The Great Healing Tour of Holland, Germany and Belgium
Ruhrkole Aktiengesellschaft, UNESCO World Heritage in the north of Essen, Germany. Listening to the tour instructor are project members from South Africa (Iyer design practice; Univen’s Department of Urban and Regional Planning as well as the Wits Mining Institute and Wits’ GCRO and the School of Architecture and Planning). Others are from the Netherlands (Delft’s Faculties of Environmental Technology and Design; Civil Engineering and Geosciences as well as Architecture and the Built Environment).
The tour on the remediation of postmining landscapes took place from the 11th to the 16th of April 2023. It is for this reason of landscapes reclamation and preservation, amongst other research goals, that the excursion is titled the Great Healing Tour. Samkelisiwe Khanyile and Ngaka Mosiane participated in this tour because the GCRO in partnership with the Wits School of Architecture and Planning, the University of Venda, the Wits Mining Institute as well as Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands are undertaking a research project called Long Durée of Urban Water-Energy-Food Nexus in post-mining landscapes. It is funded by the Dutch Research Council and the National Research Foundation (South Africa) through the Ronde Merian Fund.
The road tour started in Rotterdam, where we could have visited a number of sites had it not been for the flight delays and cancellation in Johannesburg and overnight stopover in Doha. That said, those sites include the Blue City, named after its location (the indoor swimming pool complex), where amongst other activities participants study ‘waste’ across food, energy and water systems. The other site relates to soil remediation – its removal and cleaning. In particular, from the late 1900s the Keilehaven gas factory produced gas from coal, in the process contaminating the soil. It was closed and destroyed in the early 1970s (which itself added to soil contamination) following the mid-1900 competition the coal industry faced from increased oil supply as well as innovations in the production of natural gas and electricity. There were several other sites that we could have visited in Rotterdam, including the food garden (Voedseltuin), sponge garden (Sponstuin) and Getijdepark (River as Tidal Park).
Although a number of these sites are context specific, they are useful for inspiring innovative thinking around landscape remediation and sustainable living. In Culemborg, Holland, the Ecological Centre for Education, Information and Advice is a very interesting experiment on how to develop permaculture in an urban setting – an extensive environmentally and socially sustainable neighbourhood. Additionally, the development of food forest is another rural concept materialised in an urban environment. For the Voedselbos Amsterdam Zuidoost, residents and municipal officials collaborated in transforming urban greens into a public space food forest. It is a 56 hectares of mini-orchards and habitats and nectar-rich pocket woodlands, united through wildflower meadows in formerly intensively mown (and rarely accessed) urban lawns. Through walking exercises in the area, community members strategically chose urban greens for intervention based on green parcel proximity to their homes and the parcel’s contribution to biodiversity defragmentation.
The trip to Belgium exposed us to the repurposing of postmining site in Waterschei, a former industrial city. The project included the transformation of a former colliery into a business, technology and science park where renowned research institutions, start-ups, growth companies and global players in the energy sector, manufacturing industry and smart city applications come together. Rebranded ‘Thor Park’, the other projects include the transformation of a mining site, Winterslag, into a creative hub called C-mine and the renovation of the former main building of the Houthalen-Helchteren into GreenVille, a cleantech service centre, described as a unique incubator for businesses that operate in the circular economy.
It is the interventions in the coal postmining landscape that bring the European experiences even closer to our research area. We have noted above the growth of coal mining in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, and its subsequent closure by the seventh decade. The closure of coal mines in the southeast of the Netherlands, Heerlen, in the early 1970s brought about spatial inequality marked by the affluence of the city centre and socio-economic problems in its mining suburban areas (skills mismatch, emigration, unaffordable housing, unemployment, sex work, drugs and crime).
It is perhaps the German experience that could be inspirational in how the process of mine closure was handled. Faced with the reality of mine closure, the RAG Group (German Ruhrkole Aktiengesellschaft) was established to strengthen the demand for coal supplies, to facilitate diversification within the coal-producing industry, and to oversee the treatment of underground water at closed mines. The RAG Group is a partnership between mining companies and government that ensured that mine workers who had to retire early were paid wages that covered their entire working lives. In 2019, the RAG- Stiftung Foundation was formed to manage the RAG Group, which continues to ensure the treatment of underground water, to pump surface water away from contaminated mining shafts as well as monitor and purify groundwater, especially at coking plants. Overall, the trip has provided valuable research lessons and inspiration that are very critical at the start of the research process.