Hamm’s 800th Anniversary Binds a Heritage App to a Record Solar Plant

Hamm launched a free augmented reality heritage app on June 15 for the city’s 800th anniversary. The same week, energy company RAG announced plans for a 5.97 MWp open-space solar plant on Sandbochumer Straße, billed as the largest of its kind in Hamm, a city in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. The two projects share a single anniversary moment, and their backers sit at opposite ends of the local economy: a public archive and a state heritage program on one side, a utility decarbonizing its own operations on the other.

The app, named Heimat Hamm, turns 11 historical locations in the city center into a self-paced AR walk with three guides and a surprise twelfth stop. The solar plant’s power, meanwhile, will leave Hamm for water pumps at a former coal mine site in Bergkamen, a neighboring city.

A Free AR City Tour for Hamm’s 800th Anniversary

Mayor Marc Herter, joined by City Archives director Franziska Rohloff and NRW Minister Ina Scharrenbach, introduced the Heimat Hamm app at 10 a.m. on the marketplace, inside the “Lab on Tour” science truck parked at Pauluskirche. The launch was tied to Hamm’s 800th anniversary, a milestone the city is using as a frame for both cultural and infrastructure investments. The free application is published in German and is available in any app store, per Hamm’s official announcement of the Heimat Hamm app. The city framed the app as a new way to walk through 800 years of local history, anchored to the city center.

The project cost 430,000 euros, with the bulk of the funding coming from NRW’s Heimat-Zeugnis program, which is managed by the state Ministry for Heimat, Municipal Affairs, Construction and Digitalization. The program supports places and buildings as “witnesses” of local heritage, presented in ways that connect generations, per NRW’s Heimat-Zeugnis program and funding guidelines. A 2-hour self-paced tour concentrates on the city center, with headphones and a full battery recommended for the best experience. Each historical location is anchored by a permanent QR code on the ground; users scan to start, and the app navigates them to the nearest next stop. There is no fixed starting point, which means the route can be picked up from any of the stations.

Three city institutions, the Gustav-Lübcke-Museum, the city’s Media Center, and the Bureau for Culture and Tourism, all cooperated on the project. Programming was handled by wezit transmedia solutions, a German-French firm; strategic marketing and branding by kollarneuber creative minds. The result is a self-contained digital layer that adds historical buildings, figures, and stories to the live cityscape, accessible to anyone with a smartphone.

• Launch: Monday, June 15, 2026
• Cost: 430,000 euros
• Funded by: NRW Heimat-Zeugnis program
• Stations: 11 historical + 1 surprise stop
• Tour length: about 2 hours

Eleven Stations and a Surprise Stop

The self-paced tour covers 11 stations in the city center, plus a final surprise twelfth stop. The route runs from well-known landmarks like the main railway station to less obvious sites such as Königstraße, where a former pub served as a gathering spot for the widows of miners who worked at the Radbod colliery. Stations can be visited in any order, with the app navigating to the nearest next stop once a location is fully explored. The markers on the ground are permanent, so the tour is intended to stay available well beyond the anniversary year.

Three avatar guides walk users through the experience: Grete for adults, Toni for children, and Klippi, an audio-only mode designed for visually impaired visitors. The voice-led Klippi mode is built so the entire tour can be completed without looking at the screen, a deliberate accessibility choice from the city’s Media Center. Each station also ties into a two-part gamification layer.

The first part is a collection game, with items unique to each historical site. The second is a series of location-based trivia minigames that test knowledge of the city’s past. Together, the gamification pieces turn a tour into something closer to a scavenger hunt, one that can be replayed across multiple visits. The app does not require an account, an email, or any sign-up to use, which keeps the barrier to entry at zero.

A Record Solar Plant on Sandbochumer Straße

Energy company RAG plans the largest open-space photovoltaic plant in Hamm, according to local outlet wa.de, which detailed the project on June 18. The 5.97 MWp array will sit on a 5.2-hectare site on Sandbochumer Straße, near the Berghalde Sundern spoil tip and a two-track railway line. The plant, called “Hamm Sandbochumer Straße,” will use around 8,500 solar modules and is expected to generate 5,200 megawatt-hours of electricity per year.

That output is enough to supply approximately 1,500 to 2,000 average German households for a year, wa.de reported, citing RAG spokesperson Wiebke Büsch. The two sub-plots sit in Pelkum, a district of Hamm, and were identified under a federal law that eased planning rules for renewable energy installations, particularly along motorways and two-track rail lines. That exemption let the project proceed without a formal Bebauungsplan, the local development plan that German municipalities typically require. The site meets the law’s parameters for the rail-corridor exemption, per RAG.

The investment sits in the “mid-single-digit million euro” range, RAG told wa.de. A planning permit has already been issued, with construction slated to begin between late 2026 and early 2027. RAG will run ground investigations on the site before any work starts, and a final site setup concept is still being drawn up.

Hamm’s only existing open-space solar plant sits at Römerstraße, city spokesperson Tom Herberg told wa.de. The RAG buildout will be the city’s largest by both footprint and installed capacity.

The Power Leaves Hamm for Bergkamen

The plant will generate electricity in Hamm, but the power will not stay in Hamm. Most of it is bound for Haus Aden in Bergkamen, a neighboring city, where RAG operates a water management system that pumps water out of former coal mine workings. RAG said the electricity will go to the pumps at the site.

RAG’s strategy is to build renewable capacity on its own land near the water management sites, then route the electricity through the public grid to the pumps. RAG spokesperson Wiebke Büsch spelled out the arrangement in a single line. The broader goal is to make the power supply at RAG’s sites CO2-neutral; building on company land is the most direct path. The Hamm plant is one of five in the pipeline, with four more planned near other water management locations.

We feed it into existing networks and withdraw it for our consumption.

That setup means a Hamm solar plant is a Hamm site but a Bergkamen asset, and the residents who walk past the panels on Sandbochumer Straße will not be the ones using the electricity. RAG chose a site near, rather than at, the pumps: the rail-corridor exemption and the available land made Sandbochumer Straße work, while a directly adjacent site at the pumps did not. A direct cable to the pumps would have required its own grid connection; the rail-corridor option did not.

From Screw Foundations to Hedge Habitats

The plant’s design is built around reversibility. It will sit on screw or pile foundations, a construction method that lets the entire array be removed later without leaving permanent soil sealing behind. RAG framed the choice as central to its sustainability strategy. The site will also host a station for the inverter and a separate handover station for the grid connection, both small enough to be roughly the size of a garden shed.

The perimeter will be planted with a hedge that serves double duty: visual screening for nearby properties and habitat for insects and small animals. The fencing will be animal-friendly, designed so small mammals and amphibians can cross the site without obstruction. The combination of soft foundations, low fencing, and a hedge is the company’s answer to concerns about the visual and ecological impact of utility-scale solar.

Construction will not require extensive civil engineering, RAG told wa.de, and the company expects no significant increase in traffic during the build. Some short-term noise is possible; whether adjacent pedestrian and cycling paths need to be closed is still being decided. The construction site setup concept “is currently being developed,” RAG said. The plant joins one existing approved open-space solar site in Hamm, at Römerstraße, and will be the city’s largest buildout, developed under the rail-corridor exemption.

• Foundations: screw or pile, removable, no permanent soil sealing
• Perimeter: hedge for screening and habitat
• Fencing: animal-friendly, allows small mammals and amphibians to cross
• Inverter and grid connection: housed in two stations, roughly the size of a garden shed
• Construction traffic: no significant increase expected
• Permit status: planning permit already issued

Two Anniversary Bets, Two Different Payoffs

The Heimat Hamm app and the RAG solar plant landed in Hamm in the same week, and reading the announcements side by side gives a misleading picture of coordination. The app is the city’s anniversary project, anchored to the 800th year and funded by NRW heritage money. The solar plant is a RAG decarbonization project, planned and built on company land, with the anniversary as coincidence rather than cause.

The two share a moment, and both announcements traveled through the same local news cycle. Marc Herter framed the anniversary broadly at the app launch, in German: “Im Jahr unseres Stadtjubiläums machen wir so die Geschichte Hamms erlebbar und schaffen zugleich Raum für die Auseinandersetzung mit unserer gemeinsamen Zukunft,” in English: in the year of the city anniversary, the city is making Hamm’s history come alive while creating space for dealing with a common future. The phrase lands differently for an AR heritage app and for a 5.97 MWp solar buildout. The structural similarity is real, though: both are infrastructure investments that will outlast the anniversary year, timed to land while attention on the city was highest.

RAG is building renewable energy on its own land, per wa.de, as part of a broader push to make the power supply at its sites CO2-neutral. The Sandbochumer Straße plant is the largest open-space solar project in Hamm. Four more RAG plants are planned in the region, all near water management sites; the company’s pivot to solar is broader than any one city.

For Hamm, the result is two projects in the same news cycle: a 430,000-euro digital heritage bet led by the city, and a mid-single-digit-million-euro industrial decarbonization bet led by RAG. Neither depends on the other, and neither is coordinated with the anniversary beyond landing in the same week.