City-wide sustainability visioning and real-world laboratories, City of Lueneburg, Germany

The city of Lüneburg belongs to a larger metropolitan region in Northern Germany which increasingly experiences climate change in form of heavy rainfall and flooding. Preparing the city of Lüneburg for a long term sustainable future was at the core of the project “Future City Lüneburg 2030+”. Starting in 2015 and together with the local Leuphana University of Lüneburg and its Faculty of Sustainability, a broad city-wide process started to first envision the city’s future for the year 2030 and beyond, and second to strategize about adequate actions to realize this vision. Joint transdisciplinary research efforts delivered four larger clusters of actions: (1) improving housing and local employment situation, (2) enlarging CO2-reduced transportation, (3) strengthening community and civic engagement, and voluntary work, and (4) greening infrastructure for climate adaptation, and biodiversity increase. All clusters are detailed including resources and responsible actors for the actual implementation and are at the same time embedded into a real-world laboratory design that accompanies and evaluates their implementation. Over the last years of this project a long-term partnership has developed between the city and university. As part of our evaluation we aim to understand how future work can further develop the partnership and unify many previously scattered efforts into a meaningful shared endeavor that carries the work beyond a project logic. These lessons learned will support other cities and universities to frame or diagnose their own partnership within their cultural context.