Venice City Challenge

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About the Sustainable Cities Challenge Venice

We are calling on innovators to:

Create solutions that change behaviour, increasing the use and adoption of existing low and zero-carbon transport modes in the city of Venice, with a focus on the mainland and motorized islands.

Solutions must address at least one of the following:

Increasing active mobility
Increasing public transport use
Increasing usage of shared mobility

Any proposed solution must take into account the motivational aspect of behaviour change.

Entries for this challenge are now closed.

Why do we want to innovate in the City of Venice?

The City of Venice is an iconic Italian port and one of the world’s oldest tourist and cultural centers. It is made up of the historic city of Venice and mainland urban areas such as Mestre and Marghera.

Venice has invested in developing an impressive range of sustainable mobility options, that include water, land, and railway. A few highlights:

A growing 180 km local bike lane network
A pioneering hybrid car-sharing service, the first of its kind in Italy
Widespread shared micro mobility services
An extensive public transport system via water, land, and railway, which is being made ever more sustainable with 30 new electric buses and plans for 44 more, along with 90 fuel cell buses by 2026.
An expected 32 hybrid water buses in Venice’s waterways by 2029

However, this diverse range of low to zero-carbon modes of transport is currently underutilized.

The City of Venice is looking for innovative solutions that shift behaviour, focusing on understanding users’ motivations rather than tech, infrastructure or government policy.

Watch this to learn more about the Venice City Challenge

Our judges

Meet the judges for the Sustainable Cities Venice Challenge: Embracing Sustainable Mobility. With over 120 incredible entries from innovators worldwide, they’re tasked with selecting the semi-finalist innovators who will shape the future of low and zero-carbon mobility in Venice.

Alexander Schmidt

Alexander is founder/CEO at BABLE Smart Cities with the mission to create sustainable and inclusive cities and towns. Alexander’s work focuses on urban mobility, new digital markets, system analysis and development of urban solutions. He holds an M.Sc. Transport from Imperial College London, Environmental Engineering & Business Studies. He was formerly a researcher and project lead at the Fraunhofer Research Society, Morgenstadt, in Stuttgart, Germany and at the MIT Sensible Cities Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Alexander was also part of the founding and management team of EIT Urban Mobility, an institution of the European Union.

Jannis Linke

Jannis is a research associate and PhD candidate at the University of St.Gallen, Switzerland. In his research, he focuses on factors influencing consumers’ choices of sustainable mobility solutions, including the integration of new mobility services. He has collaborated with industry and city partners on various projects and was a visiting PhD student at LSE Cities. Prior to his academic career, he worked in the railway industry.

Karen Vancluysen

Karen has been the Secretary General of POLIS since September 2014, after having been the network’s Research Director for 10 years. POLIS is the leading European network of cities and regions on urban transport innovation. For over 25 years, Karen has been involved in European urban transport networking and policy activities, and EU research and innovation projects covering a wide range of urban mobility topics.