The New Hanse investigates in collaboration with the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg the relationship between urban digital infrastructures, access to and deployment of data for the public interest; with tangible data-driven pilot projects that address real world challenges for the city of Hamburg. The New Hanse aims to showcase the potential of a citizen centered digital green city in a close collaboration between administration, science, industry and civil society.

With a pilot project in the field of mobility data and by building legal as well as technical instruments to govern these data sources collectively, The New Hanse wants to create blueprints for other European cities and explore new concepts for the transformative use of data.

The city of Hamburg thereby becomes a civic laboratory for more democratic and sustainable futures. The intertwined relation between digital and “analog” urban space, the debates and regulation surrounding both provide a starting point for practical as well as theoretical investigations and interventions.

THE NEW INSTITUTE and Francesca Bria have designed this project in order to support the city of Hamburg in becoming the European capital of green digital transformation and tell a different story about the futures of (European) cities.

Cities are accelerators of social differentiation, arenas of displacement, "markets of ideas" as well as places for knowledge exchange, political articulation, and trading. In times of crisis, city alliances have historically formed transnational alliances along common strategic and normative lines.

The New Institute aims to create a network of progressive digital cities, starting with Hamburg, and connect the past of urban cooperation with an open future: The New Hanse will be the beginning of a European initiative to support a future-oriented democracy which keeps and crafts its liberal parameters in the digital age.

The goal of the cooperation between The New Institute and the Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg is to work together in the context of an Urban Data Challenge and create a blueprint for a democratic exchange of data for Hamburg and other cities in Germany and Europe.