The Domestic Culture Trail
The Domestic Culture Day, Schüngelberg housing settlement, Photo: Büro stadtidee,
Dortmund/Lars Niemann
What have housing conditions been like in the Ruhr Metropolis over the centuries?
The huge variety of domestic housing – from tycoons’ villas to allotment huts, from wealthy Victorian industrialist areas to cooperative housing projects, high-rise apartment blocks in the 1970s to half timbered houses in the old village centres, all the way to canal house boats – reflects the wide range of idiosyncratic and contradictory living styles in the Ruhr itself. The Domestic Culture Trail will be presenting the huge variety of everyday domestic living styles in a regional context, featuring typical collieries settlements, successful and unsuccessful forms of housing, and unfashionable, newly discovered and carefully restored housing. For the Capital of Culture around 50 different types of housing will be “exhibited” and made accessible to the public along a special trail, designated in the form of a “tourist guide”.
Partners: monument preservers in the Ruhr, the Europäisches Haus der Stadtkultur e.V. (European House of Urban Culture), THS Wohnen GmbH, WIR Housing Society, the NRW Chamber of Architects