International Bauforum 2019

From 19th to 24th August, the Hamburg Deichtorhallen will be turned into a design workshop for the future of the Magistralen, the international Bauforum 2019.

The Magistralen, in their function as arterial corridors, are the city’s entrances, first addresses, local centres – and also its dividers, barriers and transit spaces. With their heterogeneous architectural, urban, transport and social structures, they shape the image of the metropolis and are thus a location of great challenges and opportunities for Hamburg’s future development.

International Bauforum Hamburg © BSW Hamburg Fotograf: Carsten Rabe

The Ministry for Urban Development has invited around 150 experts and creatives from the fields of architecture, open space, traffic and town planning, science and culture to turn their minds to these urban spaces under the aegis of a “Bauforum”. The Bauforum is a Hamburg event format of long tradition. Within a mixture of a creative hackathon and a specialist conference with a festival atmosphere, Hamburg’s own specialists will come together with renowned national and international experts to draw up new ideas together on the important topics and sites of urban development. Several big Hamburg development projects of the recent past were preceded by a Bauforum: subsequently, the “Perlenkette” on the banks of the Elbe in Altona (Bauforum 1985), the HafenCity (Bauforum 1989) and the “Sprung über die Elbe” (Bauforum 2003) have all taken physical form.

International Bauforum 2019 | Magistralen

Seven very different Magistralen running through all the districts of Hamburg have been selected for the international Bauforum. They differ in length, in the historical development of sequential uses and structures to each side of them, and in their traffic handling capability. In this way, they all face different challenges and offer different potential as drivers for the city around them. At the same time, there are similarities: the Magistralen concentrate traffic flows and link city and countryside, while themselves having a certain centrality. At the same time, the surrounding spaces are dominated by traffic – an exclusivity that must be rethought, especially as innovation and changing patterns of use in the mobility field are opening up new opportunities. On the edges of the Magistralen and in the adjoining areas of the city, there is still potential for diverse urban activities. Also important is the potential for open space: the once purely functional areas along these traffic arteries come into focus as a potential urban backbone for their neighbourhoods, while valuable green spaces in the vicinity can be better set off against their surroundings.

The Bauforum offers the chance to look to the future and draw up new development horizons for these complex spaces, in order to enrich the social debate about the future of the city. All results of Bauforum Magistralen 2019 will be presented and discussed on Sunday, 24 August. The Bauforum will be accompanied by a diverse public programme of specialist lectures and cultural events.

Figure ground plan Magistralen © Kartengrundlage LGV (Bearbeitung-urbanista)

The whole program can be downloaded here International Bauforum