City of Frankfurt and Eurohypo AG announce pupil competition "PerfectFrankfurt2020" on PerfectCity.

How will people live, work and spend their leisure time in Frankfurt by 2020? What will Frankfurt’s urban face look like? Will Frankfurt remain a tolerant and cosmopolitan city? Answers to these and many other future questions still need to be found, so that the Main metropolis remains a modern, liveable city within the next twenty till thirty years.

To contribute this discussion, German city Frankfurt/Main and Eurohypo AG have set a pupil competition called “PerfectFrankfurt 2020” on PerfectCity. This competition challenges young people to generate ideas for the city of tomorrow. Pupils in the fifth grade and up, from any school in Frankfurt can take part individually, in a group or as an entire class. Frankfurt mayor Petra Roth says “Within our competition it is not urban planners, architects or politicians that are in demand, but young people. They have a lot of imagination, creativity and are not afraid to take risks to find solutions." Bernd Knobloch, CEO of Eurohypo, regards Frankfurt as an ideal environment for the competition: "Frankfurt is an international, cosmopolitan and innovative city - that is exactly the right place to create new ideas."

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Regarding our PerfectCity Charter we have just started a new poll. This time we want to know what is most important about the economic environment in the City of The Future. To get a little deeper into that issue we want to focus on an interesting index, the so called economic environment index.

The Atlas of Canada site, a website where you can discover Canada through national maps and facts, has a wide range of different maps. There you can find map which displays the quality of life through an economic environment index in Canada.

This map shows the quality of the economic environment: the environment in which people engage in, and benefit from, economic activity that includes aspects of paid employment and household finances. The indicators of the economic environment measure the ability of households to access goods and services important to quality of life. To asses the quality of the economic environment seven indicators are used (you can find some of them as factors to vote for in our poll) regarding household finances and employment/paid work. These indicators are:

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Today it is hard to sell huge real estate property without a certificate of an advantageous environmental audit and energy balance. The German Government has agreed to hard commitments to reduce environmentally unfriendly greenhouse gases and yet further plans of the European Union. Thus, the value of conventional buildings is affected, because they are still ahead of traffic when it comes to pollution.

To discuss this issue representatives of different departments (political, economical and scientific) met in a think tank called ENRESO 2020 initiated by RWE Energy AG, a subsidiary of German electric power and natural gas public utility company RWE AG. The meeting was held in Frankfurt. The acronym ENRESO stands for Energy Real Estate Economy Society. For the first time there was a presentation of criteria for an environmental certification which has to meet international standards.

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We found out that one of our blogroll partner A Vision of Europe has a new interesting campaign: The European prize 2008 for the best urban neighborhood in Europe. This prize is launched in occasion of the 25th anniversary of the European Prize for the Reconstruction of the City, the Philippe Rotthier Foundation for the Architecture in Bruxelles, together with A Vision of Europe and CivicArch Lab at the University of Ferrara.

The European Prize promotes the characters of excellence in the designing and building of new urban neighborhoods and aims at enhancing the European genius of building the fundamental matrix of the traditional city: the mixed-use urban neighborhood. It also aims at encouraging the creation of new mixed-use urban neighborhoods conceived and designed according to the principles of Sustainable Development and the EU Green Paper for the Urban Environment.

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In the light of our PerfectCity Charter we want to start the new issue. Therefore a new poll is online focussing on economic environment. Please vote for the most important facets and aspects of this issue shaping the city of the future. We are interested in the following question: Which factors define the economic environment for you the most? What do you think is most important about the economic environment in the City of The Future?

You can cast your votes in the sidebar by distributing 100 points between the following factors which are listed in a random order:

• Geographic advantages
• Industry / Industrial foundation
• Investment environment
• Tourism
• Working environment
• Unemployment rate
• Demographic structure
• Employee structure
• Tax policy
• Market segmentation

This poll will be online until the end of May. Please take a few seconds to cast your votes.
We look forward to your votes!

According to the “World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision” by the United Nations the number of mega-cities had increased to 20 in 2005 and it was projected that there will be 22 mega-cities in 2015. A mega-city is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million people. The world is getting urban – everywhere. Since 2007 the number of people living in cities is the same as the number of people living in rural areas. Currently, the urbanization has reached its peak speeds in parts of Asia and Africa. New mega-cities like Mumbai with 14 and Shanghai with 18 million people are signs for this progressive urbanization.

What are the opportunities and risks, what possibilities are offered by mega-cites? With a portrait of the Japanese city Oskaka-Kobe we want to focus on an Asian mega-city to open up reasons and positions of the urbanization.

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In the light of our PerfectCity Charter a new issue is coming up. This time the focus lies on the economic environment of a city.  When we talk about the issue we mean the following: The economic environment of a city represents the external conditions under which people are engaged in, and benefit from, economic activity that includes aspects of paid employment and household finances. The indicators of the economic environment measure the ability of households to access goods and services important to quality of life. It includes aspects of paid employment, economic status and finances.

To see what is important for a city in terms of the economic environment we composed a list of different factors. Please help us to evaluate these factors before we put them in the new poll and let our reader vote for them.

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Regarding our PerfectCity Charter our current poll on environmental conditions and sustainability closes next week. As long as the poll is still active we like to invite you to vote for the most defining factors of environmental conditions and sustainability. From now on you still have got a few days to participate. Please take a minute to do so.

The next issue will be economic environment. By presenting a list of relevant factors of this issue to you we are looking forward to your ideas and proposals on the integral parts. Besides sending your ideas you can vote on that as soon as possible. 

We are looking forward to your comments and ideas.

During the last six weeks we published all of our “Post and Win” winner’s survey submissions. We hope you enjoyed the different opinion on arenas in and around our cities from PerfectCity readers from all over the world like we did. And once again, we would like to thank everyone who has attended our survey.

We are looking forward to other interesting interviews, projects and contests on PerfectCity.net to get our readers involved. If you have any suggestion or annotations don’t hesitate to contact us in the comments or via email.