Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

Barcelona Innova Lab is a new one-stop-shop service offering support for pilot projects in the city. The goal is to facilitate experimentation and testing in Barcelona, in line with the city’s strategy as an authentic urban innovation lab to look for and promote public policies, services and assets which have a social impact in the medium term.

Managed by BIT Habitat and the Municipal Institute for IT (IMI), the Barcelona Innova Lab is aimed at businesses, start-ups, cooperatives, research centres, universities, foundations, associations and consortiums, helping them to test public-interest innovation projects in real conditions in the city.

The whole of Barcelona will be offered as a testing ground, prioritising pilot projects at the Ca l’Alier facility and other adjacent spaces. Projects must be for a maximum of 12 months.

The lab will also provide guidance and technical support for the implementation of pilot projects and access to public spaces and assets, such as tech infrastructures (sensors and databases) and 5G connectivity rolled out by the IMI and the technological tools available at Ca l’Alier.

Pilot projects tested within the framework of the laboratory can be assets, services or methodologies applied in the following fields:

• Government and ICT: e-governance and e-democracy, participation, transparency, procurement.
• Energy: energy management, energy transition, energy sovereignty.
• Environment: management of buildings, public assets, pollution control, urban decarbonisation and climate neutrality, nature-based solutions and circular economy.
• Mobility: transport and sustainable transport, urban logistics, final mile.
• Economy: enterprise and business, circular economy and orange and blue economies.
• Quality of life: education, health, culture, leisure, public safety, welfare services.

In terms of tech applications which can be tested with the laboratory, these can relate to artificial and robotic intelligence, urban management technologies (cleaning and waste, greenery and biodiversity, environmental quality, water, energy, lighting, paving, management of permits etc.), urban mobility solutions (autonomous and connected vehicles, individual transport vehicles etc.) or drones and new smart city services etc.

Once an application is made to trial a project, within fifteen days maximum an initial eligibility assessment will be made or the project will be ruled out if it doesn’t meet the criteria. Projects which pass this initial assessment with then be studied by the Technical Assessment and Monitoring Committee at BIT Habitat.

In a period of between one and six months maximum, the project owners will be informed whether their project has been selected and what the conditions are for its implementation. This will be governed by an experimentation agreement to regulate the projects and related activity.