Build the City Challenge
What is the Build the City Challenge?
Our aim: £15M to develop and test transformative solutions to shape equitable, climate resilient future city growth
In the next 30 years another 2.5 billion people will call our cities home. Africa’s urban populations are expected to triple by 2050. Billions of people, particularly those lining in low and middle-income countries, will be highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
To transform how our cities respond to climate threats, we need data-driven, evidence-based, inclusive tools to both decarbonise cities and direct investments toward better resilience, shaped by the people who live there.
We need to upskill and empower the next generation of innovators and cities to rapidly create, test, implement and share data-driven planning and development tools and inclusive decision-making processes to understand, analyse and plan for future growth.
A challenge prize run in partnership with rapidly growing cities will enable them to grow smarter and adapt to climate change. By opening locally based data sandboxes to innovators, a challenge can spark the creation of new tools, products or services with public authorities. This will enable more sustainable, equitable and impactful digital transformation.
The challenge will empower communities that are often left out of the process. Enabling them to participate in the design of future cities, and shape how breakthrough innovations like AI or drones, or other smart city technologies, can manifest in their communities.
Enabling innovators to iterate creative solutions in partnership with communities, under an open innovation competition, will foster innovation, support a cohort of local innovators matched with technical expertise, and unleash entrepreneurial energy to solve critical urban problems.
This challenge will invite three cities in low and middle-income countries that are grappling with rapid growth and face climate vulnerabilities to create and open up data sandboxes.
This will enable innovators to design data-driven, user-centred solutions. Innovating in partnership with local residents, businesses, government agencies and services to create better opportunities for all.
These city-based challenges will be designed to foster specific outcomes, such as:
- using data analytics to test interventions against different growth scenarios
- create an AI-based emissions metrics tracker
- designing future transport systems based on city growth prediction models
- devising participatory planning and citizen sensing tools to understand pressing local problems
Get in touch if you are interested in collaborating on this future prize.
Build the City Challenge
This prize idea is designed to be a conversation starter, so tell us what you think!
The best prize ideas are developed through extensive research and engagement with experts, stakeholders and people with lived experience of the problems they are focused on. We start with a first draft like the one above – then work to improve, refine and validate our thinking.
We’re particularly keen to have conversations about this idea with potential funders and organisations working in the field. Get in touch if you’re interested – or if you think you have a better idea – and we’ll schedule a call.
Mission Possible: The role of challenge prizes in a revitalised UK innovation strategy
Challenge Works has put together a report shedding light on the role of challenge prizes in revitalising the UK Innovation Strategy.
Challenge prizes can complement grants, reduce risk in portfolios of government innovation investments, and can be particularly effective at stimulating near-market innovation targeting specific outcomes and private R&D investment.
