From the city of steel to Germany’s ‘China City’: economic restructuring, the EU–China transcontinental railway and infrastructure-led development in Duisburg

Abstract

This paper critically evaluates the prevailing World Bank recommendation for city-regions to drive infrastructure-led development through targeted spatial plans. Introducing a novel analytical framework to conceptualize Duisburg's evolution into the primary European gateway for the EU–China transcontinental railway, the paper demonstrates how key actors and institutions operating across multiple scales enabled this previously deindustrializing German city to benefit from the new transcontinental rail connection. It argues that one-off spatial planning is insufficient for actualizing infrastructure-led development: this process involves a dynamic interaction with inherited industrial pathways that recursively stimulates the repurposing and/or the revision of infrastructure-oriented developmental plans.