Do You Have an Idea for our Urban World? 21 Cities, 90 Million Citizens are Interested

How can we create wireless, interconnected cities? Can data about our health be better utilised to tackle obesity? What can we do to make the processes required to maintain our urban environments more efficient? These are just some of the challenges facing the cities involved with the Living Labs Global Award 2012 – and each wants your ideas.

21 cities on 5 continents are looking for urban innovations that could bring about significant change – and over 90 million citizens could benefit from this exercise in crowd-sourcing. Taking part are Barcelona, Birmingham, Caceres, Cape Town, Coventry, Derry/Londonderry, Eindhoven, Fukuoka, Glasgow, Guadelajara, Hamburg, Lagos, Lavasa, Kristiansand, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, San Francisco, Sant Cugat, Santiago de Chile and Terrassa, and the solutions these cities are looking for are as broad as their geographical distribution. You can check them all out here.

The Living Labs Global Award has been running since 2009, helping cities in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas solve some of their biggest problems with new technologies and services. In the last two years, over 800 urban innovations have been entered, with previous winners including a real-time traffic monitoring solution in Barcelona and an open data platform for citizen service delivery in San Francisco.

This Big City is all about ideas for an urban world, and we strongly believe that some of the best innovations come from a city’s residents. We are therefore thrilled to be partnering with the Living Labs Global Awards 2012 and look forward to seeing this year’s entries. If you have an idea which you think can solve one of the challenges facing any of the 21 cities involved, click here to submit your entry or find out more. But hurry – the deadline is February 17th.

Photo: nietnagel