Bochum and Opel – that has been a partnership with great benefits for both sides for decades. The car manufacturer helped the Ruhr area city to accelerate structural change and to shed its coal and steel image. In return, he benefited from the large workforce and the good transport links in the region. In the best times for Opel, at the beginning of the 1980s, around 23,000 people worked in the plant that the carmaker built in 1962 for one billion Deutschmarks. They produced 300,000 cars a year.
But at the end of 2014 it was over. In the competition with other, much more efficient locations, Bochum had lost out. Those responsible did not wait until the last car rolled off the assembly line to develop future plans for the location. “At the same time as the closure process, we were thinking with various stakeholders about how to proceed,” remembers Enno Fuchs, who was responsible for the delicate e-mobility plant at Opel in Bochum at the time. Everyone involved quickly agreed on a vision: the conveniently located 700,000 square meter area at the intersection of the A43 and A44 motorways should be used to profile Bochum as a city of knowledge and innovation.
A lot has happened since then. Anyone walking around the site today needs a lot of imagination to imagine where the several hundred meter long Opel production line once was. Where the paint shop was and how the car manufacturer managed to compensate for the handicap of a height difference of 22 meters that the site has.
Grönemeyer once sang about the “pulse of steel” – the times are over
The halls have long been torn down and the rubble cleared. During the meter-deep preparation of the soil on which a colliery and a coking plant had stood until 1958, the workers came across large amounts of contaminated material. The conversion costs add up to more than 150 million euros. The federal government and the state made funding of 75 million euros easy, Opel contributed a double-digit million amount. Big sums. But the area in the Laer district, southeast of the center of Bochum, has potential. Raising this is the task of Bochum Perspektive 2022 GmbH, in which the city (51 percent) and Opel (49 percent) hold shares.
It looks like things are on the right track. “Around two thirds of the available commercial and industrial space is marketed. This alone will create more than 6,000 jobs by 2024,” explains Enno Fuchs, today managing director of Bochum Perspektive 2022 GmbH. The creators have named the site “Mark 51 ° 7” – an unusual name. A name that sounds like a new beginning and a future. And it fits very well with the clientele that the marketers want as settlers: technology-oriented companies, start-ups and research institutes that, in close collaboration with the nearby Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), are supposed to show that the 365,000-strong city is not one “Pulse of steel” has, as Herbert Grönemeyer once sang in the declaration of love to his hometown (“Bochum”). Knowledge and innovations create jobs and mean the future – that is the idea that guides the Bochum Perspective 2022 Society.
But it should still not work entirely without the old economy and without a considerable number of semi-skilled instead of highly specialized workers. “We also rely on a mixture for reasons of risk diversification,” emphasizes Fuchs. The Deutsche Post DHL Group plays an important role on this path. The logistics group had already acquired around 140,000 square meters of space on the former Opel site in 2016 and built one of its largest parcel centers in Germany there. The opening was in November 2019. Since then, up to 50,000 items per hour have been sorted there on an area the size of five soccer fields. The delivery vehicles are loaded at 330 gates. The parcel center is supplied with electricity and water via its own combined heat and power unit.
Connection to the motorway and low land costs, that attracts many
DHL has invested well over 100 million euros in the location. “The settlement caused a sensation in the real estate industry and was a real door opener for further marketing,” says Fuchs. He is confident that he will be able to inspire other logistics companies for Mark 51 ° 7. Its greatest asset: the location has good connections to several motorways. In addition, the property costs are significantly lower than in other metropolitan areas, such as Frankfurt or Stuttgart.
The only relic of the Opel era on the site is the listed former administration building of the car company. Here, behind red brick walls, Europe’s largest online retailer for baby and children’s clothing, babymarkt.de, moved into around 7,000 square meters at the beginning of the year. The second user of the “O-Werk”, as the building is now called, will be the Ruhr University. It wants to offer students practical teaching, application-oriented research and concrete help for start-ups and start-ups. In addition, RUB institutions conduct research in future areas such as engineering and neuroscience.
The O-Werk is being developed by Aachener Landmarken AG. The project developer also laid the foundation stone for the O-Werk campus in October. Up to 70,000 square meters of office space are to be created here in several construction phases, which will connect with the former Opel administration building to form a modern office campus.
Subsidiaries of VW and Bosch have also already secured locations. You want to develop solutions at Mark 51 ° 7, how vehicles can be networked or encrypted to prevent unauthorized access. Together they will create more than 3,000 jobs. The close connection with the RUB and other universities in the region should help to find enough qualified applicants. “By offering highly trained young people attractive employment solutions, we can keep them here in the region,” emphasizes Michael Hey, Head of Real Estate & Facility Management at Bochum Perspektive 2022 GmbH.
In two years, he hopes, the remaining third of Mark 51 ° 7 will be marketed. It will probably take another few years until the site is fully developed and all buildings are erected. In the end, according to the vision, more than 30 companies will have settled on around 450,000 square meters. This means that the area will be much less densely developed than in the days of Opel. The car manufacturer had built on more than 90 percent of the 700,000 square meter area. Public was not intended on the company premises. The area was secured with high fences. That will be different at Mark 51 ° 7. Green areas, bike paths and attractively designed spaces should invite everyone to use the site.
– .
