Smells in the City: Chimneys of Standstill

The Süderstraße in Hamburg-Hamm starts out as a street, and in other ways it is almost like the little sister of the Straße des 17. Juni in Berlin: for a very long time it runs dead straight, and shortly before the end, on a roundabout, instead of the Victory Column, there is a 14 meter high granite column, with a shiny golden replica of the pirate Störtebeker's cog on top.

Right next to it: the Störtebekerhaus, an office building whose facade is intended to be reminiscent of the office buildings on the outskirts of the city. Diagonally opposite is the Tchibo headquarters in Hamburg. Every year, around 60,000 tons of green coffee are processed here, which corresponds to around 120 million pounds of coffee or almost 9 billion cups, the Hamburger Abendblatt once calculated. And because you can smell the coffee roasting, the planned construction of 800 apartments next door has so far failed.

Smells characterize many places in Hamburg, but they are on the decline. For example, when animals were still kept in the Rindermarkthalle and slaughtered across the street, the Karoviertel smelled of blood. Today the hall is a shopping center. The Holsten brewery in Altona regularly fogged the neighborhood with a brewing cloud, and residents were given beer as compensation. Today the site lies fallow and has been waiting for the planned new apartments for years.

Sure, there's this smell of urine-vomit alcohol in the neighborhood; in narrow old building districts like Eimsbüttel, the pink garbage bags smell on the street because there's no room for garbage cans. And recently in Ottensen, a densely built-up district near the Elbe, there was a smell of vomit for days: someone had poured butyric acid onto the facade of a small Portuguese restaurant. Maybe in protest, we don't know, no one has confessed yet. It's probably like this today: If the city smells, there's a problem.

On this sunny and windless late summer day in Hamm, a delicate roasting aroma hangs over the two dusty sports fields with a red ash surface. The new apartments are actually supposed to be built here, right next to Tchibo. One of the two places is almost completely overgrown. The area is surrounded by barriers and the stone stands are covered in grass. Voices come from the SC Hamm club building, where a youth club has its rooms, a few boys are inside and are playing something that makes a noise.

The new quarter called Osterbrookhöfe is intended to fit right here between the red brick row buildings that were built in southern Hamm, which was almost completely destroyed at the end of the Second World War. It's about 800 apartments, a daycare center, neighborhood meeting points, which is exactly what a city with a housing shortage needs. Right from the start we talked to our neighbor Tchibo because it was clear to everyone involved that the smell of coffee would be a problem. New apartments must be at a greater distance from potentially annoying odor sources than sports fields. To protect the residents. Planning started in 2017 and everything should be finished in 2027. But so far only grass is literally growing over the matter.

Hamburg urgently needs living space. With the “Alliance for Housing”, the city has set itself the goal of approving at least 10,000 apartments every year. Each of the seven districts must do its part. The Mitte district, to which Hamm belongs, has to create an average of 1,400 new apartments per year. With 800 apartments, the Osterbrookhöfe are no small beast.

Many days you barely notice the smell of coffee. On other days it hits you right in your nose, that burnt toast smell that comes when coffee is roasted. The Emissions Control Act treats this smell like that of a pigsty or a chemical factory.

Even if the smell of coffee is certainly not as annoying as the fumes of hundreds of pigs, it is legally considered a “significant nuisance”. An EU directive states that new housing construction in places with strong odors may only be approved if the pollution can be proven to be below the limit values.

What to do? The city wants Tchibo to raise its silver chimneys on top of the factory roof, which resemble shiny onion domes. So that the smell of coffee wafts high above the new tenants. Should pay: Tchibo. Tchibo rejects this and has filed a lawsuit against the Hamburg environmental authority's chimney arrangement.

If you ask people who already live around Tchibo in Hamm, they will say: the smell of coffee!

Anyone who wants to take a look at the castling that urban planning can entail. A few years ago, the Aschbergbad, a beautiful outdoor pool with a 111-meter-long slide, was demolished next door for the new district. The artificial turf soccer fields there, which are supposed to replace the old sports fields, are almost finished.

If you ask those who reject coffee because they love tea, for example: the smell of coffee!

Just a stone's throw outside the odor nuisance zone, there are already several new multi-story residential buildings with spacious balconies on a canal that flows into the nearby Bille. A couple gets into their inflatable canoe at the jetty behind the houses and paddles away, the way the paddles pierce the water sounds good.

Small boats bob opposite; they belong to the allotment gardens lush with garden gnomes. It smells of water and sun.