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Infrastructure planning in most cities is a process of sectoral implementation which produces independent sectoral solutions to urbanisation issues. With the advent of sustainable practices, along with the challenges posed by climate change, cities are discovering important synergies among urban infrastructure sectors which are being used to reduce the urban footprint. In the need for sustainable infrastructure, the city of Frankfurt am Main, although operating in a sectoral manner, has learned from past experiences and has progressively developed a collaborative approach to infrastructure planning. This collaborative approach increases the possibilities for trans-sectoral projects and reduces the consumption of natural resources. This paper showcases interesting sectoral and trans-sectoral projects in the infrastructure sectors of energy, water, wastewater, solid waste and urban agriculture. The showcased projects have been selected from a study of 36 operational, programmatic and educational initiatives implemented by the city.

In recent years, urban spaces all over the world have been effectively staged, sometimes all too obviously, and urban design has often concentrated on the implementation of "beautiful" lighthouse projects and globally oriented lifestyle urbanism. However, beauty – also in the broader sense of a beautiful experience – cannot be an end in itself in urban planning. An urban design of responsibility has to be committed to all residents and address the pressing challenges of our time, for example: the almost unlimited consumption of land, water and energy; floods and heatwaves due to climate change; lack of decent living conditions for large parts of the population. Against this background, five strategic guidelines for the integrated and responsible planning of our cities have been developed. These include "comprehensive" and integrated neighbourhoods, a mobility turnaround, interconnected blue and green infrastructure, a circular resource economy and space sharing, and the exploitation of the opportunities of digitalisation for a social and ecological city.

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