Ideas for the city: Trend report into prospects and success factors for Germany’s urban future

Following on from a trend study that Fraunhofer IAO conducted on behalf of Deutsche Bank, the institute has released a trend report outlining the key findings. Under the banner of "Ideas for the City," the Germany -- Land of Ideas initiative and Deutsche Bank honored 100 projects as "Landmarks in the Land of Ideas" in 2013 and 2014. Accompanying the competition of the same name is a trend study that brings together quantitative analysis and qualitative interpretations of the competition's featured projects. It provides insight into current trends and future developments across Germany's urban project landscape.

Analysis in the trend study, which has been compiled by Fraunhofer IAO's Urban Systems Engineering research area, is based on interdisciplinary urban expertise and on metadata provided by the selected projects. Key insights are:

Over half of the winning projects address the issue of resource efficiency -- which goes to show that society is very much in favor of efforts to improve sustainability. A positive climate of innovation in cities is also being underscored by forces such as citizen-led self-organization initiatives, community-building efforts and regional pride.

It's also interesting to look at how the projects are distributed in terms of Germany's urban structure: 67 percent of the projects were based in cities with populations of over 100,000 people. This suggests that there is still plenty of potential to establish innovative solutions in small and medium-sized towns and in rural areas.

Although business played a major role in 73 percent of the projects, it was the mix of interdisciplinary consortia and municipal bodies or private initiatives that proved an essential ingredient for success. This shows that new ways of collaborating are also required to shape the cities of tomorrow.

Fraunhofer IAO collaborates with industrial and civic partners to come up with new, innovative strategies and pioneering urban planning concepts in Fraunhofer's Morgenstadt (city of the future) initiative.