Morgenstadt City Index

Holistic governance of a city

Cities contain many constantly transforming areas, thus city managers have to deal constantly with balancing and reassessing shifting priorities. Combined with short term political cycles, this complexity leads to a tendency of focussing on short-term objectives, often neglecting important responsibilities that are imperative for maintaining or improving the city’s position in the long term perspective. Within the innovation network, the partners expressed early interest in an instrument to assist mayors, city councils and departments heads in fascilitating holistic long-term strategic management of a city.

An interdisciplinary research team from the Fraunhofer Society identified 28 indicators that were categorized into four central themes (quality of life, environmental consciousness, innovation and resilience) in order to measure the future viability of a city. Through the graphic visualization of the results, the Morgenstadt City-Index offers a snapshot of a city and a guide for city managers to help balance priorities across these four important areas.

Challenges for swarm cities

Researchers selected a range of German “swarm” cities as an initial basis of investigation. “Swarm” cities can be defined as those experiencing an increase in population, especially of students and young professionals. A city is considered a “swarm” city if the age group "20 to 34" increased their share of the population in the years 2008 to 2013 (considering many regions have suffered significant migration of this group during this period).

Index Methodology

Based on key insights of the first two phases of the Morgenstadt Project, four pillars were defined as central to the future viability of a city. A sustainable urban development process must be geared towards improved quality of life, social integration, economic prosperity.

•    The Livable City offers its citizens jobs, a healthy distribution of wealth, long term security, attractive public spaces that invite interaction and a pleasant environmental atmosphere. These aspects are not only important because of their intrinsic value, but are also considered important "soft” location factors, attracting companies to livable cities in their pursuit of retaining highly qualified workers.

•    The Resilient City is flexible, agile and well prepared for sudden or permanent changes in climatic, demographic or economic conditions.

•    The Environmentally Conscious City makes its contribution to the phasing-out of the CO2-based economy, strives for the sustainable use of resources.

•    The Innovative City embraces experimentation as a future lab, becoming an attractive location for research facilities and highly qualified workers. It is an incubator for social and technical innovations that develops solutions for urban challenges of today and tomorrow.

The Index provides a general, yet accurate, representation of urban performance derived from statistics and data already available and thus does not require costly surveys. The project originally included 30 cities, but is also available for other interested cities or municipalities. In addition to identifying strengths and weaknesses in relation to other cities, the Index also presents a baseline for a city’s strategy for improvement. The enclosed documentation shows the approach and results using the example of cities deemed particularly attractive for young people and therefore regarded as the forerunners among the German "swarm” cities. Please contact us if the project could be of interest to your municipality.

Morgenstadt City Index

For more information you will find in our brochure.

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