HAMBURG, Germany, Oct. 30, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- From November 5 through 8, Chicago will welcome a shared exhibition by the two major symbols of Hamburg's ambitious urban design and re-development: The HafenCity Hamburg, Europe's largest urban development project, is expanding the city center of Hamburg by forty percent on former brown fields on the Elbe River. The IBA (International Building Exhibition) builds on a tradition of experimental design and urban planning with a seven-year project that is transforming an inner city island into vibrant and sustainable community living.

The joint exhibition will be presented at the Urban Land Institute Fall Conference at McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago from November 5 through 8, 2013. The HafenCity is a nominee for the 2013 Urban Land Institute's Global Award for Excellence prize whose winner will be announced on November 8, 2013.

Chicago has a special relationship to HafenCity Hamburg: National Design Award-winner Jeanne Gang and her firm Studio Gang Architects contributed to the master plans for the over-all development of HafenCity Hamburg and also received second prize in the HafenCity Water Towers competition for their design of the "HafenCity Waterhouses", a group of six new residential towers to be constructed in the center of the Baakenhafen neighborhood in the eastern part of the development area.

At the heart of the exhibition is an outsized compass symbolically pointing the way to the city of the future. The directional points of the compass have been replaced with four major themes: Growing City, Open City, Smart City and Civic City. These form the conceptual framework to explain the strategies and projects which HafenCity and IBA Hamburg are harnessing to meet the challenges of the future.

HafenCity (www.hafencity.com) and IBA Hamburg (www.iba-hamburg.de) share the vision of a European city meeting the challenges of the future without abandoning its own tradition. Through the exhibition, HafenCity and IBA Hamburg also seek to initiate an international debate on the future of large cities, informed by projects and experiences of other European cities.

Hamburg Marketing GmbHVera Feller, Media Relations, vera.feller@marketing.hamburg.de,  Tel.: +49 40 300 51 581

SOURCE Hamburg Marketing GmbH