EIT Urban Mobility: Citython 2020 – Barcelona
Citython is the new type of hackathon in which multidisciplinary teams of students from different backgrounds and expertise compete to propose the best solutions to urban mobility challenges.
As part of EIT Urban Mobility’s core activities, three Citythons will be organised in 2020 across Europe. The first, in July, will be hosted by Barcelona, which has been organising this type of Citython since 2018. The other two Citythons will be hosted this autumn by Amsterdam and Lublin, to provide citizens, students and experts from other parts of Europe with the opportunity to participate.
The first edition of Citython Barcelona, in 2018, was conceptualised, designed and launched by Barcelona City Council, and coordinated by Bit Habitat and CARNET. It was held in the framework of Smart City Week, an initiative to reflect and experiment on the relationship between people, technology and cities. This year, BIT Habitat is collaborating on the third edition of Citython Barcelona (the second one was held in 2019), and just like last year, it is supported by EIT Urban Mobility.
The event is jointly organised by CARNET (coordinated by CIT UPC) with the involvement of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC). Exceptionally, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the event will be held online to ensure safety measures and provide participants with the required social distancing.
Citython Barcelona 2020
The official presentation of Citython Barcelona 2020 will be on 6 July 2020. Michael Donaldson, commissioner for Digital Innovation, e-Government and Good Governance of Barcelona City Council, will deliver the welcoming remarks. During the session, three urban mobility challenges of Barcelona will be presented with the help of recognized experts such as Javier Ortigosa Marín from Barcelona’s Metropolitan Master Plan team, Barcelona Metropolitan Area (Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona, AMB), Vicente Guallart Director of the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), and Karina Gibert from the Intelligent Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Research Center (IDEAI) of the UPC. The current crisis has forced all of us to reimagine our present, as well as the way we interact with each other in public spaces and with our city. Therefore, this new Citython edition in Barcelona aims to find solutions to the mobility challenges that citizens are facing after the lockdown. The following three challenges are set as starting points to propose solutions for:
- Management of areas with high people flow (for example, beaches, markets, malls, public spaces and cultural venues)
- Urban mobility models adapted to the new safety requirements (pedestrian areas, bike lanes, last-mile mobility and optimization of individual mobility)
- Monitoring and improvement of air quality
Participants will have time to work on their best solutions until 16 July when the final ideas must be presented to the jury. During the hack days on 10 and 13 July, all groups will have the opportunity to attend individual online mentoring sessions to get feedback on their work. A prize will be awarded in all three challenges and the winning teams will present their solutions at the Smart City Expo World Congress 2020 in Barcelona.
Registration and further information
Hacking days: 6, 8, 10, 13, 14 and 16 July (see the full agenda on the Citython Barcelone website)
Participation requirements: you must be at least 18 years old on the dates of the event. You must have a background in either data/computing or urbanism or both. More information about the specific skills required in each area can be found here.
Awards: there will be three winning teams in total (one team for each of the challenges). Each of the winning teams will be given a financial award of EUR 1 500. The three winning teams will have the chance to present their solutions at the Smart City Live 2020.
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