Sleep is mysterious, and we don’t totally understand why we need it—just that we do, and bad things happen if we don’t get enough of it. On average, we spend around 30 percent of our lives asleep, but as a review of the literature on circadian rhythms from 2005 notes, “The introduction of artificial lighting and the restructuring of working hours has progressively detached our species from the 24-hour cycle of light and dark. … At best we tolerate the fact that we need to sleep, and at worst we think of sleep as an illness that needs a cure.”

Not so in Bad Kissingen.

Though the initiative’s sexiness is perhaps debatable, in an effort to stand out from the pack and improve the lives of its citizens and visitors, Bad Kissingen has committed itself to finding ways to implement chronobiology into the fabric of the town’s society.

“The history of Bad Kissingen has [always] been linked to curation and health,” Wieden says. “We have 17 hospitals, sanatoriums and rehabs. We have about 250,000 guests per year. Hence, tourism and health treatment are closely linked in Bad Kissingen. Therefore, to me, Bad Kissingen is the best place in the world to start a ‘whole city project’ like this.”

Russell Foster, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University, studies chronobiology but is not involved in the Bad Kissingen project. “Changing behavior in any area is really difficult,” he says, and notes a classic study in which researchers observed a population of monkeys slowly learning to wash their food in the ocean to get the sand off. “The ones that were slowest to adopt [the washing behavior] were at the top of the social hierarchy.” Similarly, if those in charge of scheduling our lives—school boards, bosses, etc.—aren’t amenable to change, it’s next to impossible to truly sleep like yourself.

But there Bad Kissingen has the advantage of buy-in from the top. Kantermann is the project’s scientific manager, and in July 2013, he, Wieden, Bad Kissingen’s mayor and town council, and other researchers from the University of Groningen and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich signed a letter of intent. In that letter, they pledged to promote chronobiology research in the town, to “gather results that are directly applicable to living, education, work, well-being, health, mobility, rehabilitation, and sleep.” It goes on to claim that “the city of Bad Kissingen will be the first in the world realizing scientific field studies in a wider context.” Those involved often refer to Bad Kissingen as “ChronoCity.”

Though it was first conceived more than a year ago, the project is still in its infancy—it takes time and careful planning to do anything on this scale. Plus, Kantermann says, they need more money.

The goal is to get all of the town’s citizens’ chronotypes in an online database. Right now, individuals have to go to this website and input their own data; the hope is that one day schools and hospitals will take down this information as regularly as someone’s height or weight, making it much easier to determine and work with the town’s needs.