Optimiziation as Wealth
Hamburg, Germany’s ‘smartest’ city, offers a focus on logistical cities (Rossiter 2016: 26-50) and the attendant promise of optimization, with Hamburg’s largely smart, automated free port serving as a blueprint for running an efficient, wealthy city. Hamburg’s port is the largest inland port and second largest container port in Europe and has historically been of the highest significance for the free and Hanse city, with today still tens of thousands of jobs dependent on the port and the city’s wealth staked on its continued success. This success builds on a long history of trade, one that is deeply tied to colonialism, with much of the riches of Hamburg’s wealthiest families tied to century-old shipping companies and trade e.g. with Southern America. More recently, this success has also come with environmental costs, with the Elbe river’s more than 100 km long stretch from the North Sea to Hamburg bringing geographical advantages to the port (with much of the goods which arrive distributed within the Hamburg region) while requiring different phases of deepening and expanding of the waterways, the last one only completed in 2022. The port is also of geopolitical importance: it still is the primary port of call in Northern Europe for container ships from Asia, and China’s Cosco recently invested in one of the container terminals.
The port has been a test-bed for smart technologies for a long time: the container terminal Altenwerder is heavily automated, with automated guided vehicles and semi-automated cranes since 2002, and the port hosted a 5G test-bed for internet of things applications in logistics. smartBRIDGE Hamburg, a digital twin of the Köhlbrandbrücke, which stretches across one of the arteries of the port, has recently become the showcase test-bed for digital twinning in infrastructure with the aim of extending the lifetime of crumbling infrastructure on which business and wealth are staked. Yet smartness is today put to work not only to optimize logistical flows through automation or to save infrastructure, but also to manage sustainability. In the Elbe river delta, underwater and aerial drones are put to work to smartly manage the river ant its waterways. As conversations are ongoing about potentially widening and deepening the Elbe yet again to accommodate ships that carry more than 18.000 TEU, these autonomous robots are meant to smartly solve the problem of sustainability that is exacerbated through the port’s growth (and the ships’ size).
Digital twins in this context are only one, albeit currently very in demand, version of smart technologies that are deployed in and around the port with a plethora of promises associated with wealth: they bring efficiency in operations, they sustain infrastructure, and they manage sustainability. The project explores the antecedents and current iterations of digital twins and other smart technologies in logistics as they are deployed in and around Hamburg’s port.
