Over a five-year period, a construction project was carried out in the working-class Hörde district of Dortmund. The former Phoenix-Ost steel plant, which once employed 18,000 people, was torn down to make room for an artificial lake – the Phoenix-See. With a surface area of 24 hectares, the Phoenix-See is larger than the Inner Alster lake in Hamburg. Luxury apartments and detached houses have been built, there is a marina and a plaza. The project descriptions of the Phoenix-See Development Company no longer tie the future of this part of town to the hard graft, steel production and environmental pollution of the past. The new buzzwords are recreation, relaxation and Mediterranean ambiance. In Göttliche Lage, Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken do more than document the progress of the building work, they also let investors and builders, planners and residents have their say. The film thus presents a complex picture of gentrification and of the ever-widening social gulf in post-industrial society. For in the streets neighbouring the Phoenix-See, the very same residents still have their homes as they did in the heyday of steel production. They have not moved into the new lakeside houses because they could never possibly afford to do so. And the first cracks are already beginning to appear in this promised new residential paradise: the lake, which as a rainwater storage basin forms part of the ecological restoration project for the Emscher River, has had a bathing ban imposed; parties in the evenings are a noise nuisance and the urban mansions now appear to have been built too close together.