23 May 2024
By Namrata Mehta, Innovation Consultant, UN-Habitat
In 2021, UN-Habitat and Viable Cities, in close partnership with Challenge Works, launched the Climate Smart Cities Challenge, an open innovation competition to develop system-transforming approaches to reduce the climate impacts of Bogotá, Colombia; Bristol, United Kingdom; Curitiba, Brazil; and Makindye Ssabagabo, Uganda, while creating a better future for all.
Through the process we’ve reflected on how cities use challenge-driven innovation, and we have applied these lessons to the Katowice Energy Innovation Challenge, a collaboration between UN-Habitat and the city of Katowice, Poland, and the Sustainable Cities Challenge, recently launched by Challenge Works’ with Toyota Mobility Foundation and World Resources Institute.
But why focus on challenge-driven innovation in and for cities?
Cities provide the context within which the world’s most pressing problems affect a majority of the world’s population.
Why cities?
By 2050, 68% of the world’s population (approximately 2.2 billion people) will live in cities, predominantly in Africa and Asia (UN-Habitat, 2022). The United Nations’ 11th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) centers on Sustainable Cities and Communities. It highlights the critical challenges that cities face today and will continue to unless addressed sustainably and systemically. Efforts to localise progress on SDGs further suggest that cities are where most of the SDGs – from poverty and hunger to clean energy and climate action – can best be addressed. Cities provide the context within which the world’s most pressing problems affect a majority of the world’s population. Subsequently, cities are where transformative actions to address these key problems can have far-reaching consequences for people and the planet.
Cities are also engines of creativity, innovation, and economic activity, contributing much to regional and national GDPs. They are hotspots for activity, often hosting academic institutions, R&D centers, businesses, incubators, and accelerators. This convergence of expertise and entrepreneurship offers the ideal diversity and wide-ranging problem-solving capabilities that challenges seek to convene.
In our work on challenge-driven innovation, we often think of cities as challenge owners. The reality of many cities in the world, however, is that they don’t often have decision-making authority, adequate capacity, or financial independence. This is especially true of intermediary cities, more so in the Global South. The extent to which cities truly own the problem is often defined by the constraints of the governance structure within which they operate, even within well-resourced relatively autonomous cities.
So how do cities own the problem-solving process through innovation challenges?
The Climate Smart Cities Challenge received over 50 applications from cities across the world. The four participating cities were selected for their commitment to solving the Challenges they’d identified.
Building ownership
Challenges are political processes as much as they are innovation processes. Cities often implement innovation challenges through delivery teams that cut across silos and include political and technical leadership. To identify solutions to reduce freight emissions through UN-Habitat’s Climate Smart Cities Challenge, Bogota’s delivery team included representation from the Mayor’s Office, the Environmental Secretariat, and the Mobility Secretariat.
Cities also evolve the composition of their delivery teams depending on the phase of the Challenge. In Curitiba, the city’s planning agency Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano de Curitiba (IPPUC) led work to define the Challenge and identify winning solutions to create zero-carbon neighborhoods in the city. In subsequent phases, the city established a committee to include representation across various agencies from the Environmental Secretariat to the Curitiba Development Agency. That committee now leads Curitiba’s implementation of its urban garden system demonstrator under the Climate Smart Cities Challenge.
Seeking to address multiple urban priorities, cities often organize challenges to deliver both direct and ancillary outcomes. The Katowice Energy Innovation Challenge was defined equally by the city’s Department of Energy, focused on the city’s transition to clean and renewable energy systems, and the city’s Investor Services Department, focused on attracting business investments to the city through its municipal accelerator RawaInk. Three international upstarts won the Challenge, and the opportunity to participate in the city’s accelerator program and present to an international audience at the 11th World Urban Forum.
Internal capacity and expertise is a further consideration for cities hosting or entering Challenges. Bristol’s Climate Smart Cities Challenge proposal sought a new model for delivering affordable, zero carbon homes. To deliver the challenge, the Bristol City Council partnered with Bristol Housing Festival, a leading think-and-do tank committed to addressing the housing crisis. In a recent win, their efforts resulted in the Bristol City Council signing a development agreement with the winners of the Climate Smart Cities Challenge, to develop 29 new affordable low-carbon homes across six sites in the city!
Across its programming, UN-Habitat uses open calls or expressions of interest to identify city partnerships. The Climate Smart Cities Challenge received over 50 applications from cities across the world. The four participating cities were selected for their commitment to solving the Challenges they’d identified. Comparable city Challenges, including Climate-KIC’s Sustainable Cities Mobility Challenge and Toyota Mobility Foundation’s Sustainable Cities Challenge have also used open calls to identify city partners ready to address problems facing urban environments around the world.
Cities as challenge owners have tremendous power to set goals, mobilize problem solvers and implement transformative solutions, even within their administrative and political constraints.
Owning outcomes
Much has been written about the success of innovation Challenges resting on how well the problem is defined in initial stages (see here and here). Equally important is planning for what comes after an institution selects winning proposals – what I like to refer to as the afterlife of Challenges. Institutions administering Challenges should consider how prize or grant money; acceleration and incubation; networks and matching can help incentivize Challenge winners to deliver on their solutions. While these incentives help mobilize action, for a city to truly benefit from a Challenge-winning solution it must create a pathway to implementation either through partnership or procurement.
A common approach that cities adopt to advance the implementation is alignment with existing policies and political priorities. Curitiba’s winning solution, while focused on zero-carbon neighborhoods, is aligned with PlanClima, the Municipal Plan for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change. The soon-to-be-launched urban garden will provide a starting point for a portfolio of solutions that align to PlanClima. In a similar vein, existing procurement mechanisms and the city’s immediate need to address a temporary housing shortage helped accelerate Bristol City Council’s development agreement with the Challenge winners.
Aligning with political priorities and policy also affords cities access to public finances. Makindye Ssabagabo is exploring how to leverage municipal budgets to enable the Challenge’s winning team to build affordable and low-carbon housing in the city. The city of Bogota adopted a different approach – to partner with the private sector. Bogota’s Challenge winners, focused on reducing freight emissions, developed a digital transport management and matchmaking platform for freight companies to optimize routes, loads and times to ultimately reduce emissions. A data sharing partnership based on platforms already in use in Bogota will enable the city to learn from the freight companies and design responsive urban climate policy.
Achieving goals
Cities as challenge owners have tremendous power to set goals, mobilize problem solvers and implement transformative solutions, even within their administrative and political constraints. Through Challenges, they bring attention to a pressing problem, convene diverse perspectives towards a shared goal, and seed solutions that haven’t yet existed. In collaborating with the four Climate Smart Cities Challenge cities, we already see advancements towards new mechanisms for achieving low-carbon affordable housing whether on small brownfield sites in Bristol or through innovative funding in Makindye Ssabagabo. In Bogota, we see how new models of data-sharing between freight companies and cities have benefits well beyond both actors, and in Curitiba how engaging communities at the neighborhood level is key to addressing a cities climate impact. We’re excited to see how this work progresses, and keen to expand this group of cities to include others around the world committed to their climate transition through urban transformations.
