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A NEW KIND OF BLEAK
Journeys Through Urban Britain
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The foreground buildings are less careful, and make clear how mistaken it would be to think this a purely social democratic piece of urbanism. Each row ends with a tower. One is ‘Coffee Plaza’, by American architect Richard Meier, another is a building for Unilever by Behnisch Architekten, evocative not so much of a robust Hanseatic modernism but more of Brazilian maestro Oscar Niemeyer, with flowing, feminine biomorphic curves. It consists of both offices and penthouses, and is advertised here as ‘Marco Polo Tower – design for Millionaires’. By far the most expensive and controversial project in HafenCity is Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie. It is a large swooping thing at the end of one of these rectilinear streets, completely ignoring their context of neatness and self-effacement. It is, respectively, a hotel, a car park, luxury penthouses and a concert hall, this last a preposterous Caspar David Friedrich thing billowing and crashing atop a 1960s warehouse. It was not initially part of the HafenCity plan at all; it was the private project of two local ‘business leaders’ who personally commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to draw up a ‘landmark’ scheme for the site, claiming that they would pay for the execution, holding many fundraising dinners among Hamburg millionaires in order to do so. Needless to say it soon went over budget, and the bill was offloaded onto Hamburg city council. The cost has risen over fivefold, and is hence a matter of some controversy. When I looked at the construction site of the Elbphilharmonie, rather than high-rent high-spec apartments for millionaires, I could see ads for bedsits, aimed at the building workers who are erecting this enormously complex edifice. They are at least going cheap, although the rate ‘per person/night’ implies that they aren’t supposed to stay there very long. Many are in both German and Polish, so readable by the workers from New Europe who are actually building the place.
As a town planning project, it forms a chastening contrast with the sort of schemes you will find in this book. Hamburg is not much richer than Edinburgh, yet it’s hard to believe HafenCity was designed by the same species that redeveloped Leith Docks. The place is a thumping indictment of the Birmingham Canalside, Bristol Harbourside, Belfast Laganside, London Docklands, all of which were trudged through for the purposes of the book you hold in your hand. As enjoyable public space, as urbanism contiguous with the existing city, as architecture, their equivalent in Hamburg is immeasurably superior, and any British councillor, planner or architect visiting the North German city would be well within their rights to fall to their knees and weep. All this masks the fact that HafenCity is the exact same place as Bristol Harbourside et al. It is a place which caters for, as the slogan goes, the ‘1%’. It has been commissioned by and for the ruling class. In order to get planning permission for such a project in a Social Democrat city, there are sops: a small percentage of ‘affordable’ units, public access, a University expansion and a U-Bahn extension, but these are minor differences, some of which you could find in the UK anyway. It’s the precise same typology – mixed-use redevelopment of a former industrial area, with only the most insecure, casual labour left for the former industrial classes. I dare say there’s less buy-to-let speculating and more renting, and suspect it is all much more carefully managed, but the basic ideology is not different. New Labour tried to make neoliberalism look nicer, and failed miserably, largely because they tried to create a social democratic city using Thatcherite methods. The Germans are constructing an unambiguously capitalist city using social democratic, or at least Keynesian methods – public investment, tightly controlled long-term planning, very little speculation. In the last instance, here too, the public purse ends up paying for the follies of the super-rich. But it really does look nicer.
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