“Finding Places”: An Innovative Partnership for a Collaborative Effort to House Refugees in Hamburg
In the wake of Chancellor Merkel’s bold, oft-decried decision in September 2015 to offer refuge to over a million refugees, cities have proven themselves to be the backbone of Germany’s effort towards refugee housing and integration. Local government has risen to the challenge, spearheading partnerships with civic, academic and private stakeholders and promoting citizen engagement in welcoming the newly arrived and providing for their needs. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the city of Hamburg (population: 1.8 million). Currently home to 50,000 refugees, of which 30,000 reside in public shelters, the Hanseatic City received, at the height of the so-called crisis in the summer of 2015, over 400 daily arrivals. The City promptly reacted by putting together a new task force, the Central Coordination Unit for Refugees or Zentraler Koordinierungsstab Flüchtlinge (ZKF), a new entity dedicated solely to tackling the diverse array of challenges born of this demographic shock. This 80-employee unit is entrusted with a mission to welcome, house, and integrate a steadily-rising influx of refugees.
On 2 February 2017, La Fabrique de la Cité’s working group on refugees and European cities met with Anselm Sprandel, head of the ZKF, and members of his team to find out more about the city’s efforts to house and integrate its new inhabitants. First stop at “Finding Places”, a remarkable example of a partnership between a city and an academic actor aimed at solving a complex equation: how to accommodate 20,000 additional refugees while ensuring residents feel actively involved in a process that directly affects the morphology of their hometown and its social structure.
When experimentation meets citizen participation
Located in HafenCity Hamburg, a massive urban regeneration project on the waterfront, HafenCity Universität is a young university dedicated to urban planning, civil engineering, and architecture. The University is home to the CityScienceLab, an initiative launched in June 2015 by Olaf Scholz, Mayor of Hamburg, in cooperation with the MIT Media Lab’s Changing Places Group, with a view to make the city “a living laboratory for digital urbanization”. Headed by HafenCity University vice-president for research, Pr. Gesa Ziemer, the project was presented to our working group by Tobias Holtz of HafenCity University.
Shortly after its inception, the Lab began to experiment with CityScope, a new technology developed by Changing Places with an aim to solve complex urban planning problems. An interactive city model combining digital (data-visualization and algorithms) and physical elements (Lego bricks!), CityScope is a versatile, open-source tool for 3D-visualization of urban territories. While the CityScienceLab originally intended to use the tool to plan for the reconversion of Hamburg’s 2024 Olympic Village into an urban innovation district, those plans were cut short when a popular referendum put an end to Hamburg’s planned bid to host the Olympics.
In February 2016, during a visit to the CityScienceLab, Olaf Scholz was asked by members of the lab what his most pressing challenge was. Without hesitation, the mayor mentioned the accommodation of refugees. In early 2016, Hamburg’s existing and planned housing for refugees could accommodate 60,000. However, the city expected 80,000 refugees by the end of the year, meaning that 20,000 additional beds were required. Simultaneously, civil protests opposing the settlement of refugees in certain neighborhoods had been erupting in response to these housing efforts, highlighting, at the very least, a high demand for citizen participation and involvement in this housing process. The CityScienceLab immediately got started on fitting CityScope to this new project. The result, eight weeks later: the launch of “Finding Places”, a series of 34 workshops which drew on CityScope and citizen engagement to identify potential plots to be used for temporary refugee housing.
A community engagement tool for housing refugees
From May to July 2016, over 500 citizens flocked to the University to submit ideas for city-owned, public plots where local authorities may want to consider developing temporary, modular housing for refugees. Walking into the CityScienceLab, participants were greeted by a map displaying, in dark blue, existing and planned refugee accommodation in each of the city’s seven districts, and, in light blue, projected housing needs.
With these figures in mind, participants were then led to two interactive, digital models of the city. As each workshop focused on a specific district, the first of these models allowed for a global vision of the district geography, with aerial views and marks for existing housing offering visitors a primary understanding of the possibilities of the area.
A representative of the district municipality and a member of Hamburg’s ZKF attended each of the workshops, allowing citizens to engage directly with the city, to exchange perspectives, and, at times, to address preexisting biases. After selecting an area of interest within the district at hand, participants were invited to move on to a second model at a smaller, neighborhood scale.
Covered in removable bricks, this second model showed an aerial view of the neighborhood superimposed by projectors. Citizens could suggest a particular location by removing the corresponding brick and replacing it with a Lego brick. Different Legos symbolized different capacities (40, 80, or 1,000 refugees, for instance), and, upon being placed on the model, allowed participants to see the number of needed housing decrease in real time. Placing Lego bricks had the effect of displaying, on a screen, the characteristics of the specific plot of land: size, location potential, applicable laws and restrictions, …
Participants also had the opportunity to write down comments explaining why they regarded a given location as worth considering. These comments were especially precious to the City, which vowed to examine each suggestion within an extremely short timeframe of two weeks, as they drew on the inhabitants’ ultra-local knowledge of available spaces and proximity to amenities and social infrastructure. The unique participatory approach relied on unmoderated comments delivered directly by the citizens in writing, with no prior reinterpretation before transmission to the local authorities for examination. The comments were publicized on the “Finding Places” website, as were the city’s responses, in a transparent process that allowed the initiative to include all citizens, regardless of whether they attended the workshops or not. This approach, added to the extremely fast reaction time guaranteed and delivered by the city, worked to increase dialogue and confidence between the city and its inhabitants.
In fact, far from a gimmicky game of Legos, “Finding Places” highlighted the inextricability of housing and integration, and encouraged participants to consider aspects such as equal and fair distribution, as some districts are accommodating a significantly higher number of refugees than others. Further, interactive visualization of existing refugee housing gave participants the chance to examine and highlight proximity to amenities such as public transportation, schools, etc. Participants further took into account the extent to which the selected location would facilitate the integration of the newcomers into the existing community by checking for the presence nearby of organizations and civic initiatives working towards integration. Potential locations were eventually divided into three categories based on ease of access and potential construction restrictions (commercial-use areas, areas under national protection, etc.)
Ultimately, the answers offered by the Hamburg administration on the feasibility of each location were made public and posted on the project’s website, where visitors could click on each location and access detailed information on the reasons behind the City’s choice to pursue or abandon a given lead. All in all, 161 locations were suggested, potentially providing housing for 24,000 refugees. Of these 161 locations, 40 were selected for review by the City, and six were eventually taken through a further planning process. While those results might seem modest, they serve to show the legal and regulatory constraints at play and the difficulties associated with creating housing for tens of thousands in a city such as Hamburg, even though the city benefited from amended laws which allowed it to use locations not usually considered suitable for housing. In other cases, the city deemed a given plot suitable, but opted not to use it due to other factors such as the presence of large refugee accommodation nearby, noise caused by a nearby train, accessibility hindered by trees, etc. Finally, the initiative only concerned itself with vacant city-owned lots, as insufficient data on existing buildings precluded the project from examining empty buildings or facilities for temporary housing.
As for the green-lighted locations, some proved to require a lengthy and complex planning process; on average, construction was completed in 9 to 18 months. But while “Finding Places” spurred ideas that eventually became short-term housing, what of longer-term accommodation? The selected lots are expected to house refugees for approximately 3–5 years, after which their inhabitants should be integrated into regular apartments. Yet Hamburg’s housing market was already under stress prior to the crisis, with plans to build 6,000 new apartments per year. Now, this target has been extended to 10,000, a third of which will be dedicated to social housing. Simultaneously, Hamburg is home to a prospective housing program whereby new apartments built specifically to accommodate refugees should ultimately be converted into social housing.
In the meantime, “Finding Places” has brought a highly valuable contribution to the integration of refugees in Hamburg, providing evidence of an innovative and open mindset on the city’s part, as it successfully engaged and cooperated with citizens to increase the city’s resilience and provide shelter for its new inhabitants.
La Fabrique de la Cité is a think tank on urban transitions and innovations. Find out more about our work here.
This article is part of La Fabrique de la Cité’s current research project, “From Asylum-Seeking to City-Making: Asylum-Seekers and Refugees in European Cities.”
