A holistic approach to understand urban complexity

In 2012, the Fraunhofer Society, under the leadership of the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering, started an ambitious innovation network project called Morgenstadt: CityInsights. For this system research initiative, 12 Fraunhofer institutes worked together to analyze innovative solutions in six different cities around the globe for a sustainable city. The goal of this project was to understand the city in a holistic way, applying the approach of system engineering to the field of urban development, as well as to identify the key factors to redesign existing and newly emerging cities in a more sustainable way. In this paper we will describe a systematic and holistic approach in city analysis and illustrate initial sector-related results of the on-site research in New York City in 2013.We will further analyze project and process structures of the studied projects and describe what other cities can learn from New York City. We complete the paper with an outlook on the second project phase that started earlier this year.