Workshop in the Future of Cities Forum”: A Forum for Regenerative Urban Development

Ms Elworthy,
Mr Schurig,
Mr Bruns-Berentelg,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Thank you very much, Mr Schurig. I would like to welcome you most cordially to what was once the central power station of the Hamburg Speicherstadt, the Kesselhaus. Welcome, too, to the centre of what is now Europe’s largest inner-city urban development project.

I’d like to begin with a quote which will put in a nutshell the ideas we will be dealing with both tomorrow and in the future:

What cháracterises a modern city is that: "Knowledge is more important than space. This quotation comes from Edward Glaeser, the American Harvard professor and author of the book Triumph of the City.

And the World Future Cities Forum” is a venue for such an exchange of knowledge. It is a great honour for us, following Delhi in 2011 and Dubai in 2012, that the Forum is taking place in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg this year.

How could we better learn from the experiences of other people than at an international gathering like this one involving mayors, city planners, scientists, and representatives of civil society from all over the world?  As part of a learning city,” one that is constantly re-inventing itself, we in Hamburg are highly interested in participating in other people’s experiences and at the same time in permitting them to take part in our own experiences.

There is one thing that unites us: Despite all of the challenges presented by life in a large city, we see the city as a marvellous opportunity to shape it for the benefit of the people who live in it. Which brings me right to the main topic: What are the challenges Hamburg is facing, and how do we intend to confront them? I can elucidate them by naming three main áreas:

-    transport and mobility
-    the growing city and environment-friendly housing construction, and
-    energy turnaround and climate protection.

Hamburg is one of Europe’s most important centres of industry and trade. It is extremely important for transport routes and the flow of traffic to be ensured, as well as the mobility of the city’s inhabitants. This is why a progressive and sustainable city is prudent when it invests in infrastructure and mobility.

Hamburg has the second largest container port in Europe, and it is the hub of worldwide trade for Europe’s growing economic power. In the coming years, in part due to the planned deepening of the River Elbe, the harbour will be farther expanded as an international transshipment centre and Hamburg’s importance as a key hub for logistics and transport will become even greater.

Ports need good transport networks that reach not only into their hinterland, but also connect with international destinations. And being a turntable” not only from a railwayman´s point of view, but concerning motorways, inland barges and an international airport as well, all traffic needs to be kept going smoothly and, whenever necessary, we must pave new ways for it.

As to the railwayman´s point of view, his means of transport has a leading part because it is the most environment-friendly of the land-based ones. Hamburg will insist on demanding from the Federal Government to improve and extend the supra-regional railways, with a focus on Hamburg as northern junction. This must include what we call the Y-stretch” and an eastern bypass as part of the Eastern Upgrowth Programme”.

A prime contribution will be made by establishing and expanding the uniform European transport network which, following lengthy discussions, was agreed by the European Commission, Council and Parliament at the end of May 2013. It’s been a long time coming, but worth the wait.

Because we need to build an efficient network of rail, road and waterway routes that will link Europe’s major economic centres. To eliminate bottlenecks, modernize infrastructure and allow cross-border traffic to flow more freely.

As a result, however, individual and commercial traffic in Hamburg and the metropolitan region will also continue to grow. This means that Hamburg is faced with the challenge of finding a way to synchronise the needs of a dynamically growing economy with the objectives of environmentally compatible mobility and sustainability.

The city is using a large number of innovative measures to organise transport, logistics and traffic so that negative impacts on health and the environment are minimised. In the medium and long term, these measures will improve air quality and provide prevéntative health protection.

Top of the list is local public transport. It serves as the backbone of mobility in the city. We are expanding its capácities. We want to give it priority and to lower its emissions by adding new metropolitan train services, and increasing the capacity of the bus network. As from 2020, we will discontinue to buy buses with any sort of emissions.

What´s more, we shall encourage what we call intermodal public transport, which includes train-to-bus-to-ferry-to-bycicle options, and car sharing, whether it be done by using apps”, or other means of communication that help some to make commuting easier.

Closely linked to this are the market launch and market penetration of low-emission and emission-free drives, such as electric cars and hydrogen hybrid powered vehicles, in local public passenger transport, motorised indivídual transport, and inner-city commercial transport. A pleasant side effect of this will be the reduction in noise emissions. The city of the future will be quieter.

Furthermore, as recent surveys have shown: Germany has rediscovered the bicycle. Cycling is the means of locomotion that is showing the greatest growth, followed by the train, the bus, and simply walking. We need to react to this development and reclaim public space so to speak - for means of transportation other than the automobile.

To reduce the emissions from shipping low-sulphur fuel is used in our port during the entire time vessels are at berth.

Cold Ironing will add to a substantial reduction in air pollution in Hamburg.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
This brings me to the second of our challenges: Hamburg is a growing city. Today we have a population of nearly 1.8 million. And by 2030 there will be 1.9 million of us, perhaps even more. A few years ago, young families were still moving to the country. But now they are coming back to Hamburg, because they find that this is a place where they can combine their work and their family life. Thus, urbanization makes the growing city a place of high hopes.

Singles looking for jobs are moving to the city, as are older people, who appreciate the good infrastructure from the public transportation system to the medical care. All of them enjoy the fact that everything is so close, including cafés, restaurants, cultural events, and recreational activities. This shows that a future-oriented city is a livable city.

But these new city dwellers need houses and apartments they can afford. So we want 6,000 new housing units to be built in Hamburg every year. And this is why the City has signed a contract with its various districts and agreed on joint objectives with the real estate industry: for súbsidised housing, for climate-friendly building, and just the same and this is not easy for the preservation of Hamburg as a city of brick.

Wherever it is possible and acceptable, we will be compacting neighbourhoods. We are taking sites that are no longer needed for industrial or commercial purposes and we use them to construct résidences. This is most striking in HafenCity, which is growing out of unused harbour space  as a completely new part of the inner-city.

Ideal from the environmental point of view is the compact city, for it uses fewer resources less área, fewer streets, cables and pipes, and less fuel, because the distances are shorter.

But the compact city is also susceptible to the results of climate change. According to current scientific knowledge, these will include more frequent incidences of heavy downpour, as well as more hot summer days and a rise in the sea level, which will affect us directly as a port city.

This past June, we approved the "Action Plan: Adaptation to Climate Change” to meet these challenges. In the Action Plan, the Senate defined some 40 measures the City intends to confront climate change with. We are building retention basins for rainwater, planning cold air corridors for air exchange on hot days, plus new parks and recreational areas, and an even better biotope network system for Hamburg.

We are planning climate-neutral housing units, green roofs and façades, and planting climate change friendly street trees. Some of all this can already be seen at the International Building Exhibition on the Elbe island of Wilhelmsburg.

As I have already mentioned, rising sea levels are also predicted as the result of climate change. As a port city, Hamburg has already had plenty of experience with unwelcome masses of water. Approximately half of the area of the city must depend on reliable protection from storm surges.

To contend with this danger, the Senate has repeatedly decided to continue on with its currant flood protection construction program beyond 2016. These measures particularly involve increasing the height of the dykes, as the inner-city installations were built higher to begin with. These measures are to be finished by 2016. Flood protection in Hamburg will then be as complete as never before.

However, this does not mean that we no longer need to think about time-tested alternative flood protection measures those to be used along the major rivers. This year, we were again reminded of the fact that the water can also come from the other side.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
As you well know, following the disaster at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japán, Germany again resolved to successively end its use of nuclear energy.  The roadmap” of an earlier Red &Green” Party coalition in the Federal Government agreed in consensus with the energy sector later became moot again. This wasted a great deal of time. Just the same, Hamburg is supporting the current energy turnaround” all the more decisively, and implementing it in its own urban area.

Like we did when we became an electric city in  the budding 20th century: a ground-breaking  modernization of our city indeed. Within just a few years, electricity prevailed as the impetus of our urban lives, substantially changing the cityscape. All of a sudden, there were telephones in 1881, and electric street lamps in 1882. We can do something equally significant now.

The sustainable city is a city in transition. In connection with the word energy turnaround,” this transition involves the expansion of renewable energies, particularly the construction and repowering of wind turbines. But the energy turnaround must also reweave the supra-regional energy networks, because in the future energy will no longer come from just a few large-scale power plants, but primarily from wind and sun. And we will have to capture most of the wind "offshore” in the north of our country, and then either relay this energy or store it.

In Hamburg, this turnaround involves the entire city, the port, and the expansion of district heating, as well as the increase in energy efficiency. By 2050, we want to cut down our CO2 by 80 percent. This is an ambitious goal, one which we want to move closer to step by step.

What are the three most important elements of our strategy?

The first is the construction of energy storage facilities. At the present time, wind and solar installations are turned off at times, if they are producing too much electricity at the wrong times. This is expensive, annoys the citizens, and wastes one of the most precious resources we have.

Supplying power on the basis of renewable energies therefore requires the development of storage systems. The simplest approach is to convert wind or solar energy into heat and then to use this as district heat, for example. A wind-to-heat storage facility of this type is being developed at the moment at the site of a power plant that already exists at the Tiefstack location and it will be linked with a combined cycle gas and steam power plant we are building at Wedel.
Additionally, we have set up a pilot plant for converting renewable electricity into hydrogen or methane that can be fed into the gas network.

We are continuing to develop our power network into a smart grid, one that can react more quickly and locally to changing input and load situations. All of this is being done within the framework of an Energy Partnership which we have established with the major Hamburg utility companies.

Just the same, the cheapest and the cleanest energy is, of course, the energy that doesn’t have to be produced at all.

This means that, secondly, we must increase energy efficiency. To foster sustainability, the Senate and Hamburg businesses have joined forces in an Environmental Partnership. The contract has been extended for an additional five years and provides financial support for voluntary environmental protection. Up to now, approximately one thousand companies belong to the UmweltPartnerschaft”, and there are more than 4,000 officially environmentally committed firms and businesses.”

Investments in energy efficiency are supported, such as those in resource-conserving technology. With the program entitled Companies for resource protection,” it has been possible to avoid some 300,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per year and to save almost 50 million euros in operating costs. Of the required investments of 365 million euros, 35 million were facilitated by the Senate and those have ensured numerous jobs in the installation trade in Hamburg.

There is no way round it: economic growth, and the growing city at that, will function if they are based on climate protection or else they will not.
Because economic progress and ecological progress account for one another. As I believe in good engineering, I am optimistic because we do have good engineers and they possess the means to take care of the environment if we take the right decisions.

Added this past June was Smart Port Energy.” The objective of this energy collaboration between the City and the Hamburg Port Authority is to make the port into a showcase for renewable energies. Among other things, this involved locating potential sites for wind energy. In addition, making use of previously untapped waste heat potentials in the port operations and refitting shipping traffic in the port with drives for hydrogen and liquefied natural gas.

As I have already mentioned, as a port city, Hamburg needs to keep its eye on climate change. For this reason, we want to know: How will it be developing, what will the ramifications be for us, and how can we best react? Hamburg is also making investments with this in mind, and this brings me to my third point:

The City of the Future is a powerful centre of science and research. Germany has entered unchartered territory with the energy turnaround. There are hardly any proven solutions, or best practices. So this unchartered territory has to be explored and tilled. Our goal is to take our place at the very top in both areas. And this is why Hamburg is broadening its activities in the fields of climate research and renewable energies.

Within the KlimaCampus, meteorólogists and oceanógraphers, atmosphere researchers and ecologists work closely with members of other scientific disciplines with sociologists and economists, with media scientists and peace and conflict researchers. Together, they analyse natural climate changes and those caused by mankind and develop possible future scenarios. Involved are 18 university institutes, as well as non-university partners such as the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the Helmholtz Zentrum Geesthacht, and the German Climate Computing Centre.

The hub of the KlimaCampus, by the way, is the Integrated Climate System Analysis and Prediction” cluster of excellence of the University of Hamburg, which is fostered within the framework of the federal and regional excellence initiative. As you can see, Hamburg is already at the forefront of climate research.

And we want to take this position in regard to the energy turnaround, too. Since the beginning of 2013, the Hamburger Energieforschungsverbund combines the expertise of the universities in the fields of energy research and renewable energies, particularly in regard to the themes of "network integration/storage," and it improves collaboration with companies in research projects. Members of the organization are the University of Hamburg, the Technical University of Harburg, the University of Applied Sciences, the HafenCity University, and Helmut Schmidt University.

Furthermore, the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences is building a new technology centre, the above-mentionened Energy Campus Hamburg” now becoming a visible location as well. It will include a research and training laboratory for wind energy and intelligent power networks, as well as the construction of a wind farm. The latter, however, is still somewhat controversial” among the citizens. But debating the correct approach is also part of the question of the energy turnaround, and we will naturally be dealing extensively with people’s hesitations, with the pros and cons.

While Hamburg has already begun to take a leadership role in the energy turnaround, this is being done in a way that is embedded in our surroundings. The Hamburg metropolitan region from Cuxhaven to Lübeck and from Neumünster to Lüneburg is already the centre of North German activities in the field of renewable energies.

According to a Prognos study commissioned by the Renewable Energies Hamburg cluster, approximately 25,000 people work here in the renewable energy sector. In fact, a 2012 study showed that the companies in the Hamburg metropolitan region expect further job growth of about 40 percent by 2015.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Hamburg was the European Green Capital in 2011. We have further developed, so that we are now also Europe’s Wind Energy Capital. And this almost automatically leads to our next goal: We want to become the Energy Turnaround Capital as well.

This makes it clear that: The sustainable city is an optimistic city.

And that just about wraps it up for now, doesn’t it? I’m looking forward to hearing your questions and your ideas.

Es gilt das gesprochene Wort.