In the past few years one of Germany's better-known but most understated cities has been quietly climbing the ranks of international business centres. But despite being the country's largest port and the partner city to big, brash, fast-moving Shanghai, Hamburg has shown considerable reserve in trumpeting its arrival as a serious player on the world stage.
And yet this former Hanseatic trading centre has plenty to shout about, should it choose to do so. It has just opened the largest downtown shopping centre in Europe, in the shape of the Europa Passage. Its airport now hosts new direct daily flights to the US, with Emirates and also with Continental. And its aerospace industry is the city's largest employer, ranking it alongside Seattle and Toulouse.
Over 50 per cent of Germany's news media is generated in Hamburg, when measured in terms of circulation. The city has the lion's share of Germany's millionaires, and the highest per capita income in Europe. Its cruise-ship traffic has increased at such a rate that two new temporary terminals have had to be built to cope with demand, and its tourism has recently overhauled much better-known national capitals such as Budapest to reach 12th in the popularity league of European cities.
And to top it all, Hamburg is now the venue for one of the biggest urban development projects in Europe. The former docklands area, re-christened HafenCity, will add another couple of ribs to the city's heartland, as well as becoming a cultural attraction in itself. Seasoned observers, however, express little surprise that Hamburg has been so slow to beat its own drum. An in-built reserve is part of the local character, a tendency to hold oneself back that is more British than the British themselves. As the local saying goes, "if it rains in London, the people of Hamburg put up their umbrellas".
This is, after all, the city whose Anglican church belongs to the parish of the Bishop of London; whose smart set wears pearls, cravates and corduroys; and whose status car is a Jaguar, not a Mercedes-Benz. One of the current bestsellers in downtown bookstores is a title called Watching the English: The hidden rules of English behaviour.
If the 1990s was Berlin's decade, with the relocation of government and huge building projects like that at Potsdamer Platz, the next 10 years will be Hamburg's. Here, the Potsdamer Platz equivalent is HafenCity's embryonic docklands development, so far with only 50 projects completed but already attracting headquarters buildings for the likes of Unilever, Spiegel and Kühne & Nagel.
When I last visited Hamburg, 10 years ago, the area now designated for all this development was a forbidden land, a customs zone hidden behind a long and mighty double ridge of formidable, almost gothic, brick warehousing called Speicherstadt, into which the world's ships unloaded their treasures. Previously, all this land had been home to some 20,000 residents, who were summarily relocated to make way for warehousing. But what goes around, comes around, and now containerisation and the need for speed have put paid to Speicherstadt's narrow waterways and archaic pulleys and cranes. The area has been re-born as a historic warehouse district, and now hosts a variety of cultural institutions to coax people back.
HafenCity itself begins just on the other side of Speicherstadt, and comprises 155 hectares of quayside and hinterland within walking distance of the city centre, thereby expanding that city centre by 40 per cent. Accordingly this is prime property on a scale rarely seen in Europe these days, and it is expected to attract private investment of around Euros 5 billion.
Acknowledging that central location, the planners have set out their stall to create a zone which has a vibrancy of its own by day and by night, with an intended aim of 40,000 jobs and 12,000 residents. "Hamburg's city centre is already very thinly populated and we don't want to create dead spaces," says HafenCity's Susanne Bühler. "Around 33 per cent of sites will be apartments, of all price ranges."
In accordance with that mixed-use policy, the development will include a school, a university faculty, a couple of concert venues, a retail zone, a giant aquarium, science centre and maritime museum, and even a mini-Chicago of skyscrapers in one of its furthest quarters. All of it practically cheek-to-cheek with the corporate offices, in what will amount to an interesting social experiment.
It will also have what promises to be one of the most remarkable signature buildings in modern Europe, the Elbe Philharmonic, rising out of the top of giant brick warehouse Kaispecher A. Work on this building, a block of glass waves designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, starts in March. When completed it will house a concert hall, hotel, apartments and restaurants, and promises to do for Hamburg what Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum did for Bilbao, becoming an international attraction in its own right.
In fact, around 80 per cent of HafenCity's buildings will be of significant architectural interest, believes Martin Murphy, partner in the Hamburg-based firm of architects Jan Störmer Partner. And while around 30 per cent will be the creation of international names like Herzog & de Meuron, the rest will be German-designed. Murphy, originally from the UK, is a forceful champion for locally-grown talent. "There's a lot of high-quality work being done here but until recently German architects didn't have the self-confidence to export their expertise. They were not good at representing themselves abroad," he says. If all goes well he believes that HafenCity could turn out to be a great showcase for the sector, although with the city planners themselves taking a detailed interest in each project the end result is likely to tend towards a solid architecture rather than the cutting-edge zeitgeist.
Murphy envisages the overall result as being a "pot-pourri" of styles, thanks to the official policy of running individual competitions for every single building. So far around 200 firms have been involved in these competitions, with at least 100 of them slugging it out for the chance to design the university faculty building, which also happens to be the faculty of architecture. Jan Störmer has entered four of these competitions and won three – the Kühne & Nagel building among them – which represents a very high hit rate, but other companies will have entered a similar number and won none, producing a great deal of stress and no revenue. Competitive selection like this is exhausting, says Murphy - "after a while you get a bit spent" - but it's a policy which he believes will guarantee a very high standard of end result. Certainly it looks handsome so far.
Walking around the site as it stands today, with much of it under construction, the first thing to strike this casual visitor was the over-engineering against flooding. Hamburg's location on a tidal river can create dangerously high water and planners have specified that buildings and roads should be a minimum of 7.5 metres above mean sea-level. That means that a great deal of wall, both concrete and brick, is presented to water, which in turn makes any wandering visitor feel rather small and insignificant. Although this will ultimately be relieved by the creation of floating pontoons in the docks themselves, allowing closer contact with the water, it does have a dehumanising tendency. Perhaps the effect will be minimised when there are more people and the docks start to fill with boats.
To the untrained eye it is also clear that projects are proceeding fast. The land is all city-owned, and HafenCity has consequently been able to prevent speculators from buying a plot and sitting on it, waiting for its value to increase, as happened in London's Docklands area. Instead, potential developers have to take an option on their plot while going through the competitive design process, but don't actually have the right to purchase the land until their design is finally approved. If the building does not then go ahead within a certain time-frame, the land will be repossessed.
So far there's been no such defaulting. On the contrary, a viewing tower for the benefit of casual visitors built two years ago to last several years is already having to be moved to allow Unilever's building work to start. It will be re-positioned rather than scrapped, says Susanne Bühler, because it still has valuable work to do in promoting the new image of what had been a forbidden zone. Along with the HafenCity info centre on Sandtorkai, this is one of the main stops for bus, bicycle and walking tours, now frequent visitors to the zone.
The numbers of people actually living here is still small – as yet there are no shops for basic provisions – and at this stage it is not clear whether HafenCity will really attract the mixed market that the planners are targeting. Its new corporate residents are image-conscious banks, software and media companies in stylish new buildings, and some of its apartments have been interior-designed by Philippe Starck. How that will integrate with a poorer residential population remains to be seen.
What is clear is that Hamburg did need a development project on this scale. During the 1990s, Berlin's speculators made a play for some of Hamburg's companies to fill their new office accommodation, and the city needed to come up with something to encourage those companies to stay. Now the pendulum has swung back the other way, with Berlin going through something of a slump and people leaving the capital to find work elsewhere.
Although HafenCity remains unproven, Martin Murphy is full of hope. "There's a huge amount of excitement and optimism in Hamburg today," he says. "Although we won't finally be able to declare it a success for a while yet, we are embarking on an adventure that's going to last at least 20 years."
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