If the very idea of the European Capital of Culture is sometimes dismissed as a time of Brecht and circuses, it was at least clear from the outset that the Ruhr’s year in the spotlight was going to be a rather different kind of spectacle. The setting for the opening ceremony – the floodlit bowels of a gargantuan redundant coking plant – was an unlikely one, lent an additional note of surrealism by the snowstorm that accompanied the formalities. German president Horst Köhler resembled a park ranger; José Manual Barroso, president of the European Commission, donned a fur cap. Both addressed the assembled audience and TV cameras through driving snow. Dancers and musicians – including German rock idol Herbert Grönemeyer – performed on a stage gritted with salt, while spectators were handed brightly-coloured survival packs to ensure that hypothermia didn’t feature on the programme. If creating a warm glow had been the object of the exercise there are surely easier ways to do so, yet the combination of driving snow and dogged persistence conjured a genuine sense of occasion for the 100,000 participants.

The Ruhr is, perhaps surprisingly, Germany’s largest conurbation, with  5.3 million inhabitants – comfortably bigger than the capital, Berlin. It’s also the third biggest urban agglomeration in western Europe after London and Paris, yet if it glows brightly on night time satellite images of the continent, its place in the European urban pantheon has hitherto been rather more low-key. Perhaps that’s simply due to the lack of a single dominant city: the region’s 53 municipalities merge into each other with no clear physical boundary. If the largest – Dortmund and Essen, with more than half a million inhabitants apiece – are substantial cities in their own right, neither one of them is quite big enough to claim the crown of regional ‘capital’; Dortmund is a shade bigger, but Essen is the more obvious geographical focus. The Ruhr has never been a single political entity – traditionally, it was split between the Rhineland and Westphalia – and yet, for all that, it has a strong sense of its own identity, which was fashioned from coal and steel during the heady years of the 19th century when it rose to become continental Europe’s greatest concentration of heavy industry.

As in other ‘rustbelt’ regions in Europe and North America the furnaces have long cooled and the mines closed. Travel east from Duisburg on the E40 autobahn in summer and, though you’re driving through the very heart of the Ruhr, the greenery is so luxuriant you’d be forgiven for failing to notice there was a metropolis there at all. Yet it is as a single metropolis that the inhabitants of the ‘Ruhrpott’ increasingly imagine their region, helped by a dense road network and affordable, frequent public transport that make an expedition to Oberhausen’s CentrO Mall or a night out in Bochum’s buzzy Bermuda Triangle as straightforward as shopping or playing locally.

Fierce pride in the region’s industrial traditions ensured that the approach to regeneration adopted so often elsewhere – of levelling the redundant steelworks, pitheads and slagheaps and starting again from scratch – was not imitated here. Instead, the cathedrals of industry have been reworked as visitor attractions and poles of new economic activity. In Duisburg, a former Thyssen steelworks has become the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, a surreal but compelling combination of post-modern garden and outsized industrial objet, floodlit to dazzling effect at night. In Oberhausen, the 117m Gasometer is now an exhibition space for outsized artworks. Meanwhile, Dortmund’s landmark Union brewery – once Germany’s largest – is now the centrepiece of an 80,000m2 development of offices for creative industries, from software developers to designers and musicians. The 1926-built brewery tower will this year become the new home for the city’s Ostwall art gallery.

Similarly, Essen’s Zeche Zollverein – a 1930s’ coalmine of Flash Gordon-like retro-futurist appearance – has become both a centre of culture and a growth node for creative industries. Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001 in recognition of its architectural and historical significance, there’s no sense of an ossified museum piece, and the new uses to which its structures have been put are often strikingly audacious. The coking plant that hosted the Ruhr 2010 opening ceremony also hosts giant art installations and, in winter, an outdoor skating rink. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas reworked the mine’s coal washing plant to create a home for the new Ruhr Museum, whose opening is one of the year’s high points; the boiler house was reworked by Norman Foster to create the Red Dot Museum, the world’s largest exhibition of contemporary design, and associated with the international Red Dot design awards.

In the wake of these big-ticket cultural institutions, the Zollverein nurtures business start-ups, providing studio spade and offices for artists, artisans and design-oriented businesses. It’s precisely this interweaving of culture and economic regeneration that characterises Ruhr 2010. There is little sense of art for art’s sake in the Essen-led Capital of Culture programme. Visitors will enjoy a programme of events as offbeat as the Ruhr’s gritty charm, witheverything from the Love Parade to a 60km-long banquet on the A40 autobahn. But the party itself isn’t the point. The year is ‘Change through Culture – Culture Through Change’, and this sense of culture for a purpose pervades even the most obviously highbrow of the year’s events: the unveiling of the elegant, David Chipperfield-designed extension to Essen’s distinguished Folkwang art gallery.

“With its twin focus on change and the creative economy, Ruhr 2010 has opened a new path for Capitals of Culture,” says Bernd Fesel, acting director of ECCE – the European Centre for Creative Economy – which has been founded by as part of Ruhr 2010 but will continue working after the region’s term as Capital of Culture has ended. And although the creative economy is the starting point, “it will, like an impulse, create ripples into many other sectors: education, urban development, cultural diversity and European openness,” says Fesel. While it may be over-optimistic to expect the Capital of Culture to compensate for the effects of the financial crisis or the decline of the automotive industry (Bochum is a major manufacturing centre for German GM subsidiary Opel), it can nevertheless be an important agent of change. “It can promote the general structural change to an innovation and knowledge-based economy – and, in the best-case scenario, even initiate it,” says Fesel.

ECCE’s remit includes the promotion of talent and creative enterprise, of market structures spanning different sectors – including a trade fair for the creative economy – and promoting space in the city for creatives.

All this takes time, according to Fesel: “Capitals of Culture are the economic icebergs of culture: the economic emphasis of their accomplishments is not recognisable immediately – like the construction of traffic routes, the building of new cultural infrastructures doesn’t pay off in the first year.”

The Ruhr already has one of Germany’s most dynamic creative sectors, with some 23,000 firms generating an estimated annual turnover of €8bn. In Essen alone, 28,000 people work in the creative or communications sectors, in everything from advertising to TV and film, software and web design, printing and publishing.

Sector-specific initiatives aim to nurture the music and games industries, while new developments at Herne, Mülheim an der Ruhr, Oberhausen, Unna and Dinslaken aim to provide accommodation clusters for creative industries, in the process furthering the physical regeneration of the urban environment. It is hoped that the development of creative quarters within the Ruhr’s cities will not only attract foreign artists but also encourage its students to remain in the region once their studies are complete.

Attractive new neighbourhoods will provide a high quality live/work environment, from the Phoenix See waterside development on the site of a former steelworks close to Dortmund city centre to the Krupp Belt on the western fringe of central Essen, developed in conjunction with ThyssenKrupp and providing a mix of leisure, work and residential space across a 2.3km2 site. In Bochum, the bars, clubs and restaurants of the Bermuda Triangle and the nearby Schauspielhaus – one of Germany’s most renowned theatres – together provide the focus for the new Victoria Quarter Bochum, which incorporates the site of the city’s former railway station and will provide 34,000m2 of new buildings for creative businesses or those who simply value the creative buzz of working in a cultural and entertainment quarter. In Mülheim an der Ruhr, the 2,000m2 Games Factory Ruhr was established in 2009 to provide a home for businesses in the games industry, from developers to sound designers and an events company. The individual municipalities are supported in their regeneration efforts by the regional development agency, Wirtschaftsförderung Metropolenruhr.

What actually makes the Ruhr an unconventional Capital of Culture is not its relative cultural clout but its decision to focus less on the grand institutions of ‘official’ culture – the galleries, museums and orchestras – and more on supporting and promoting the independent and private sector providers of culture in its broadest sense, who have the potential to be the future drivers of the region’s economy. In the process, Ruhr 2010 is providing an answer to the question that bedevils Capitals of Culture and host cities of the Olympic Games alike: what happens afterwards?