Esch’s identity doesn’t only contain iconic references to its industrial history. Also, a natural landscape shaped and transformed by industrial and cultural achievements surrounds the city. As they gaze out and listen beyond Esch from the Gaalgebierg, visitors figure out the landscape’s terrain and receive a taste of what they expect in the city centre: The urban planner Joseph Stübben proposed a garden city in his «Stadtbauplan für Esch an der Alzette», providing that visitors today can experience the city as astonishingly green. Stübben’s city plan is almost a hundred years old and laid the essential principle for today’s pocket parks in the city centre, green belts along watercourses and new parks and gardens within the industrial sites.
In the industrial era, parks were the city’s green lungs and meeting points where people could relax after heavy workdays and thus of utmost importance. The garden city soon turned out to be the counter-design of the industrial city’s dense block development, bringing city dwellers closer to nature and improving their well-being. Like in up-and-coming Belval, the residents in today’s develop­ments also have an essential need to live close to places for recreational purposes. Whether for relaxing, participating in social activities or playing sports, people prefer locations within walking and cycling distance and open to all. Exploring the walk’s various locations soon reveals which ones appeal better to the ear or are more fragile and sensitive to background noise and bothering noises in the foreground than others. Which public realm’s design is strong enough to set sounds pushing the noise into the background of perception?

Both the city of Esch and its main shopping promenade have the river Alzette in their names. However, we can neither see nor hear the river today in the city centre, through which the river Alzette has flowed underground since the beginning of the 20th century. Only a few locations refer to the river and bring acoustic memories to today’s reality. Also, access to the river is not always easy outside of the core city because it flows underground through channels or over brown­field land – the Terre Rouges – usually not accessible. The city structure reveals historical watercourses and moats, which later urban planning steps have covered with roads.
The names of streets and squares, old buildings, and industrial relics hark back to when the residents used the river water for commercial and functional purposes. However, it doesn’t have a particular meaning for today’s purposes so far. The river mostly remains without any public access and without being visible nor audible.
Existing urban spaces and particularly former industrial sites near the city centre will experi­ence further conversion into new purposes to serve the public needs for relaxation, cultural activities and housing. With this in mind, Esch’s collective memory for its water sounds could actively direct and modulate urban development steps. Discovering and exploring the blue noise thoroughly to support these steps moving forward possess inspiring potential.

Two modes of existence hover in this realm, unable to give peace to today’s reality: Almost inaudible echoes of thunder, heavy metal percussion and beats, and the fading of earthquake-like unrest still reach the innermost parts of our bodies. Now they are silenced but smouldering with vibrations of a ghostly afterlife. No, these giants in Belval will not rise again, but the titanic relics remain and will continue to overwhelm us, humans, for a long time.
Surprisingly, the panorama of history is interrupted by metamorphic architectural modules of the emerging post-industrial era. While we can witness how new parks, event venues, car parks, work­places, and housing evolve, we can understand how radically this environment is currently changing, and the sites of former steelworks and production buildings are being transformed. New possible routes through the acoustic terra incognita offer a still unknown audible variety of spaces, materials, shapes and dimensions.
No one knows yet whether the new voices of dark, still water mirrors and perfect glass cubes will be strong enough to clear the post/industrial reverberation of the permanent traffic patterns on land and in the air.