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This study inspects how an urban place is made in HafenCity, Hamburg, currently one of Europe’s largest urban development projects. This process is illustrated as a co-production of residential initiative and planners' facilitation in developing a nascent urban district into a self-sustained community. The qualitative approach draws on interviews with 55 residents, interviews with planning agents and participant observation. Planners' agendas and policies are set in relation to residents' local activities, to display how physical engineering and social appropriation are moments conjoined in urban place-making. Newly-built riverside developments have commonly been characterised as enclaves of private affluence with weak attachments of their residents to the local area. Middle class professionals enjoy a ready-made lifestyle marked by private consumption and domestic services that enable them to socially disengage from their surrounding neighbourhood. HafenCity bucks this trend in regard to its dynamic neighbourhood life unfolding among its residents. It is argued that the situation of first-time occupation of a neighbourhood spurs the development of residential relationships and their intensification more readily than in established neighbourhoods. An initial merely aesthetic identification of incoming residents with the lures of their chosen destination is a precondition for the generation of farther reaching identifications, epitomised in engagements with place as something valorised in its own right. The facilitation of such associations is grounded in the intersection of two important factors. As a residential site, HafenCity selectively attracts educated middle class cohorts, implying that cultural capital concentrates within a very confined geographical setting that characterised HafenCity at its earliest stage. The personal identification of many incomers with HafenCity as a place of desire and their resulting optimism after arrival translates into a shared positive sense of place among individuals feeling similarly. This 'community in the mind' facilitates familiarisation among residents and the transition of neighbourly interactions into more meaningful voluntary associations serving needs of sociability, cultural indulgence, economic wellbeing, and most prominently, political engagement seeking to make HafenCity's official planning policy more foreseeable and accountable. In essence, the abundance of cultural capital at the neighbourhood scale acts as a favourable condition for its conversion into social capital for the advancement of a new area into a community of strong residential ties marked by attentiveness to one another's needs. The spatial situation of 'under-construction' encourages residents to voluntary engagement in HafenCity’s development policy. While the planning authority itself stimulates such participative mechanisms, they are at the same time concessions made to legitimise and reinforce the power held by this authority. As a consequence, participation in the development process becomes an ambiguous amalgam of volunteering and institutional intervention. While participation facilitates dialogical structures between residents and planners, it does not increase residents’ actual influence in urban policy making. Through their facilitation of residents' place-making, planners can credit themselves with treating the issue of planning in a foresighted way that refutes notions of technocratic blindness to human needs. Such active promotion of residents' attachments to their place however has its limits. While planners have a vested interest in an active residential community they can showcase as a testimonial to the reasonability of their agenda, they are unable to resolve conflicts of interests among residents that thwart the project of joint place-making. The scope of planners in collaborative place-making is circumscribed by the competencies of an authority that de-legitimises the actual engineering of interpersonal relationships at the neighbourhood level.

Detta arbete behandlar hur fysisk planering kan utföras för att bemöta problematiken kring översvämningar i urban miljö som uppkommer i samband med nivåhöjningar av vatten i kust- och vattennära lägen. Konsekvenserna som dessa översvämningar orsakar belyses framförallt ur ett socialt, ekonomiskt och ekologiskt perspektiv. På grund av dessa konsekvenser är det av stor vikt att planera i förebyggande syfte mot dessa problem vid planläggning i kust- och vattennära läge. Individer ska, oavsett vattenstånd, ha framkomlighet i sin närmiljö utan att utsättas för fara. Det finns belägg i både Plan- och Bygglagen (2010:900) och Miljöbalken (1998:808) för att planera förebyggande åtgärder för framkomlighet vid vattennivåhöjningar i detaljplan. Därmed finns det ett lagstiftat stöd i Sverige för frågan inom fysisk planering. Både Stockholm stad och Malmö stad gör reglering för detta i flera av sina detaljplaner som är gjorda för fastigheter i kust- och vattennära läge. Framförallt står markhöjningar och byggnadsteknik i fokus i båda städer. Stadsområdet HafenCity i Hamburg, Tyskland har planerats för att fungera som en blåkopia inom fysisk planering när det kommer till planering i kust- och vattennära lägen. Stadsdelen har vidtagit flera förebyggande åtgärder som gynnar framkomlighet vid vattennivåhöjningar. Likt Stockholm och Malmö har kraftiga markhöjningar genomförts innan någon vidare exploatering fått ske. Det har även gjorts infrastrukturlösningar samt styrning kring byggnadstekniken i stadsområdet.

Harbor developments have been realized in several European cities over the last years, becoming an important topic in the field of urban and regional planning. Despite their presence in innumerous sites with unlike contexts and backgrounds, those developments look pretty similar in terms of design and form. Are we witnessing the born of a generic and similar city? The aim of this paper is to investigate how similar are these areas and their positive or negatives effects upon the existing cities. Through a review on the main urban theories of the twentieth century it is possible to identify what are the contemporaneous trends in urban planning and how they have been employed in harbor developments. Four case studies were selected to illustrate these similarities, two almost completed: Dublin Docklands and Hamburg HafenCity, and two newly ones: Stockholm Norra Djurgårdsstaden and Copenhagen Nordhavnen. The findings indicated the case-studies share several similarities in terms of discourse, implementation strategy, sustainability, publicity and as well social and income inequalities. Contemporaneous urban discourse preaches for diversity which it is still far to be reached by the case-studies