Hamburg’s ambitious HafenCity

In the world of urban planning, Hamburg has perhaps become best known for HafenCity, which has been slowly replacing Hamburg’s obsolete 19th-century port in the years since 2003 (an enormous new container port has grown up across the Elbe). HafenCity is claimed to be the largest urban renewal project in Europe. It is not only big, but the fact that (unlike, say, London’s Docklands) it abuts the old central business district makes it particularly important. The coming-into-being of HafenCity has presented Hamburg with an opportunity to create a kind of ideal 21st-century inner city.

I spent a fair amount of time in HafenCity when I was in Hamburg late last month. In many ways it’s an admirable place. Its mixture of office buildings, residences, and institutions gets away from what is widely felt to be the pernicious effect of rigid zoning in mid-20th-century cities, although there is a certain amount of internal zoning: residential areas are largely on the western side of HafenCity, offices in its central spine. Just about all the new buildings contain “sustainable” elements; most have achieved gold “ecolabel” status (that is, a European Union certification analogous to LEED status). There are numerous pedestrian- or bicycle-only corridors. Automobiles are allowed, but play almost no role in internal movement. For the most part they are kept to the edge of HafenCity, or put underground. HafenCity even includes a new subway line (U4). It now has two stops, and a third will open soon. There is also access to HafenCity from subway lines U1 and U3 just to its north.

HafenCity’s form provides an excellent window into what people who have the power in the early 21st century to create urban spaces are thinking cities should be like. The fact that HafenCity’s ecological virtues are stressed in its official literature is pretty significant. So is its relatively modest density. No one officially connected with HafenCity has ever seriously proposed building really tall buildings there or recreating anything like, say, a 19th-century city.

HafenCity’s status as a 21st-century enterprise is manifested in one more way. It may be the product in part of government planning and have all kinds of official backing and financial support, but it is also a speculative real-estate venture. It’s supposed to be a commercial success. Thus, it’s created an enormous publicity apparatus. There’s an elaborate Website and two on-site information centers, where one can begin a free tour or choose from a great many beautifully illustrated brochures.¹ Of course, one should view advertising for HafenCity like any other advertising, somewhat skeptically. I don’t quite know what to make of the fact that the substantial academic literature on HafenCity describes the place just as positively as the advertising.²

I must admit that in some ways I found HafenCity mildly disappointing, chiefly perhaps because on weekdays at any rate it seemed rather empty. It doesn’t feel at all like an inner-city neighborhood in a major city. The Hamburg metropolitan area has a population of something like five million and has several dense, bustling, and complicated inner-city neighborhoods.³  These are all quite different in feel from HafenCity, which has a population of something like 3700 in its two square kilometers. HafenCity is also the location of approximately 14,000 jobs, but the other inner-city neighborhoods host commerce too, and the figure given for HafenCity apparently includes jobs in the long-existing Speicherstadt.⁴ Let me add that HafenCity’s emptiness has something to do with the fact that it’s not even half finished. Only approximately one of its two square kilometers has been built on. Eventually, there are supposed to be two or three times as many inhabitants and jobs. And it needs to be said that on weekends HafenCity gets a bit more crowded, as numerous mostly local tourists visit HafenCity’s largest building, the Elbphilharmonie, or go on guided tours.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder whether HafenCity wouldn’t feel a bit more, well, urban (that is, bustling) had it been built to a higher density. The apartment buildings are mostly only six or seven stories tall, and they do not touch each other except at their base. I’ll admit that I may be imposing a personal aesthetic taste that makes no sense in the context. It might have been difficult to get world-class architects to participate in a project with buildings that weren’t quite separate from each other. It’s also possible that a denser project might have found it harder to pass the ecological tests that HafenCity set for itself. Furthermore, it’s easy to imagine that there wouldn’t have been as much of a market for larger apartment buildings. Away from its center, Hamburg is not a particularly dense place. The city of Hamburg has approximately 2400 people per square kilometer, and the Hamburg region is even more spread out.⁵ Hamburg’s most prestigious districts (for example, around the Alstersee) are definitely not built to a very high density. They consist of smallish apartment buildings and quite a few single-family houses. There aren’t very many high-rise residential buildings in Hamburg. The modest, ecologically sound buildings of HafenCity fit Hamburg pretty well. Let me add that plans for some of the as yet un-built-on areas along the Elbe show taller buildings.

I still couldn’t resist contrasting HafenCity with the Speicherstadt, just to its north.

The Speicherstadt, built at the end of the 19th century, was claimed to be (and probably really was) the world’s largest warehouse district. The Speicherstadt, which consists mostly of two rows of enormous buildings on both sides of a canal, separates the Altstadt from the old port. It is still one of the world’s most distinctive places. It was constructed at the one time in Hamburg’s long history when the city, the largest port in continental Europe’s most powerful country, could be said to have taken on elements of “world-city” status. It was the world’s 20th largest city in 1900 and 18th largest in 1914.⁶ Its size and status were connected with Germany’s pre-World-War-I effort to build a major empire in Africa and the Pacific. A huge number of goods were flowing through Hamburg’s port. The Speicherstadt was built to support this trade. It’s truly an amazing place in a way that HafenCity, as a physical entity, really isn’t.

It needs to be added that, like Germany’s other big cities, Hamburg, even without HafenCity’s ecologically sound features, would seem to most Americans like a rather “green” place.

There is plenty of healthy inner-city housing. Public transit, consisting of integrated U-Bahn, S-Bahn, regional rail, and bus routes, is excellent. Most lines have services at regular (often five- or ten-minute) intervals until late in the evening. The elevated portions of the U-Bahn, like their counterparts in Berlin and Vienna, look like the “els” in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia but are mysteriously much quieter for reasons that I wish I understood.

Sidewalks are generally well-maintained. Cyclists are catered to admirably, with spaces on sidewalks or lanes in streets that almost never put cyclists at risk of being doored (the pedestrianization of bicycling does make speed difficult, however).

Drivers are almost always respectful of pedestrians and cyclists. There are also nearly continuous walking/bicycling paths around Hamburg’s inner-city lake, the Alstersee, and along the Elbe downstream from Hamburg; these paths are jammed on weekends and busy on weekdays.

It is true that there are freeways and major highways in Hamburg that can be enormously overcrowded and horribly polluted by diesel fumes, but official policy in recent years has leaned in favor of restricting car use, and Hamburg is generally a comfortable place for anyone preferring to live a life that has little to do with automobiles.

HafenCity is different from the rest of Hamburg. It’s newer. It’s on an island in the Elbe rather than inland. And the relationship of building to street to non-motorized-vehicle right-of-way in HafenCity is different than elsewhere. HafenCity is also far less bustling than certain other inner-city neighborhoods and has the controlled feel of most of the world’s newly created urban districts. I suspect, though, that it would be difficult to prove that HafenCity is substantially sounder ecologically than the rest of Hamburg even though this is one of its major claims to fame.