Things were calm after the Romans, until the early Middle Ages. Heerlen is then mentioned in the legal figure of ‘Liberties’: Heerlen’s oldest core around St. Pancratius was then a walled and defensible area, to which some norms of the medieval borough charter applied under public law. At that time Heerlen was not granted town privileges either, but was placed in the third category of late-medieval rank and file.
The urban development of both Zenica and Heerlen stems from a dominant urge to colonise resource-rich inland areas. Just as present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina formed a colony within the Habsburg Empire, South-East Limburg was developed by engineers and railway builders from the Dutch East Indies.
Henri Sarolea, for example, the architect of the Herzogenrath (DE) - Sittard railway line, which opened in 1896 only seventeen years after the opening of the first railway line in Zenica, had gained experience in Sumatra under the leadership of J.L. Cluysenaer with the Ombilin railway line, the connection between the Ombilin mine, which opened in 1892, and the Emmahaven south of Padang. This colonial experience helped to rapidly kick-start the industrial exploitation of South-East Limburg.
The discovery of the natural gas field at Slochteren makes hard coal obsolete as a national fuel, leading to the rapid dismantling of the mining industry. Industrial mining came, saw and vanished before it had properly been built up. Like a grand pop-up event.
At the announcement of the closures, the socialists dreamed of a new society; there was hope for replacement employment. But over the years, and with the changing of political power, that promise faded. Economically speaking, the promise of replacement employment was hardly ever fulfilled. The urban fabric was unrecognocisally misformed in an Delirous Destruction and the opening of an NATO-base in a former nearby mine brought an influx of heroin abuse to the city’s inhabitants.
Not surprisingly, the decay of the city and citylife brougth about a braindrain: those who were talented enough went elsewhere, levaing behind a disoriented urban society who were left with big-city problems and the aftermath of one of the biggest economic restructering operations that ever took place in the Netherlands.
Today, fifty years after the collapse of the industry, Heerlen is doing okay. Some say it is still struggling with social-economic disadvantages, which is definitely the case, but younger generations and new EU-citizens see the potential of the city. Perhaps this is because they are not burdened by the past. After decades of urban shrinkage and decay, the city experiences modest new growth, largely because of non-Dutch citizens.
Heerlen is in-between growth and shrinkage, between backward- and forwardleaning. Which way strongly depends on how new citizens will feel welcomed and if they feel Heerlen is the place where they build a future.
This dives in the origins of the city: a city built on migration from all over the place, with a language that is neither a dialect nor the official Dutch language. This remix of culture and background, of ages and ideologies, will define if growth is here to stay.
For cycling or hiking enthousiasts, for mural tour enthousiasts, there is a lot to see.