Working together for sustainable urban development - IOER and City of Dresden agree on future-oriented collaboration

The IOER and the City of Dresden are already working together in various projects on individual issues of sustainable urban and regional development. Among other things, they are working on heat adaptation in densely built-up urban neighbourhoods or the participatory design of processes of sustainable innovation. In the future, the partners want to orient themselves even more long-term and coordinate more strategically than before.

The agreement aims at a new form and quality of local collaboration between science and practice. The aim is to take up and link different bodies of knowledge from politics, administration, business, science and civil society and make them equally useful for research and practice. The newly acquired knowledge should help to initiate, accelerate and perpetuate innovative processes and thus drive a profound change towards sustainability.

To achieve this, the City of Dresden and the IOER rely on long-term formats of integrated research and application - such as transition experiments or real world labs to test sustainable ways of living and doing business, but also planning processes with intensive participation. It is important for the partners to effectively involve actors from administration, civil society and the private sector. The focus is on a broad range of strategic questions for the future, which at the same time reflects the spectrum of the research topics of the IOER. Among other things, the IOER and the City of Dresden want to work together in the fields of action of climate protection and adaptation, biodiversity, energy and mobility, citizen participation, health and nutrition, as well as smart city and the use of big data.