Hamburg - April 2007

Below the steel-shafted cranes that lurch and swing above the River Elbe lies a city that works. The red bricked warehouses, reminiscent of Manchester, indicate a proud trading and commercial heritage. Some have undergone conversion into living spaces for the nouveau riche, others continue to be used, as they were intended, as bases from which spices and rugs are received from the orient. The river bustles with goods arriving from ports around the world, making their way into lucrative European markets. Tugs ease their passage; their wash provides the thrills for tourists as they explore the labyrinthine maritime environment. The container ships tower over the quays, being loaded and unloaded in minutes of their rigid corrugated boxes.

Beyond the river lies an infamous and heady cultural mix. St Pauli and the Reeperbahn continue to entice those seeking luminous and bodily adventure. Tucked away in the adjoining streets are quarters which have a youthful buzz, a sense of anticipation, a cultural edge that marks them out as places to be. These are the new wombs of creative talent. In one street as we wandered around in the pink dusk was a building - clearly earmarked for demolition - adorned with graffiti declaring a defence of cultural autonomy against property developers. The hobos and crusties behind, warming themselves by their burning oil drum, know all too well that commercialism will destroy their idyll, replacing the down-at-heel minimarts and speciality Lebanese shops with designer fashions and cappucino culture. These streets are animated by bobos and the feral, children of the urban jungle.

Hamburg's watery expanse, a leviathan that grips and gropes around the bricks and concrete, will be home to a new area in the next decade - the harbour area - a modern yuppie paradise of bricked-paved bouldevards, municipal leisure and commercial maintream shopping. How anodyne, how safe. The heart of this harbourscape will beat the comforting rhythms the bourgeoisie expect, an enclave for limited aspiration. But it will be seedy Hamburg and its hipster, multicultural and working class streetscapes that will bring the creative highs, new wealth, treasures and enrichment from which the parasitic bourgeois water-rats will realise their property equity.