Work has begun on updating the Free and Hanseatic City’s Spatial Vision: this further development aims to create a strategic framework that will guide and shape the city’s spatial development up to the year 2050. At the first workshop, we came together as one of three planning teams: not to present ready-made answers, but to gain a shared understanding of the city.
For three days, the focus was on getting to know the city – with all its unique features and contradictions – the stakeholders involved, and the task itself. On two bus tours, we were able to see and experience Hamburg’s diversity and its current developments with our own eyes; expert insights into urban development, density, the economy, and especially the port sharpened our perspective, and discussions with the authorities, the districts, and the other teams highlighted just how many different perspectives converge in this process.
The spatial vision is not intended to replace existing plans, but rather to re-view and re-contextualise them and develop them further in spatial terms, to best position Hamburg for the years ahead.
The structure of the process is noteworthy. It is explicitly not a competition from which the ‘best’ design emerges at the end, but rather a collaborative format in which three teams develop different approaches in parallel. The resulting diversity of ideas and concepts is intentional; it helps to highlight spatial possibilities, conflicting objectives, and development pathways. This is an approach that prioritises dialogue over competition, and one that we find highly productive.
We are working as part of a team with PosadMaxwan and Felixx, as well as with Karin Renner as a local expert, whose knowledge of the city is grounding our perspective from the very beginning.
