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The social upheavals taking place in the eastern part of Germany in 1989 and 1990 also led to significant and undeniable changes in the old seaports along the coast of Mecklenburg - Western Pomerania. The fundamental factor here was the termination or relocation of cargo handling in the early nineties, and with it the loss of one of the characteristic primary functions of the respective harbours. This transformation triggered entirely new developments of kinds previously foreign to harbours, and led to various innovations, some quite curious in nature. Essentially, the harbour areas underwent redesign and reorganization for the purposes of tourism - including the visitor-friendly removal of harbour railroad tracks and of a large part of the cargo-handling technology, along with the paving and to some extent terracing of the harbour area, its partial covering with vegetation, the provision of benches and lampposts, and embellishment with works of modern art. A second fundamental change resulted from the efforts of communities to attract investors for the renovation and novel utilization of harbour buildings and real estate. The main result of this development is that harbour warehouses have meanwhile come to serve as hotels, guesthouses, restaurants, apartments, offices, commercial spaces, and occasionally even as museums. In addition, there are a substantial number of new buildings, above all in Wismar and Rostock. In addition to the innovative utilization of the harbour as a residential area, commercial location and company headquarters - now also for non-maritime enterprises and institutions -, the new design and usage of the harbour enjoys an even more striking profile as a promenade with a large number of corresponding gastronomic facilities, as a large parking lot, and especially as a location for folk festivals. Mention should also be made of a further - not always successful, but nonetheless interesting - innovative idea, namely the establishment of museums in the harbours of Barth, Stralsund, and Sassnitz. In the water, moorings are now offered to vessels of types other than cargo-carrying ships. The spectrum includes passenger ships, sailboats and motor yachts (in "harbour" or "city marinas"), occasionally also large-scale sailing ships and reconstructions of historical ships, along with the meanwhile quite numerous stationary "cutters for the sale of fish" and "traditional" sailboats. The latter have even come to share mooring areas in museum harbours (Rostock, Greifswald) which themselves represent a further cultural innovation in some seaports. Hand in hand with the increase in recreational offerings along the waterfront in addition to the opening of the harbours for maritime tourism, seaports have rapidly also been occupied by trades and commercial enterprises catering to this customer group: companies specialized in servicing boats and boat motors, outfitting yachts, making sails, chartering yachts, and operating marinas. In many other European seaports, the aforementioned innovative developments in maritime culture - which did not reach the seaports along the coast of Mecklenburg and Western Pomerania until the advent of the social transformations taking place since 1990 - had already commenced in a similar manner at a much earlier point in time. The development began in the 1970s in those locations where - for commercial and technical reasons - the harbour facilities which were oldest and closest to their respective cities could no longer be used to handle cargo. This most recent chapter in the "cultural history of the seaport", however, has presumably not yet acquired its permanent form, neither along the coast of Mecklenburg - Western Pomerania nor elsewhere, for in many places seaports will continue to offer event managers, project developers and investors a range of possibilities for creative, innovative, and sometimes curious innovations.
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