The Ruhr area always feels strange at first with the unfamiliar and such states can last for a long time. The all-new Marl city center that transformed the city introduced forward-looking future-oriented thinking in the 1960s became a challenge. Marl looked under his energetic mayor Rudolf-Ernst Heiland, to the future. City Council and Citizenship shared this view, a newly built city center wanting to stand for culture and education and with the means of urban development and architecture was trying to become a radiant landmark of a new urban life - and this together with the newly emerging chemical industry. Marl, the collieries and the chemical industry were considered prosperous secure unity thought, without work no culture and education, without culture and education there is no city. This is again highly current. Concern about community finances brings the radiance once again in distress. One fears her new shrinking. But without the conservation, care and meaningful use of these excellent architectures and their grand public space the city will come to a standstill. Fear is always a bad advisor. That has been aknowledged even in the barren times when the new center was established as a cultural achievement. What is the bond between chemistry and citizens, between work, culture and education today? What can and could give it away? Should you keep it out of sight like the New Economy proposes as the rich are getting richer and the City of Many transforms into a city of poor? The speaker shows ways of self-assertion of the city and citizens, also having the the chemical industry in mind. She does not like doom scenarios, one can always find new avenues of confidence and build cooperation.

Prof. Dr. Ingrid Krau is an architect and urban planner with the focus on urban research and urban development. Ingrid Krau has the further development Marl in sight for some time now. She went to school in Gelsenkirchen, went on studying architecture in Braunschweig and Berlin and did her doctorate in social sciences at the Free University of Berlin . When she returned to the Ruhr area, she became a member of the interdisciplinary planning staff of the city of Duisburg in 1973, has reasearched about the steel industry and became a consultant for the IBA-Emscherpark with her architecture and planning office in Bochum. In 1988 she took part in the Marl city center competition and received the 3rd prize. From 1994 she was a professor for urban planning at the Technical University of Munich. She never lost sight of Marl and the Ruhr area.

Baukultur in Marl is organized by the Skulpturenmuseum and the Adult Education Center in cooperation with the ruhrmoderne e.V. initiative. The event takes place at 6.30 p.m. in the insel VHS (Wiesenstraße 22, 45770 Marl) in room P1 and is free of charge - please register at 02365/50356699 or www.vhs-marl.de.