The Elbphilharmonie and the Hamburg effect: on the social positioning, identities and system functions of a building and a city

ABSTRACT

Drawing on social positioning theory, we examine how the identity of the city of Hamburg has been affected by the identity and system functions of its recently completed Elbphilharmonie building. We explore the social positioning and identity formation processes involved, and argue that, rather than having a ‘Bilbao Effect’ as is often claimed, the Elbphilharmonie project is in fact having a distinct ‘Hamburg Effect’ of its own.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• materiality
• social positioning
• system functions
• qualitative study

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Philip Kennicott, Ascan Mergenthaler, two anonymous referees, the editors of this Special Issue, seminar participants at the Cambridge Judge Business School, and participants at the 2018 CJBS Winter Doctoral Conference and the 2019 European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium, for comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We are grateful to Ascan Mergenthaler of Herzog & de Meuron for this point.

2 These included a metro system designed by Norman Foster and footbridge and an airport terminal designed by Santiago Calatrava in Bilbao, and the HafenCity project already described in Hamburg.

3 While Hamburg’s port remains the third largest in Europe in terms of containers in 20ft equivalent units (TEUs) handled, this number fell by nearly 9% from 9 737 110 to 8 730 000 TEUs between 2008 and 2018 (AAPA, 2020).

4 Bilbao’s population was 431,520 in 1980 and fell to 350 478 in 2005 before steadying at around its current level of 349 633 (2020) (World Population Review, 2020). The corresponding numbers for Hamburg are 1 645 095, 1 743 625 and 1 845 229 (June 2020) (Statistisches Amt für Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, 2020).

5 The Laeiszhalle has an audience capacity of 2025 and was the largest and most modern concert hall in Germany when it first opened in 1908 to replace the former Conventgarten as the city’s premier concert venue. The Conventgarten originally opened in 1853 with an audience capacity of 1100 (later 1500), and was destroyed in the Allied bombings of Hamburg during World War II.

6 The buildings also differ significantly in other ways, not least in terms of cost and in that, unlike the GMB, the Elbphilharmonie incorporates parts of a historic building and is a complex with a variety of system functions.

7 Burkhard Glashoff, managing director of Dr. Rudolf Goette Konzertdirektion Hamburg, from a 2019 interview.

Additional information

Funding

PhD funding and support from the Economic and Social Research Council, the Cambridge Political Economy Society Trust, Cambridge Judge Business School, the Cambridge University School of Technology, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, are gratefully acknowledged.