Essen

About Essen

Essen lies within Germany’s industrial belt, the Ruhr area. Originally, Essen was a collective of small farming communities, likely leading to the lack of a distinctive center today. It became a region dominated by coal and steel production, and heavy pollution followed. Eventually, the old mines were redesigned as art galleries, restaurants, or venues. Essen also added bicycle lanes and pedestrian areas, while allowing the vegetation to grow naturally. It has transitioned into a city deserving of the 2017 European Green Capital Award, consistently meeting environmental standards and committing to the improvement and development of sustainability.

Policy

Rather than focusing on the past, as the U.S. government seems determined to do, the Essen metropolitan area has shut down all of its coal plants and focused on reinventing the city. This reinvention has been largely successful in a relatively short period of time; in fact, Essen is being looked to as a model for its speedy transition. Greening the city included making many parks, including a park on top of a graveyard. In Chempark nearby, an old landfill was covered and is now a park. To watch out for the workers who were displaced by a dying coal industry that then shut down completely, retraining programs created new opportunities for those workers. Rather than gearing them into one specific area, retraining programs reoriented workers into a variety of areas - none of which would harm the environment. Essen is also creating more and more bike infrastructure, hoping that commuters will soon see that as an acceptable, maybe even preferable option.

Urban Design

Essen has successfully evolved from an industrial city of the past to a model for green and sustainable cities of the future. Having a vision for reinventing Essen was important for transitioning it from a mining town. This new vision for Essen, transformed it into a prosperous city replete with green and open spaces. These green investments have increased the air and water quality of the urban environment while creating a city for its citizens. Essen has used landscape urbanism to incorporate important functions through design. Green space not only serves as an attractive setting for the city, but it also provides numerous ecological services. These services include increasing urban air and water quality, decreasing urban heat island effect, increasing the capacity for an urban area to handle storm water, and increasing biodiversity and pollinators. Essen is replete with green and open spaces that citizens can enjoy that also assist with the city’s resiliency to climate change. Essen has become more of a livable city by cultivating green areas and cleaning up water bodies. Increased open space and parks have been accompanied by pedestrian trails and bike infrastructure, which serve as an avenue for citizens to enjoy while increasing the share of commuters who bike. Many of the new open and green spaces were converted from former brownfield sites into spaces that are clean and safe for people to enjoy. Converting brownfield sites into attractive green space can be a lesson for other industrial cities. By doing this, cities can take unattractive space that is not being fully utilized and turn it into a functional and beautiful setting that increases the environmental quality of the city. By investing in green infrastructure and jobs, Essen has become a prosperous city that its citizens can enjoy and be proud of.

Technology

Mobility

Essen has made strides in transportation with around 372 kilometers of cycle paths, not including the newly built RS1, the newest and fastest bicycle highway connecting many major cities near Essen. One strategy Essen implemented were mobility stations along the traditional public transport network. These mobility stations, known as Intermodal3, connect people to bike rental, car-sharing, and taxi hire services all in one locations to offer a variety of transport options and simplify transitioning between them. In junction with the new Intermodal3 stations, Essen has developed integrated smart transport systems such as a digital-car parking routing system which uses over 120 signboards to direct drivers to over 12,000 parking spots and online portals to create carpools with the car-sharing initiative. The RUHRAUTOe project allows drivers to hire 20 electric cars from 11 locations in the city and functions much like Uber. On a regional level, the Ruhrpilot project serves as a regional traffic management system which provides transportation and manages traffic through the eyes of the Traffic Eye Universal (TEU) system. The TEU system informs the digital parking routing system and manages traffic flow; these programs combined with carpooling and multi-modal transportation initiatives reduce traffic congestion and CO2 emissions in Essen.

Citizen Involvement Applications Developing Essen

Citizen involvement has been cited as one of the driving factors for Essen’s successful transition to the greenest city in Europe. Not only have citizen produced over 200 project ideas to greenify Essen, but Essen has also deployed the wide use of certain apps to collect data. ‘GreenApes’ is an application used to share information on achieving greater sustainability in daily life. As a reward for sharing ideas, citizens are given points which can be redeemable at certain stores. Creating a mobile platform increases visibility which in turn creates more interest in sustainable ideas. As citizens demonstrate more interest in sustainable initiatives, the city will respond by developing these ideas and therefore building a more sustainable and livable city. Another online tool Essen has developed, the Noise Action Plan, encourages citizen input through an online forum to brainstorm ideas for reducing noise pollution in the city. Sourcing information and ideas from citizens is an intelligent use of technology and further connects and invests people in the projects the city decides to pursue. Additionally, other cities pursuing similar noise pollution problems can source this data from Essen and use it to inform their own projects.

Energy Performance

Since their coal mining days, Essen has embraced the energy transition and shifted towards renewables. Currently, Essen alone uses a combination of waste, solar-thermal energy, local heating from biomass, cogeneration, geothermal, photo voltaic systems and hydroelectric power. In order to utilize all forms of renewables efficiently, Essen is drafting an Energy Utilization Plan which will specifically benefit cogeneration, heating networks, waste heat recovery, and all other renewables in general. The Eschmer River Conversion Project has transformed the wastewater treatment plant into a hybrid power plant which by 2018 will produce more energy than is demanded. A biomass heating plant in Gruga Park provides a heating network for 17 buildings in its vicinity, and the STEAG Fernwärme AG project retrofitted a heating plant into a biomethane-fired cogeneration plant. The Energy Utilization Plan also plans to make joint heating districts giving Essen access to gas and steam power plants, waste heat from industrial plants, waste incineration plants, and heat from biogas cogeneration. The transition to renewables from their coal mining days shows great progress in Essen as a city and its people. In the future, Essen plans to diminish their energy demand and further develop their smart renewable sector. By investing in smart renewables now, Essen will be able to install more energy saving technologies, reduce their carbon emissions, and greatly expand their renewable sector to generate over 1000 GWh/year by 2050. By updating their energy grid with sensors and transitioning power plants to multifaceted generation plants, Essen will be able to monitor and control energy fluctuations, stabilize the energy grid, supply energy demand with renewables, expand their renewable energy repertoire, and reduce carbon emissions and energy costs.

Health & Wellness

Essen’s dedication to converting old infrastructure into biking paths has a lot of possibilities. While the autobahn is legendary for no speed limit, commuters are becoming frustrated with the amount of traffic. With 13 foot wide lanes assigned just for them, and walking paths separated by grass to prohibit any interference, bicycling in Essen seems to offer a less stressful, quicker way to travel. People traveling to and from the neighboring city Mulheim are already finding the bicycle autobahn faster than the car version, and recent switchers to cycling for commutes are already reporting massive amounts of stress relief. While in the end the highway will stretch 66 miles, over a million people will live within a mile of the planned path, and 50,000 cars are expected to be removed from the road. All in all, the cycling plans of Essen will provide physical activity, stress relief, and decreased carbon dioxide in the air, which can be associated with poor health ailments such as acute and chronic asthma, and a variety of other respiratory and cardiovascular problems.

The previous large mining area, however, is known more as the European Green Capital. Over half the city’s territory is green and open space created in part through brownfield regeneration. The River Emscher which crosses over the city was long considered biologically dead due to the mining pollution and open waste water canal system in place. However, in major investments by the city, the river was brought back to life, water quality has improved dramatically, and fish even inhabit the waters now. A good ecosystem of animals and plants is crucial to health; biodiversity keeps nature balanced. Humans rely on these ecosystems, and elements such as pollinating insects, to provide us with food. The focus on green will only help in creating a healthier city - people are happier and feel better in green surroundings, and are more inclined to participate in social activities and exercise. Additionally, trees, shrubs, and even mosses help fight the adverse health effects of air pollution. As a city that had no trees just 60 years ago, Essen has embraced the idea that no cause is a lost cause when it comes to environmental health - even bringing rivers back from the dead is possible.