New Urban Progress in the United States and Germany

New Urban Progress initiates a conversation with German and U.S.-American experts, activists, and local authorities on urban challenges and diverse innovative solutions on both sides of the Atlantic.

New Urban Progress has entered its exploration stage. By embarking on a transatlantic exchange on metro innovations dealing with the future of work, democracy, and well-being, we want to explore how German and U.S. cities are preparing themselves to be metropolitan areas of the future. We want to first define the challenges facing cities and urban areas in three thematic fields – inclusive growth and innovation, networked governancesocial mobility – and then identify policy approaches and citizen initiatives aiming to overcome these.

To do so, we are inviting researchers, activists, members of local governments and other stakeholders involved in metropolitan affairs from Germany and the U.S. to help us sketch country-oriented landscapes of the most common and urgent challenges that cities and metro areas face, as well as the approaches applied in each country to tackle them. Understanding the context of urban policies and the current innovations will lay the groundwork for further project activities. The outcomes from Germany and the U.S. will be compared and complemented by desk research and literature reviews to find a common framework to launch a hands-on, future-oriented transatlantic dialogue on an urban agenda.

Two events will kick-off the project

The first kick-off event took place in Washington DC, on March 10th, 2020. In Germany, the kick-off event Urban Atelier will take place later in 2020.


About New Urban Progress


New Urban Progress is the joint metro initiative of Das Progressive ZentrumAlfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft and the Progressive Policy Institute.

The project is supported by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi).


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Supported by:

on the basis of a decision by the German Bundestag

Authors

Paulina Fröhlich was Deputy Managing Director and Head of the Future of Democracy Programme.
Lara was a trainee at the Progressive Center in International Relations from November 2018 to June 2019. She completed her Bachelor's degree in European Studies at the University of Twente.

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Matthias Miersch (Chair of the SPD Parliamentary Group) and Astrid Séville (Professor of Political Science at Leuphana University Lüneburg and member of the Scientific Advisory Board of Das Progressive Zentrum) on stage.

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