WHEN the 6000 future residents of Hamburg’s Grasbrook residential development look out of their apartments at the nearby port and the surrounding city, they will be doing so through very special windows.
Invented for their neighbours on the other side of the Elbe River, the HafenCity windows, named after the district for which they were created, use an ingenious design to divert noise.
Someone sleeping in one of the 3000 new apartments will not be woken at 3am by Europe’s third busiest port which operates around the clock 365 days a year just metres from people’s bedrooms.
For this ambitious development in Germany’s second largest city to succeed, however, it will need more than just smart design. It will require a combination of intense negotiation, politics and goodwill from all sides. If the city does pull it off, the district could become a global model for how urban metropolises manage the competing demands of industry, residents and business.
And as the New South Wales government adds the final touches to its Glebe Island proposal, Grasbrook may offer insights on how the harbour city can solve its housing conundrum.
The city of Hamburg is inseparable from its port. Sitting astride the Elbe River, the city-state occupies a strategic position between the North Sea and Central Europe, with a network of canals, sluices and locks allowing barges to bring goods from as far away as Prague for transshipment to ocean-going vessels.
A visualisation of the new Grasbrook district in Hamburg. The new elevated metro station
can be seen in the foreground. Image: © moka-studio / Supplied
After the destruction of World War II and the rise of the Iron Curtain, however, Hamburg was cut off from its productive hinterland. The shift to containerisation, moreover, resulted in the development of new quays further away from the city centre and by the late 20th century, the once bustling inner-city docks had fallen into disuse.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Hamburg reassumed its position as Germany’s Tor zur Welt, or gateway to the world, and embarked on a progressive project to redevelop the docks closest to the old town. This brought the city centre to the Elbe and is crowned with the iconic Elbphilharmonie building by world-renowned Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.
In some ways, HafenCity was the trial run for the current development of Grasbrook. While HafenCity replaced largely disused docks, Grasbrook will be built directly alongside a terminal that handles cars and foodstuffs. Most of HafenCity is commercial, with planners in the late 1990s and 2000s unsure about whether Hamburgers would want to live by the river. Grasbrook involves high density residential, new schools, sports facilities and a shopping centre large enough to also cater to the adjacent dockworker district of Veddel, while retaining and repurposing heritage listed warehouses in the old Moldauhafen.
And a new bridge over the River Elbe… perhaps.
In a conference room wallpapered with renders, concept plans and maps of the new district, senior project manager Bianca Penzlien of publicly owned development company HafenCity Hamburg GmbH explains the current project is not the first time the city has considered repurposing the old docks and warehouses of Grasbrook.
In fact, there have been two earlier approaches.
The first idea, more than 15 years ago, was to relocate the University of Hamburg and build a new campus. Then the site was earmarked as part of Hamburg’s bid for the 2024 Olympic Games, which foundered after a poll of city residents in 2016 found 52% were opposed.
“There was a short pause, and then there was the deal,” Ms Penzlien says, tracing the boundaries of the current proposal on the wall.
Once complete, Grasbrook will comprise 3000 apartments and space for 16,000 new workers across 47 hectares of land and 900,000 square metres of floorspace. The masterplan conceptualises the project across two districts; Moldauhafenquartier, which includes the residential areas, commercial spaces and a large park, and Hafentorquartier, where most of the jobs will be, with a focus on providing offices and workspaces for the future of logistics and transport.
Heavy vehicles bringing goods to and from the port over the Sachsen Bridge will be redirected to the south and the U4 metro line will be extended across the Elbe with a new station to be built on an elevated viaduct astride the two sides of the development.
The project aims to be a landmark in sustainable development, targeting the smallest carbon footprint possible and encouraging the regrowth of vegetation in the midst of the port to promote biodiversity.
The future development will repurpose heritage listed warehouses in the former Moldauhafen. Image: Connor Pearce
It is also a project with a social conscience, with 35 percent of the housing consisting of publicly subsidised rental apartments, a memorial to be built for the forced labour used in the port during World War II and a new national port museum, the first of its kind in Germany.
Realising this bold vision will require the collaboration of several actors in and around the port, many of whom are arms of the city government and not always fully aligned.
Control of the port is split between a range of organisations, some publicly owned by the city-state of Hamburg, such as project developer HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, some privately held and others a mixture of the two. An example of the latter is port operator Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG (HHLA), a publicly traded company with shares held by the city government and Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC). HHLA operates the foodstuffs and auto terminal, directly adjacent to the Moldauhafen quarter in Grasbrook.
Meanwhile, the city-owned Hamburg Port Authority retains significant influence over parts of the project with its mandate for the safe and efficient operation of the port.
As doctoral candidate at Frankfurt University and former research associate at HafenCity University Sophia Leipert points out, these overlapping ownership and responsibility structures can come into conflict.
“The local port elites, they fight for their ports or for their companies,” Ms Leipert tells DCN.
“They have a big lobby and fight for port space, and the local authority is more conservative in this direction. So, it is not easy to remove the port’s functions, even if, for example, we can see certain parts of the port for years now are not well maintained or empty.”
An aerial photo of Grasbrook under development. The cleared area will be redeveloped as housing and a commercial district while parts of the existing port facility in the centre will be used for office space. Image: © Fotofrizz / Supplied
A case in point is a series of berths along the northern edge of Grasbrook. HafenCity would like to build a bridge to provide shorter commutes for office workers and avoid forcing residents to use the Elbe Bridge further south. This bridge would, however, make the berths inaccessible for larger vessels.
While the berths are seldom used, they perform a critical overflow function at times of intense need.
In the middle of this stands Ms Penzlien, who has some experience in achieving deals in sometimes challenging environments. In other cases, port users have agreed to sustainably optimise the use of port land, including the construction of a multistorey carpark for auto-shipments.
But the bridge or an alternative berth is still a work in progress.
“We just agreed on making a new study,” Ms Penzlien said. “Among other things to find out how much it would cost.”
Standing on top of the giant mounds of sand which mark the future blocks of Grasbrook, one only needs to squint to see the similarities with Glebe Island. Both are centred on the opening of a new metro station in an existing port district. Both cities are grappling with a housing crisis and an acute shortage of industrial land. And for residents of either city, the harbour is a central part of the metropolis’s identity.
With a decision expected on Glebe Island any week now, Grasbrook could provide a model of how a city and port can coexist.