Hamburg - Geography and history
The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is Germany's second-largest city and is also a Land in its own right. It is situated on the North German Plain, at the head of the Elbe estuary, around 100 km from the river's North Sea mouth.
Hamburg has a maritime climate with mild winters and an annual average air temperature of 9.3 °C.
The city covers an area of 755 km2 and stretches, at its greatest extent, about 40 km both from north to south and from east to west. To the north of the Elbe, Hamburg borders on the Land of Schleswig-Holstein, to the south on the Land of Niedersachsen. Of the city's surface area, 36% is taken up by buildings and courtyards etc., with roads accounting for 12%. Also within the Land's boundaries are the islands of Neuwerk and Scharhörn (uninhabited) in the mouth of the Elbe.
Hamburg has one of the largest seaports in Europe, handling 107 million tonnes of goods and 11 500 sailings in 2003. In addition, 9 million tonnes of inland-waterway freight are transhipped each year. The city has a major international airport and is also an important hub in the European rail network, with around 800 long-distance trains leaving its stations daily. The total length of roads within Hamburg is 3 900 km.
Centre for services and industry, and an attractive residential location
In these early years of the 21st century, Hamburg has been afflicted like the rest of Germany by sluggish economic growth. During the preceding decade, the city had powered ahead and developed into a high-performance services centre of international standing. Trading and transport services have a long tradition in Hamburg, reflecting its more than 800-year history as a port, and these have been complemented in more recent times by the growth of business services. Industrial activities have been refocused towards future-oriented high-technology products.
In addition to the fresh impetus deriving from German unification, which extended Hamburg's function as a regional capital, increasing globalisation has given a further boost to the city's development. So much so that Hamburg has now become known as a gateway to China. The European Union's enlargement into Central and Eastern Europe will provide further stimulus to the Hamburg economy, partly because of the city's function as a lynchpin between the North Sea and the Baltic.
More foreigners than Germans in some districts
Every year, roughly one Hamburg resident in six moves house, and in some areas of the city this is leading to changes in the population structure. In the past, the middle classes moved out of older houses close to the centre, and the mainly low-cost accommodation they vacated was taken over by lower-income sections of the population. The proportion of non-Germans living in some inner-city districts is currently in excess of 50%.
The better-off social groups tend to live in the residential areas on the north bank of the Elbe in the west of the city or along the Alster, a lake which flows through central Hamburg from north to south.
The central employment area is made up of the city-centre districts and the docklands, as well as industrial sites to the east of the docks. Purely residential areas are mainly to be found in the outer city. Many districts are mixed-use, and for some time now traditionally residential areas have been experiencing more and more commercial development.
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