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

The Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) and the City of Dresden want to work even more closely together in future on issues of sustainable urban and regional development. In doing so, the partners will jointly explore new ways of local collaboration between science and practice. This is provided for in the cooperation agreement signed by Marc Wolfram, Director of the IOER, and Lord Mayor Dirk Hilbert on Monday, 6 December 2021.

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.

With the City of Dresden and the IOER, two strong partners are joining forces. The City of Dresden has long pursued an innovative urban development policy, which is reflected not least in the Integrated Urban Development Concept (INSEK) "Future Dresden 2025+". The INSEK addresses important topics of sustainable urban development such as mobility, resource conservation, participation or climate protection and adaptation. In addition, the city is currently updating its Integrated Energy and Climate Protection Concept (IEK 2050) and its Mobility Plan (DMP 2035+), both of which involve the IOER. For its part, the IOER is an international leader in research on sustainable urban and regional development - especially on issues of transformative, i.e. far-reaching, change as well as on the manifold interactions between the environment and spatial structures and processes.

With the now agreed cooperation, both partners also want to strengthen Dresden as a science location.

Due to the current Corona regulations, the signing took place online.

The Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development is jointly funded by the federal government and the federal states.

FS Sachsen

This measure is co-financed by tax funds on the basis of the budget approved by the Saxon State Parliament.