ruhr

The coal industry in Germany mostly happened in hughe cities of the Ruhr metropolitan area, and these are far from dying.

The Ruhr valley is part of the reason for this: energy sources (coal) and minerals (iron, copper, etc) very close together.

Last time I was in the Ruhr (okay 20 years ago), C-classes were used as taxi cabs.

After WW1 France tried first through international (England) enforcement bodies, and then ultimately by occupation of the Ruhr valley (Germany's most productive region then).

I've always wondered why the Ruhr Valley isn't marketed/established as a techhub of sorts.

Eventually the Weimar inflated their currency until the French debt was worth nothing, workers in the Ruhr valley striked, and extremist political parties promising a return of German dignity flourished.

The train just happens to have a halt there¹, but 95% of the passengers get on in the Netherlands and the Ruhr Area, and won't get off until Austria (and vice versa).

In Western Germany, most region with very low life expectancy are those regions that were under strong economic pressure in recent decades (usually former mining areas, such as the Ruhr Area and the Saarland).

I remember being a passenger in an Audi 80 Avant with windsurf boards n that on the roof, traveling from the ruhr in northern Germany to southern Spain, in around 1985.

I used my DB50 card for many years to do weekend trips all over that part of Europe from the Ruhr area (okay, mostly to Amsterdam, I admit), and it was definitely a good investment.

I think also another factor is that Munich is monocentric, the urban core absorbed districts very quickly (most people wouldn't know it these days but Bavaria used to be very underdeveloped for a long time) whereas the Ruhr area or Berlin are much more decentralized urban agglomerations, growing over a longer time, making it a bit more chaotic and sprawlish and economically hit or miss.

We don't know whether atomic bombs would have been used on, say, Berlin or the Ruhr area (maybe even tactically, to speed up the allied advance in the west), but I think the USA would have used one, if only to send a message to the soviets.

> RUB For those not in-the-know, this is "Ruhr University Bochum".

About your examples, the first sentence of the Wikipedia article for Zimbabwe is: [1] "Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe began shortly after destruction of productive capacity in Zimbabwe's civil war and confiscation of private farms." While in Weimar Germany the French occupation of the Ruhr valley, the at that time most important industrial region of Germany, directly preceded the hyperinflation.

The French wanted to take the Ruhr, the industrial heartland in Western Germany and annex it into France.

Ironically the very last place in Europe that was liberated because the Allies bypassed it in their drive to the Ruhr.

Paris doesn't get smog from the Ruhr, mostly it is vice versa.