Gelsenkirchen, in Germany's western Ruhr area, is the poorest city in the country. Garbage lies about in the streets and parks, and vacant and derelict apartments are a frequent sight. Every fourth person in work lives from social welfare payments as well, the average yearly income is the lowest in the whole of Germany at not even €18,000 ($18,762) and the unemployment rate is the highest, at more than 14%.

Being mayor of Gelsenkirchen is perhaps the hardest job of its kind in the country. Karin Welge has taken it on.

"Gelsenkirchen has a history unlike any other German city. This city became rich and prosperous incredibly fast. And then came the extremely brutal structural collapse," she told DW.

"Before 1960, we had almost 400,000 people living here. During the structural changes, this number went down massively to 258,000 at the time of the financial crisis. Half of the jobs paying social insurance contributions were lost," she said.

During the era of the "economic miracle" in former West Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s, the city flourished. It drew "guest workers" from Poland, Italy and Turkey and even rose to become the most important coal-producing city in Europe.

In 2008, the Westerholt mine ended operations as the last pit in Gelsenkirchen. But for half a century before that, the city had been going continually downhill.

Structural change despite empty coffers

Coal belongs to history; service industries and education are the future. But Gelsenkirchen is in the same situation as many other German cities: It simply has no money.

The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia stipulates how much the city of Gelsenkirchen is allowed to spend. And, according to Welge, this is what it hears: "You are not allowed to employ more people in the administration, and you are not allowed to invest more."

"That is although investment is most needed in places where things are fragile. We haven't built a school here since the 1970s," Welge says.

AfD profits from city's problems

In addition, the 2007 enlargement of the EU led to mostly uneducated people from Bulgaria and Romania coming to the city, who so far have largely failed to become properly integrated.

And that has political consequences. The Ruhr area was traditionally a stronghold for the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of which Karin Welge is also a member. But the times have gone when the SPD used to garner 60% of the vote in elections.

Instead, the populist far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has been making gains for years. From 2017, mistrust and Islamophobia saw a dramatic rise in what was once Germany's melting pot.

"The reputation that Gelsenkirchen had for years of being a melting pot of successful integration, with a good story of immigration to tell has pretty quickly turned into the opposite. And that opens the way for radical forces," Welge said.

Nordsternpark project: Bucking the trend

If there is one person who represents and understands the history of Gelsenkirchen with all its ups and downs, then it is Reinhold Adam. The 79-year-old toiled in the mines as a teenager, did a mining apprenticeship and later worked as an electrician in the Nordstern mine.

And it is onto this mine's premises that he takes guided tours today. His stories about miners and their comradeship often bring tears to the eyes of the visitors, some of who come from as far away as Canada, Japan and Australia.

After the mine was closed down in 1993, a landscape park was built on the 100-hectare (247-acre) industrial site that is visited every year by 200,000 people. Among its features are a climbing area, an amphitheater and a winding tower with an 83-meter-high(272-foot-high) lookout platform. Visitors taking in the panoramic view are always amazed at how green Gelsenkirchen is, Adam says proudly.

But despite the many efforts to make living in Gelsenkirchen really attractive, the AfD gained 21.7% of the vote at the European Parliament elections in 2024 and was just 1,600 votes away from coming first.

Adam cannot understand how this could have happened.

"Solidarity was always a strength of people in the Ruhr area; it was actually vital among the miners," he said. "But it has unfortunately been lost. Once people looked for solutions; today, the first thing they are concerned with is finding someone to blame."

But in his opinion, "we can't always ask the city and the state to help, we have to take action ourselves."

Trendy and multicultural: Kreativquartier Bochumer Strasse

Bochumer Strasse in the district of Ückendorf is one place where a lot of people have been taking action in the past few years. Here, dilapidated, ruined buildings in a no-go area have been turned into a "Modell und Kreativquartier" (Model and Creative Quarter) with cafes, galleries and a church that has been converted into an event location.

Many people have done voluntary work here, and the City Renovation Society (SEG) Gelsenkirchen and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia have subsidized projects and purchased properties, to help breathe new life into the district.

One of the volunteers is Kirsten Lipka. Since things reached their low point in 2016, things have been looking up in the district, she says.

"Nowadays, even students from Cologne are moving here because they can't afford to live there," Lipka says. "People have even come back from Berlin who say, 'we didn't like it there so much anymore. Ückendorf still has a kind of innocence."

Frank Eckardt, who was born in Gelsenkirchen and teaches today as an urban researcher at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, thinks Ückendorf is a godsend.

"For decades, there was a feeling of very great resignation here," he told DW. "You had the feeling that nothing is being done, we are broke. Just from a psychological point of view, it is very important for people to now have a place here where you see that something is happening. But we haven't reached the point yet where people say: 'Why should I leave Gelsenkirchen; it's cool here.'"

This article was originally written in German.

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