This study inspects how an urban place is made in HafenCity, Hamburg,
currently one of Europe’s largest urban development projects. This process is
illustrated as a co-production of residential initiative and planners' facilitation in
developing a nascent urban district into a self-sustained community. The qualitative
approach draws on interviews with 55 residents, interviews with planning agents and
participant observation. Planners' agendas and policies are set in relation to residents'
local activities, to display how physical engineering and social appropriation are
moments conjoined in urban place-making.
Newly-built riverside developments have commonly been characterised as
enclaves of private affluence with weak attachments of their residents to the local
area. Middle class professionals enjoy a ready-made lifestyle marked by private
consumption and domestic services that enable them to socially disengage from their
surrounding neighbourhood. HafenCity bucks this trend in regard to its dynamic
neighbourhood life unfolding among its residents. It is argued that the situation of
first-time occupation of a neighbourhood spurs the development of residential
relationships and their intensification more readily than in established
neighbourhoods. An initial merely aesthetic identification of incoming residents with
the lures of their chosen destination is a precondition for the generation of farther
reaching identifications, epitomised in engagements with place as something
valorised in its own right.
The facilitation of such associations is grounded in the intersection of two
important factors. As a residential site, HafenCity selectively attracts educated
middle class cohorts, implying that cultural capital concentrates within a very
confined geographical setting that characterised HafenCity at its earliest stage. The
personal identification of many incomers with HafenCity as a place of desire and
their resulting optimism after arrival translates into a shared positive sense of place
among individuals feeling similarly. This 'community in the mind' facilitates
familiarisation among residents and the transition of neighbourly interactions into
more meaningful voluntary associations serving needs of sociability, cultural
indulgence, economic wellbeing, and most prominently, political engagement
seeking to make HafenCity's official planning policy more foreseeable and
accountable. In essence, the abundance of cultural capital at the neighbourhood scale
acts as a favourable condition for its conversion into social capital for the
advancement of a new area into a community of strong residential ties marked by
attentiveness to one another's needs.
The spatial situation of 'under-construction' encourages residents to voluntary
engagement in HafenCity’s development policy. While the planning authority itself
stimulates such participative mechanisms, they are at the same time concessions
made to legitimise and reinforce the power held by this authority. As a consequence,
participation in the development process becomes an ambiguous amalgam of
volunteering and institutional intervention. While participation facilitates dialogical
structures between residents and planners, it does not increase residents’ actual
influence in urban policy making. Through their facilitation of residents' place-making,
planners can credit themselves with treating the issue of planning in a
foresighted way that refutes notions of technocratic blindness to human needs. Such
active promotion of residents' attachments to their place however has its limits.
While planners have a vested interest in an active residential community they can
showcase as a testimonial to the reasonability of their agenda, they are unable to
resolve conflicts of interests among residents that thwart the project of joint place-making.
The scope of planners in collaborative place-making is circumscribed by the
competencies of an authority that de-legitimises the actual engineering of interpersonal
relationships at the neighbourhood level