Citation: Greiving, S.; Gruehn, D.; Reicher, C. The Rhenish Coal-Mining Area—Assessing the Transformational Talents and Challenges of a Region in Fundamental Structural Change. Land 2022, 11, 826. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/land11060826 Academic Editors: Stephan Bartke and Sigrun Kabisch Received: 27 April 2022 Accepted: 23 May 2022 Published: 31 May 2022 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). land Article The Rhenish Coal-Mining Area—Assessing the Transformational Talents and Challenges of a Region in Fundamental Structural Change Stefan Greiving 1, * , Dietwald Gruehn 1 and Christa Reicher 2 1 Department of Spatial Planning, TU Dortmund University, 44227 Dortmund, Germany; dietwald.gruehn@tu-dortmund.de 2 Chair of Urban Design and Institute for Urban Design and European Urbanism, RWTH Aachen University, 52062 Aachen, Germany; reicher@isl.rwth-aachen.de * Correspondence: stefan.greiving@tu-dortmund.de Abstract: This paper addresses the extensive structural changes of the Rhenish coal-mining area in Germany. Coal mining was and still is a relevant economic activity throughout Europe and is the focus of many political and societal debates, as well as research activities in the Rhenish coal- mining area. The project DAZWISCHEN followed the concept of evidence-based planning and therefore identified, by means of a GIS-based analysis, the structural changes within the Rhenish coal-mining area for the conflicting thematic clusters for settlement development and open space. Moreover, we investigated the complex multi-level governance that the region is characterized by. The results suggest an increased pressure on blue and green infrastructure by new urban development, especially in the northern part of the Rhenish coal-mining area. On the other hand, the southern part of the Rhenish coal-mining area will be more likely to undergo a process towards an increase in green infrastructure. Thus, the future development of the whole area is segregated in two different development trends in the north and south parts. The complex governance structure in the Rhenish coal-mining area requires an in-depth view of the ongoing working processes in the development of ideas and visions for regional mission statements of different planning areas, levels, and network partners in a real-life laboratory. Keywords: structural change; coal mining; evidence-based planning; real-life laboratory; regional development 1. Introduction Coal mining was and still is a relevant economic activity throughout Europe. Due to its economic importance, the severe local environmental effects, and the given global climatic importance of fossil fuels such as coal, coal mining is the focus of many political and societal debates [1–4]. These debates focus in particular on the phasing out of coal mining that causes a couple of economic, social, and environmental structural changes. Structural change is defined as “a complex, intertwined phenomenon, not only because economic growth brings about complementary changes in various aspects of the economy, such as the sector compositions of output and employment, the organization of industry, the financial system, income and wealth distribution, demography, political institutions, and even the society’s value system, but also because these changes can in turn affect the growth processes” [5] (p. 2). In 2015, 128 coal mines operated in 12 European member states, with a total annual production capacity of 498 million tons. Germany is the largest producer (184 million tons annually), followed by Poland (135 million), Greece, and the Czech Republic (46 million tons each) [6]. The coal-mining industry and coal as a fossil energy source as a whole are significant contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, EU ETS emissions from EU Land 2022, 11, 826. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11060826 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/land