ABSTRACT
The city of Hamburg lies on the mouth of the River Elbe in northern Germany and is the second largest city in the federal republic. In 1991 the population of Hamburg stood at some 1,662,000 compared with a peak of around 1,850,000 in 1965. Administratively the city has special status, as a federal Land in its own right, and is therefore represented with the fifteen other Länder in the powerful Bundesrat second chamber, as are the cities of Bremen and Berlin. Figure 5.1 shows how the city of Hamburg is subdivided into 104 Stadtteile and seven Bezirke, similar in size but with a weaker service delivery role than the London Boroughs. Only the Bezirk Bergedorf and Harburg in the south of the city assume more wide-ranging responsibilities for the provision of local government services. This is an historical anomaly arising from local government reorganization in 1937, extending the city boundaries into more autonomous outlying areas. 1 Hamburg is currently faced with a deteriorating waste management situation worse than either London or New York, derived from the absence of any landfill opportunities within the city boundaries coupled with escalating political and economic restrictions on landfill outside the city. The position has been exacerbated by German reunification and the restrictions on cheap waste disposal opportunities in the former East Germany. Furthermore, the largest of the city’s three municipal waste incinerators is to be decommissioned in 1994 and the costs of waste management are steadily escalating to emerge as one of the most contentious areas of public policy for the city. The administrative boundaries for the city of Hamburg https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315070384/33ef9beb-1124-4d21-bd8e-c0050ade7f5e/content/fig5_1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> Source: Gandy, M (1993), Recycling and waste: an exploration of contemporary environmental policy, Avebury, Aldershot
