The work looks at the functional mix of residential spaces and product-orientated businesses, based on the example of the Hamm-Sued inner-city industrial estate in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. It was initiated by a strategic planning scheme by the Ministry of Urban Development and Environment (BSU) entitled “Upstream on the Elbe and Bille Urbane Production in HamburgOst,” which investigates the eastern districts of Hamburg as possible locations to develop new residential areas.

The industrial area of Hamm-Sued, near the city center, is the site where an “innovative mix of residential and commercial waterfront” is to be built as one of eleven focal areas of the strategic plan. But, is it sometimes confusing, because there are already obvious traces of residential spaces here — whether in the form of a few people who have appropriated the industrial area as a living space, or speculators who hope the industrial area will soon be opened to housing construction, which is actually already being done by investors, landowners, and other speculators in many places in the district.

And here the question finally arises: what do the terms residential and commercial actually mean, and what references to these functions, besides that of the residents and the business owners, can be seen on site? The analysis of these multifarious forms of the two functions is the starting point of this draft. Eventually, the work focuses on precisely those points where residential and commercial meet in their complexity and interact with each other. These interactions are identified and compared from the perspective of the relevant function on the basis of nine moments. The added value of this comparison is that we can examine the extent to which these functions might influence each other. But the work does not stop there. The chapter “Start the Blender” highlights a planning tool, namely the urban land-use planning that has been made available for the production of this functional mix. Yet, in four scenarios, it also attempts to take a look into the future and examine what happens when a first approach of such a mixture takes place in Hamm-Sued.