Niklas Effenberger

Hi, I’m Niklas. I’m a research associate at Fraunhofer IAO in Stuttgart, working within the Urban Systems Engineering department. My work sits at the intersection of urban sustainability, governance and technology.

Over the past years at Fraunhofer, I have developed and coordinated work packages in large-scale European programmes. In URBREATH, a Horizon Europe project on nature-based solutions for climate resilience, I coordinate the Replication and Scaling work package, developing frameworks and training formats together with cities adopting nature-based solutions across different climatic and institutional contexts. Before that, I served as Replication Manager in SPARCS, a H2020 programme on positive energy districts, where I worked with five European cities on their implementation. I also co-led the work package on societal integration in ACCSESS, an H2020 project on carbon capture and usage, focusing on governance, public administration and stakeholder legitimacy.

More recently, I have been working around ideas of the so-called Citiverse: City-scale virtual environments that bring together digital twins, simulations and “immersive” interfaces to support urban decision-making. My interest here is about the technology itself and whether this technology could help people from different backgrounds to arrive at a shared understanding of what is happening in their city and what could happen next? I contributed to the ITU Citiverse Use Case Identification Track as part of the Global Initiative on Virtual Worlds and AI and the Metaverse Themenwochen campaign from the Department of Urban Systems Engineering on the topic of the convergence of digital twins, AI, XR and urban systems.

A topic that has become increasingly important to me is nighttime governance. Cities are 24-hour systems, but planning and policy rarely account for what happens after dark. I published a comment titled “My city never sleeps” in Nature Cities in 2025 and contributed to the Nighttime Economy Report published at the World Economic Forum in 2026. I have spoken about this topic at SXSW in Austin, the UN World Urban Forum in Cairo, the NØK Conference in Mannheim and coached the winning team of the 2025 Fraunhofer Summer Camp, and their AI-driven tool for nighttime pedestrian safety.

On a more independent track, I have been developing the Amazonia City Lab Initiative together with Amazonia 4.0 and Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV). The initiative is close to my heart, it tries adapting Fraunhofer’s Morgenstadt City Lab methodology for small towns in the Brazilian Amazon. You may find more information about the initiative in the dedicated project subpage.

I also co-lead the Fraunhofer Museum Innovation Network, a think-tank format that aims at translating research into practical strategies for cultural institutions, contributed to the development of an AI-Regions Benchmark for the Heilbronn-Franken region and have been involved in exploratory work on telepresence robotics in urban contexts.

I hold a Master of Science in Bioeconomy from the University of Hohenheim, where I wrote my thesis on The Governance of Nature-Based Solutions (graded 1.0). For my master, I was supported by a scholarship from the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung.

I care about the gaps between research and practice, between daytime planning and nighttime reality, between technological possibility and lived reality. If you are working on urban futures, nature-based solutions, immersive technologies for cities or the governance of innovation, I would be happy to connect.

Talks & Media

Publications

Beyond Work

I share photography on Unsplash, play music as dj effekt and occasionally build things with my hands, from paintings to birdhouses. I starred in an e-bike commercial and co-created Crab Couture, a concept for a sustainable fashion brand using generative AI.

More of these personal projects live on the Creative section.

Get in Touch