Urban regeneration meets sustainability - HafenCity, Hamburg

Conceived in 1996 as an urban waterfront regeneration initiative, HafenCity Hamburg is currently Europe's largest urban redevelopment project. Located along the northern banks of the Elbe River adjacent to Hamburg's historic Speicherstadt quarter, when completed in the mid-2020s, HafenCity will be home to 15,000 residents and up to 45,000 jobs. Although HafenCity has many of the scale and financial characteristics of a megaproject, it was not originally planned as such. Instead, it was presented as an effort to reclaim Hamburg's historical and under-used waterfront and to do so in a manner that was as economically productive, technologically modern, and environmentally sustainable as possible. To a notable degree, it has succeeded on all three counts. HafenCity is currently home to 750 companies and educational institutions international shipping leader Kühne & Nagel, the German publishing giant the Spiegel Group, and Unilever, the global consumer goods conglomerate. HafenCity offers three lessons to other city governments thinking about undertaking comparable urban regeneration megaprojects. The first is the importance of having complete site control, something Hamburg negotiated from the start. The second involves the importance of having a realistic and robust infrastructure financing model. In HafenCity's case, Hamburg put together a special-purpose organization of experienced real estate development professionals who understood the critical linkages between public and private financing and project programming and phasing. Third, HafenCity's original project planners understood the demands of the private real estate market but were not afraid to push on conventional wisdoms about building designs and technologies, land use synergies, and environmental amenities and performance.