Location: Hamburg, Germany.

Architect: ADEPT and Karres en Brands together with Transsolar, Büro Happold, Kraft.

The Connected City is a master plan for a 360-hectare area close to Hamburg City Center, developed by ADEPT and Karres en Brands with Transsolar. The plan includes a mix of housing, business, shopping, public buildings, and recreational activities. Oberbillwerder, the location of the development, is just a 15-minute ride from the center of Hamburg and has enormous potential as an attractive urban development area with a highly livable and vibrant city environment. The infrastructure in the Connected City prioritizes pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport, while looking into the future of mobility. The unifying green artery that encircles the plan provides access to all neighborhoods, public buildings, and recreational activities. The overall development strategy embraces social, financial, and environmental sustainability as well as climate adaptation through a nuanced distribution of functions, typologies, and resources. The mosaic of neighborhoods within the master plan is linked by pedestrian and cyclist-friendly streets and blue/green arteries. The different characters are defined by climate adaptation: wide canals, large green rain beds, and narrow blue streams, or concave street profiles and thin linear trenches. The future inhabitants can then choose a way of living; canal living, landscape living, or urban living. Each of these is the starting point for developing unique housing typologies and collective facilities. The Connected City is a forward-looking concept for Oberbillwerder that creates a district that shows what Hamburg should look like in the future. The design offers an excellent planning basis and deals very precisely with the sensitive cultural landscape. It develops a very specific contribution to this location and has a good sense of the right scale, creates a diverse range of different living and working opportunities, and makes great first proposals for possible architectural ideas. The Connected City is part of the strategy “Mehr Stadt an neuen Orten” and aims to design a lively and urban, future-oriented district as part of this strategy in a beautiful natural and cultural landscape.

Photo credit: ADEPT/Karres en Brands/Doug & Wolf (aerial).