With some 100 projects, the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park in the Ruhr District was attempting to set quality building and planning standards for the environmental, economic and social transformation of an old industrialised region. The landscape park Duisburg Nord is one of these projects. The idea was to integrate, shape, develop and interlink the existing patterns that were formed by its previous industrial use, and to find a new interpretation with a new syntax. The existing fragments were to be interlaced into a new „landscape“.

In the landscape park Duisburg Nord, individual systems operate independently, such as the low-lying water park, the single fields and clumps of vegetation, the promenades at street level connecting parts of the town which were separated for decades, and the railway park with its high level promenades and the rail harp. They connect only at certain points through specific visual, functional or merely imaginary linking elements.

Created collectively as an artwork by engineers, the rail harp reflects the centennial history of the place. The huge land art slowly emerged again due to a cautious vegetation management with the help of the gardeners.