Development of City Nord

City Nord is the only building project of its size in Germany where urban development plans for Greenfield sites have been realised.

At the end of the Second World War, Hamburg’s city planners faced a new set of challenges. The iron curtain drew its border 40 kilometres east of Hamburg, cutting off the main transport routes to middle and Eastern Europe. Alongside the appraisal of new traffic concepts, the search was on for new starting points in economic developments. The service industry in Hamburg was already showing the greatest growth. The aim was to establish Hamburg as a national service centre, and there was a burgeoning demand for new office space.

The inner city area was already bursting at the seams and had become too small for large corporations and administrations. The city of Hamburg could not take any further pressure. Because companies required large areas of land for their offices, obviously not suited to the inner city, and the neighbouring residential areas of Harvestehude/Rotherbaum, Uhlenhorst and Palmaille should not be turned into business parks, Hamburg city planners searched for other possibilities.

The decisive idea was made in 1958 after a visit to New York by the then chief of Hamburg’s building department, Werner Hebebrand: The idea of a second business city. Similar to Central Park in Lower Manhattan, businesses and their administration were to be located in a “business park”.

The land utilization plan of 1960 provided several central locations for service and supply facilities. Included in this was an area north of the Winterhude City Park that belonged to the city and was pledged as a test area.

The optimal location for the site of the future City Nord was an important criterion at the time, and remains today one of the advantages making the office park attractive to businesses:  proximity to the city centre and Hamburg airport, Fuhlsbüttel, first rate public transport connections, and closeness to the Hamburg City Park.

With an area of 42.5 acres, the grounds offered space for 30 to 40 administration buildings and were thus perfectly suited to the building of an office park, relieving the inner city of 200,000 employees and calming the traffic situation. The inner city kept its unique Alster and Elbe environments. There would be no high-rise buildings to spoil the skyline. The threat of businesses moving out of Hamburg was countered.