Resilient City: Ideas for the city of tomorrow

How can cities become more resilient and sustainable? The Resilient City Challenge, organized by ITAS and Fraunhofer ISI, yielded nearly 100 innovative ideas for resilient urban development. Three winning entries were rewarded.
Drei farbige Balken beschriften eine mit "Resilient City Challenge" überschriebene Stadtvision; eine Frau mit VR-Brille erkundet die Grafik. Crowd Innovation / Fraunhofer ISI
Bringing new ideas for the resilient city of the future to light – this was the goal of the challenge.

In collaboration with the Fraunhofer ISI Crowd Innovation Platform, ITAS organized the Resilient City flagship challenge. The goal was to gather ideas on how cities and their surrounding regions can shape deep transformations in the face of climate change, social inequality, resource scarcity, and demographic change. For – as the challenge’s initiators believe – livable, equitable, and adaptive cities require collaboratively developed and easily implementable solutions.

The challenge invited creative visionaries and co-creators who would share their experiences, methods, and approaches for resilient urban development and help shape the transformation.

From a total of 94 submissions, the jury selected three particularly compelling ideas:

3rd Place: Play.Plan.Buchenberg – Urban Design with Minecraft

The project uses the existing Minecraft platform to involve young people in urban design processes in a low-threshold way. A particularly accessible approach that takes participation seriously and engages through play.

2nd Place: NIGHTWALK – Making the city livable at night

NIGHTWALK addresses nighttime safety, dark spaces, and unsafe routes. The project combines civil society perspectives with planning approaches and energy-efficient lighting solutions.

1st Place: PISS – The smart phosphorus recovery system

The winning entry focuses on phosphorus recovery as a resource in urban circular economy that has received little attention to date. Thinking systemically, PISS opens up new avenues for research and real-world laboratories.

“Crowd-based approaches bring ideas to light that aren’t even on the radar. This makes them a valuable tool for quickly gathering a broad spectrum of information,” is the positive conclusion drawn by Silvio Martin and Daniel Lang from ITAS. However, the two initiators of the challenge also point out that this can only succeed with adequate resources for communication and that the online platform must be highly user-friendly. (30 March 2026)

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