Innovate UK has launched the Innovation in Urban Spaces Contest through its digital innovation programme IC tomorrow.
The £140,000 contest aims to find novel solutions for people’s movement through, engagement with and connection to, urban spaces.
As part of the contest, four winners will be rewarded up to £35,000 in funding for smart city innovations exploring the ideas of engaging spaces, active citizenship and urban travel.
The winners will also be offered the scope to collaborate with commercial partners for further development of their technologies.
Presently, 54% of the global population is concentrated in urban areas, which is expected to go up to almost 70% by 2050.
Population growth and urbanisation has been projected to add another 2.5 billion people to cities around the world by 2050.
Innovate UK has formed partnership with Transport for London (TfL), Centro, Clear Channel Outdoor and Atkins for the contest.
TFL is seeking tools and concepts that can be used by the agency in its existing and emerging train occupancy datasets while Centro is exploring new ways to combine existing public and travel open data to maximise parking capacity, manage traffic flow, reduce congestion and emissions, and speed up journey times.
