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Oberhausen was the first city to emerge from the Ruhr industrial heartland, incorporated in 1862 as Germany's steel and coal economy hit its early peak. For a century the city poured itself into iron, coal, and glass -- the former Saint-Gobain glassworks once employed thousands. When the heavy industry collapsed in the 1980s, Oberhausen faced the challenge common to all Ruhr cities: what to do with the enormous infrastructure it had built. The answer came partly in 1994, when the Gasometer Oberhausen -- a cylindrical gas storage tank 117 meters tall and 67 meters wide -- was converted into an exhibition space. The interior offers a genuinely vertiginous experience: you stand inside a cylinder nearly 70 meters across, looking up at a ceiling that seems impossibly distant.

CentrO, the shopping and entertainment complex that opened in 1996 on the former MAN factory site, became one of the largest shopping centers in Germany and brought an unexpected consumerist energy to a former industrial wasteland.

The Lyric Theatre and the Ludwig Galerie Schloss Oberhausen -- a baroque palace housing an art museum with a Picasso collection -- remind visitors that the Ruhr's cultural ambitions ran alongside its industrial ones. The area forms part of the Industrial Heritage Trail that links 25 anchor points across the Ruhr, an itinerary for anyone interested in how Europe's most productive industrial region is renegotiating its own past.