Every year the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, the national innovation agency for German science, awards the title "City of Science". Oldenburg's successful application for 2009 was entitled "Übermorgenstadt", which literally means "The city of the day after tomorrow". This title was chosen to indicate that science is the decisive mainspring of the city's further development and its viability for the future.
Dynamism, innovation, future orientation – the guiding principle of the Übermorgenstadt is founded on these three cornerstones. Oldenburg has a young university, academies and higher education colleges with a practical orientation, a lively scientific community and is a city full of creative and clever minds – and it wants to stay this way in the future. These aims are guided by a study of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which predicts that in ten years time around 40 percent of all jobs will require scientific or technical training.
The Übermorgenstadt concept promotes thinking about utopias, evolving visions and encouraging dialogues between an urban society and its scientists on how we want to live in the future. Promoting talented people and tolerance as well as technology and research creates the decisive foundations to realise this aim.
The main topics of the future were focused on in 16 key projects. One of these was the "I'll show you how science works" project which revealed the secrets of chemistry to primary school children and presented the results of their experiments to the general public. "Power for Übermorgen", for example, focused on visions for supplying our power in the future. The project entitled "Smart house" dealt with questions of the homes we will be living in in the future. The main theme was how to subtly integrate information technology into our everyday lives. The content of this project laid the foundations for the actual "Smart House" which will be built on the Schlossplatz, the palace square.
More information on the "City of Science" is available on our German website »