ABSTRACT
The most beautiful way to Hamburg leads over the River Elbe. A real piece of luck in Hamburg’s architectural history, yet nobody half a century ago thought that HafenCity would be home to the largest inner-city urban development project in Europe. Most of the Hamburgers considered plans for an OlympiaCity as a continuation of HafenCity on the Elbe islands. The conversion of former port areas into new neighbourhoods for living, working, culture and leisure began earlier in other cities than in Hamburg – in Europe since the early 1980s notably the Docklands in the East of London, followed by Amsterdam and Copenhagen. The special quality of the Hamburg HafenCity, like other waterfront projects, is essentially based on the mutual learning of the cities. The economic boom, as consequence of Germany’s reunification in the early 1990s, was an essential background for the specification of the plans for HafenCity.
