Anticipating Augsburg's Tomorrow: A Look Ahead at the City's Prospects
In the heart of Germany, the city of Augsburg has outlined a comprehensive plan for sustainable development with the release of the "Future Guidelines for Augsburg". This strategic framework, divided into four dimensions, is a collaborative effort involving civil society, economy, city politics, and city administration.
The four dimensions are Ecological Future Viability, Social Future Viability, Economic Future Viability, and unspecified future dimensions. Each dimension encompasses specific goals that aim to create a sustainable and resilient city.
Ecological Future Viability
This dimension focuses on protecting the climate, enabling ecological mobility, improving energy and material efficiency, and preserving natural living conditions. Key initiatives include integrating renewable energy, primarily through large-scale photovoltaic installations between 2023 and 2026, and promoting climate resilience research.
Social Future Viability
The Social Future Viability dimension emphasises enabling healthy living, living holistically, living safely, enabling participation in society, and creating social balance. This includes guidelines for supporting researchers focusing on sustainability, such as graduate centres and networking initiatives.
Economic Future Viability
The Economic Future Viability dimension aims to strengthen the location, connect life and work, economize in a community-oriented manner, sustainably generate and use finances, and sustainably develop and design areas and buildings.
Unspecified Future Dimensions
The fourth dimension encompasses future objectives that have yet to be defined.
The "Future Guidelines for Augsburg" are aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emphasizing higher objectives such as climate resilience, energy efficiency, and proactive environmental communication. The guidelines also focus on expanding renewable energy infrastructure, promoting sustainability in research practices, and supporting junior researchers in sustainability-focused careers and networking.
The city council resolutions are reviewed using a "Sustainability Assessment" based on the Future Guidelines since 2017. The report contains 88 indicators, providing a measurable way to track progress towards sustainable development.
To facilitate discussions about the city's future, the Augsburger Zukunftsbox, an analog-digital future vision game, has been developed. This game is used to discuss current challenges of the future, and in 2022, it was developed for Augsburger schools and other educational institutions.
Everything about the Future Guidelines can be found on www.nachhaltigkeit.unserwebsite.de. The "Future Guidelines for Augsburg" list 78 specific goals for what the city understands by sustainable development. The third Augsburg Sustainability Report on the "Future Guidelines for Augsburg" was published in 2025.
Achieving sustainable development in Augsburg requires contributions from many actors. The guidelines serve as the basis for the sustainable development of the city, with the implementation being a continuous collaborative effort. The city of Augsburg is committed to creating a sustainable future, and the Future Guidelines are a significant step towards achieving this goal.
In the context of the "Future Guidelines for Augsburg", the City of Augsburg is dedicated to creating a sustainable living environment, as evidenced by their focus on promoting home-and-garden practices that coincide with sustainable living. For instance, the Ecological Future Viability dimension includes initiatives for integrating renewable energy in homes, such as large-scale photovoltaic installations.
Moreover, the Social Future Viability dimension emphasizes the importance of healthy living by supporting researchers focused on sustainability, such as graduate centres and networking initiatives, which might contribute to the development of a sustainable home-and-garden lifestyle.
