Master Plan Magistralen 2040+

A Master Plan for Hamburg’s Main Arteries

City entrance, prime address, district centre and at the same time a caesura, barrier and transit space. Anyone wishing to shape the growth of the city cannot ignore the Magistralen.

Twelve Magistralen across all themes and locations of the city: On the major arterial roads, where currently the transport of people and goods is primarily in focus, diverse potentials for urban development are opening up. More than 550,000 people live on or in the immediate vicinity of a Magistrale. 160 kilometres of urban space extend along the Magistralen; more than half of these main traffic axes have a traffic volume of more than 26,000 vehicles per day, and 71% of the Magistralen are already affected by heat. With the International Building Forum 2019, where international and interdisciplinary planning teams developed visions for the traffic arteries and their urban spaces in a week-long planning workshop, the City of Hamburg provided a major initial impetus for Magistralen development. Since then, the Magistralen have moved into the focus of Hamburg’s urban development.

Heterogeneous Urban Spaces along the Magistralen

With its city-wide master plan, Hamburg is the first metropolis to address the future role of its Magistralen. The Master Plan Magistralen establishes a framework between the metropolitan region, the city, and its districts. At the city-wide level, it outlines the role each Magistrale can play as a catalyst for innovative urban development. At the local and urban planning level, it adopts the perspective of the people who live and work along the Magistralen. The Master Plan Magistralen is a strategic planning document that integrates tasks and requirements across the city while describing the transformation of specific locations, which could hardly be more diverse.

As urban spaces, Hamburg’s Magistralen are characterised by a strong inherent logic. They are main traffic routes and, at the same time, places for living, working, and life. They are less designed spaces and more functional spaces between the centre and the region, shaping the city’s structure. Due to diverse land demands, they are exposed to enormous dynamics of change. A key driver for the future development of the Magistralen is the conviction that previously undiscovered qualities of living can emerge here, right in the city. This is achieved through greater diversity of use, attractive public open spaces with a high quality of living, and new provisions for different forms of housing, workplaces, and community meeting points. At the same time, the Magistralen offer the potential for mobility- and climate-friendly redesign of street spaces.

By creating urban planning and open space qualities, the Magistralen become the city’s ‘calling cards’. The Master Plan formulates four strategic development goals, translates them into thematic strategy maps and spatial terms, and visualises concrete objectives in public spaces, offering assistance in implementing various tasks in diverse areas. It serves as an overarching spatial strategy and framework for all future planning and projects along Magistralen.

Nine Space Types
The spaces along the Magistralen are diverse and require overarching planning approaches. Nine characteristic space types exemplify the urban planning and traffic diversity. The prototypical target images for each space type illustrate what changes are possible in these spaces in the future.

The Master Plan Magistralen was developed in an intensive, two-year cooperative process with various departments from specialist authorities and seven district offices. A series of workshops provided a stable platform for the authorities and district offices to discuss important urban development issues and local requirements among themselves and to look strategically far ahead. In response to the challenges, the concept was developed by an interdisciplinary planning team with expertise in strategic urban development, process management, urban planning, mobility, open space, climate adaptation, and economics.

Magistralen development is a generational task. The thematic and scalar breadth with which the Master Plan addresses complex issues is particularly noteworthy: With a time horizon of 2040+, the Master Plan formulates goals, contains spatial-strategic statements (Where is there development potential for various functions?), qualitative-design target images (What should the Magistralen spaces look like in various spatial situations in the future?), and implementation instruments. A long-term steering structure and even closer cooperation were established through a cooperative process. This has created a framework within which the Magistralen will gradually evolve through numerous complementary measures in the short, medium, and long term.

In the coming years, the Magistralen will become an arena for future topics concerning Hamburg’s sustainable development – be it as a real-world laboratory for the mobility transition, a field of action for climate adaptation and climate protection, or a space for new forms of urban production.