labour is playful - an immersive realm of the senses. The message is familiar; movies such as A City Beneath the Sea and Meteor in the 60s and 70s, and Deep Impact and Armageddon in the 90s, have presented meteorites as alien: metaphors for the technologies disrupt our lives. But Heller reinvests the cultural myth with 'positive energy', sending out a redeeming message to those recently relieved of their jobs by technology: there's life after catastrophe.

Emscher Park places physical emphasis on the industrial past: sites such as the Kokerei Zollverein in Essen overwhelm the visitor with their vastness. The human figure, once forced into the tortuous Chaplinesque rhythm of technology, and later replaced entirely by machines, now, ironically, stands once again in the spotlight. However, within the excavated, polished architecture, the relations underlying Disneyland-type theme parks are inverted. The human body is reduced to a Lilliputian figure overwhelmed by architectural bodies that are weighted with history's presence. The atmospheric walk along the mine complexes immediately suggests images from films as yet unshot, at once futuristic and archaic, and a pernicious magic haunts these off-world colonies.

The memory of this sunken world is accessible to the public only after its downfall. For years the Ruhr was home to invisible architecture. Now it supplies urban and rural areas with energy of a different kind. The impending mass exodus of the remaining industries of the Ruhr basin is pre-ordained, yet the future of the Emscher Park isn't. Its temporal nature and general decentredness, perhaps a major element of its attraction today, could prove problematic later. The region's highways are already signposted with advertisements for Oberhausen's CentrO shopping complex, which, camouflaged as regular road signs, read 'CentrO - Neue Mitte' - the phrase translates as 'New centre', but is also suggestive of Schröder's equivalent to 'New Labour'.