Every year the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, the national innovation agency for German science, awards the title "City of Science". Oldenburg's successful application for 2009 was entitled "Übermorgenstadt", which literally means "The city of the day after tomorrow". This title was chosen to indicate that science is the decisive mainspring of the city's further development and its viability for the future.

Dynamism, innovation, future orientation – the guiding principle of the Übermorgenstadt is founded on these three cornerstones. Oldenburg has a young university, academies and higher education colleges with a practical orientation, a lively scientific community and is a city full of creative and clever minds – and it wants to stay this way in the future. These aims are guided by a study of the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,  which predicts that in ten years time around 40 percent of all jobs will require scientific or technical training.

The Übermorgenstadt concept promotes thinking about utopias, evolving visions and encouraging dialogues between an urban society and its scientists on how we want to live in the future. Promoting talented people and tolerance as well as technology and research creates the decisive foundations to realise this aim.