Rejuvenating Transatlantic Dialogue from the Bottom-Up

The project “New Urban Progress: Transatlantic Dialogue on the Future of Work, Democracy, and Well-being” has launched. Two countries, two road trips, four conferences, ten cities, and 20 program fellows: all to reimagine transatlantic relations and collaboratively work on policies that will positively impact cities on both sides of the Atlantic. 

The New Urban Progress project will compare metropolitan regions that have emerged as hubs of public innovation and collaborative problem-solving, and use the results as frameworks to build inclusive, innovative, digital, and diverse cities. This work will be dialogue-based: we want to engage young Germans and U.S.-Americans in a conversation on contemporary social, cultural and economic phenomena present in all post-industrial multicultural societies.

The task at hand cannot be any more urgent. Both the United States and Europe are confronting a rising tide of illiberal populism that needs a bold, creative and collaborative response. We believe that cities are rising actors of global policies that are capable of delivering the necessary answers and thus can serve as a great vehicle for both relaunching transatlantic dialogue and building cities that work for all. 

Three organizations have joined forces to achieve this goal: Das Progressive Zentrum and the Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft in Germany as well as the Progressive Policy Institute in the United States. The project is supported by the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi).