Every design for Ludwigshafen Am Rhein

Ludwigshafen faces Mannheim across the Rhine, on the river's left bank, opposite the point where the Neckar arrives from Heidelberg. For centuries this was swampy floodland, and the city's story only really begins in 1606, when Frederick IV, Elector Palatine, built a fortress here – the Rheinschanze – to guard the new city of Mannheim on the far bank.

The Wilhelm-Hack-Museum and the Ernst-Bloch-Zentrum show another side of a place known primarily as an industrial city and the home of BASF, the world's largest chemical producer. Older layers lie in the suburbs: Oggersheim, where Friedrich Schiller stayed for some weeks in 1782 while fleeing Württemberg and where the famous pilgrimage church stands, and Rheingönheim, where the Romans kept an auxiliary fort. Ludwigshafen is also where Helmut Kohl was born and where he died.

For anyone who grew up here, the map holds the familiar shape of it all: the long curve of the river, the tram lines running over to Mannheim, the streets of the district where you went to school.