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 built and led work packages in large-scale European programmes. In URBREATH, a €15 million Horizon Europe project on nature-based solutions for climate resilience, I lead the Replication and Scaling work package, developing frameworks and training formats that help cities adopt nature-based solutions across different climatic and institutional contexts. Before that, I served as Replication Manager in SPARCS, a €23 million H2020 programme, where I guided five European cities through the implementation of positive energy districts. I also co-led the work package on societal integration in ACCSESS, an €18 million H2020 project on carbon capture, 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, AI-driven simulation and immersive interfaces to support urban decision-making. My interest here is less about the technology itself and more about the translation problem underneath: How do we help people from different backgrounds arrive at a shared understanding of what is happening in their city and what could happen next? This work connects to my contribution to the ITU Citiverse Use Case Identification Track as part of the Global Initiative on Virtual Worlds and AI and the Metaverse Themenwochen campaign I chair for the Department of Urban Systems Engineering on 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 launched at the World Economic Forum in Davos 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 at the 2025 Fraunhofer Summer Camp, developing an AI-driven tool for nighttime pedestrian safety.

Beyond the EU project portfolio, I have been developing the Amazonia City Lab Initiative together with Amazonia 4.0 and Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV). The initiative which is close to my heart 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 deticated project subpage. I also co-lead the Fraunhofer Museum Innovation Network, a think-tank format that translates 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. The thesis received a grade of 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, and between technological possibility and human understanding. I believe sustainable cities need people who work across these divides. 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 co-created Crab Couture, a concept for a sustainable fashion brand using generative AI.

More of these personal projects live on the Creative section.

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