Phoenix from the Ashes: Dortmund's Cluster Policy and Urban Development Since 2000

Dortmund is a city on the eastern edge of the Ruhr Region in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, and today boasts almost 600,000 inhabitants. Over a period of many decades and until the relatively recent past, the image of the city was dominated by the backbone of its industry: coal mining, steel industry and beer production and the ancillary production and service processes. In 1970, 28,000 people were still employed in the steel industry with several thousand more jobs in related sectors such as mining, coke plants and local transport businesses. As coalmining moved northwards, the local pits began to disappear with the last pit in Dortmund closing in 1987. From then onwards, the local steelworks obtained most of their coke from other towns, and this often included cheap imported coal. In the course of this far-reaching structural change, Dortmund lost around 80,000 jobs from 1960 onwards. From 1970, Dortmund’s most successful economic year since the Second World War, employment dropped from 275,000 to reach 225,000 in the year 1999, with the job gap (including both the unemployed and hidden unemployed) estimated at around 60,000 in 1998, when the unemployment rate briefly reached around 18%. In spite of considerable gains in the tertiary sector it was not possible to compensate for the massive job losses sustained in Dortmund’s traditional core sectors. Dortmund’s economy certainly seemed to be on its last legs at the end of the last century. The city’s long and sucAbstract This paper discusses Dortmund’s municipal economic development policy, in particular during the period 2000-2010 in the context of the “Dortmund-project”, a strategic concept designed at the end of the last millennium. Its core elements and key projects are presented in the following. We draw much attention to the interplay of cluster policy and urban development. In an earlier paper, Becker and Hermann (2013) had discussed some of other important milestones reached in the context of structural change in Dortmund, with a particular focus on the development of the TechnologieZentrum (=Technology Center) and the TechnologiePark (=Technology Park) Dortmund from its beginning in 1984. The “dortmund-project” was not addressed in detail. This present article and their paper are complementing one another.