The Creative Bureaucracy Festival 2022 Has Come to an End

After a two-year pandemic, the festival brought together over 1,000 international participants as a face-to-face event. Charles Landry, the festival president, sees this as the strength of the format: “The Creative Bureaucracy Festival is a place where administrative talents from around the world learn from and inspire each other.” The next Creative Bureaucracy Festival will take place on 15 June 2023.

Innovation and crisis resilience will determine the future of cities and municipalitis. This was emphasised by the head of the Chancellery, Wolfgang Schmidt, in his welcoming speech at the festival: “The motto of the coalition agreement ‘Dare more progress’ also applies to bureaucracy. We want to make bureaucracy and administrations more agile and set an example that cooperation and collaboration are the right things to do.”

The festival guests see first and foremost the urgent need in the areas of structural transformation of the administration, in the further training of professional skills and the holistic use of technologies. In view of the current and future crises, administrative reform must be clearly in the focus of the political agenda. Work processes must be designed in an agile manner and seen as projects, not as line work. “Federal ministries and their subordinate authorities, state administration and municipal level – the administration has a remarkable power of innovation,” says Claus Wechselmann, Managing Director of PD Berater der öffentlichen Hand, and sums up: “We are pleased about the many clients and shareholders of PD who used the stage of the Creative Bureaucracy Festival with us and shared their creative and courageous ideas and initiatives.”

The following international creative projects were awarded the Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award:

• Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation was recognised for successfully digitising Ukraine.
• Kotchakorn Voraakhom, Thai landscape architect and urban planner, was recognised for her sustainable commitment and contribution to green urban development in the Thai capital Bangkok.
• Brian K Smith, Director of Performance and Innovation for the City of Minneapolis, USA,was recognised for the police reform that sparked Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

The Creative Bureaucracy Festival Award “Young Faces – Young Spaces” for the creative participation of young people in the design of public spaces went to the municipality of Bleckede in Lower Saxony. The award was made possible through the support of the “Jugend entscheidet” programme of the Hertie Foundation.