Dortmund has become a centre for future-oriented sectors such as IT, micro- and nano-technology, logistics, and increasingly also for biomedicine and robotics, and the figures confirm that this trend is continuing. The number of people in employment is rising, with more than 37,000 employed by more than 1,400 companies in these sectors. 680 IT and software companies with 12,000 employees are based in Dortmund, making the city one of Germany's biggest software locations. More than 3,000 employees in 100 companies are specialised in e-commerce, and there are approximately 640 companies with almost 22,000 employees in the logistics sector. Eight per cent of Europe's employees in the micro-technology sector work in Dortmund, and 24 companies with around 1,700 employees mean Dortmund is Germany's biggest MST cluster and one of the biggest in Europe.

As locations for a whole variety of sectors are required, the city of Dortmund Economic Development Agency supports a sustainable urban development policy, with a focus on the reactivation of industrial wastelands and their sector-oriented development. Top-quality locations combine residential, working and leisure areas. The lead project in this sector is the 200-hectare PHOENIX site, an area almost as large as 280 football pitches, with a new multi-functional technology location for the micro- and nano-technology and IT sectors on the PHOENIX West area and an attractive residential, working and leisure location by the PHOENIX Lake.

The city centre is Dortmund's calling card, with more than 600 shops, restaurants and cafés situated within the line of the medieval city walls. Up to 100,000 people stroll through the shopping precinct every day, lingering on historical or modern city squares. After the city had been completely destroyed during World War II, one billion euros in public and private investments have made the historic core of the 1,100-year-old free and Hanseatic city the urban heart of Dortmund.