Speicherstadt  The Speicherstadt (, literally: 'City of Warehouses', meaning warehouse district) in Hamburg, Germany is the largest warehouse district in the world where the buildings stand on timber-pile foundations, oak logs, in this particular case. It is located in the port of Hamburg—within the HafenCity quarter—and was built from 1883 to 1927. The district was built as a free zone to transfer goods without paying customs. As of 2009, both the district and the surrounding area are under redevelopment. As the first site in Hamburg, it was awarded the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site on 5 July 2015. The "Speicherstadt" is located in the port of Hamburg. It is long and interlaced by loading canals (Low German: "Fleets"). Since 1815, the independent and sovereign city of Hamburg was a member of the German Confederation—the association of Central European states created by the Congress of Vienna—but not member of the German Customs Union. Following the Austro-Prussian War which established Prussian hegemony in north Germany, Hamburg was obliged to join the North German Federation. However it obtained an opt-out in the form of Article 34 of the North German constitution, which stated that Hamburg and the other Hanseatic cities would remain as free ports outside the Community customs border until they apply for inclusion. Article 34 was carried over into the imperial constitution of 1871, when the south German states joined the federation. However, Hamburg came under great pressure from Berlin to join the Customs Union after 1879, when the latter's external tariff was greatly increased. In 1881 an agreement was signed between Prussian Finance Minister Karl Hermann Bitter and the State Secretary of the imperial Treasury, on the one hand, Hamburg's Plenipotentiary Senators Versmann and O'Swald, and the envoy of the Hanseatic states in Berlin, Dr. Krüger, on the other. Hamburg would join the Customs Union with all its territory, except a permanent free port district which the agreement specified. For this district, Article 34 would still apply, thus the freedoms of that district could not be abolished or restricted without Hamburg's approval. In 1883, to clear space for the new port area, the demolition of the "Kehrwieder" and "Wandrahm" area began and more than 20,000 people needed to be relocated. The construction was completed before the start of World War I, managed by the "Freihafen-Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft" (the predecessor of the Hamburger Hafen und Logistik AG), which was also responsible for the subsequent operation.