Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

L'Ajuntament de Barcelona, through the BIT Habitat Foundation, has presented the six winning projects in the fifth edition of the "La ciutat proactiva” grants for urban innovation, which this year was dedicated to tackling the drought. The six winning proposals present projects for improving the water cycle in Barcelona and will now receive a grant to implement these solutions in a real-world environment in Barcelona.

This year, the fifth edition of BIT Habitat’s “La Ciutat Proactiva” grants call was dedicated entirely to finding innovative solutions to tackle the drought, at a time when the city continues to suffer from water shortages and during the Alert phase of the drought protocol. The 46 proposals submitted for the call have now been examined and six winning projects have been selected that aim to improve some aspect of the water cycle in the city.

In total, the six proposals will between them receive funding of 400,000 euros to finance 80% of each project (with budgets ranging from 30,000 to 100,000 euros) with the aim of making their ideas a reality, implementing them in a real-world environment in Barcelona with demonstrations or pilots tests to verify their usefulness.

The winning projects

• REGALIM – Reconfiguring sanitation systems to guarantee good use of cold water and limit its waste (UPC, Tarpuna SCCL, FEGiCAT): this is an innovative, simple and effective solution to reuse cold domestic waste water, channelling it to the toilet cistern.
• REGENET- Regeneration and reuse of the water from self-service laundrettes (University of Barcelona): reducing the consumption of potable water in Barcelona by treating and reusing greywater in self-service laundrettes, with technologies that remove contaminants and reintroduce the water to the washing cycle.
• Comunitats de Sembra d’Aigua (Associació Germanetes Jardins d’Emma, Associació Taula de l’Eix Pere IV, Associació LEMUR Laboratori d’emergències urbanes, Fundació Privada Elisava Escola Universitària, Viver Tres Turons S.C.C.L.): this is a community organisation model for collecting and managing water involving local public facilities and green spaces.
• MICA – Smart Monitoring of Water Consumption (Lucía Chacón, Miquel Escobar, Marta Castells, Jaime Escobar): this is a digital platform that uses Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things to monitor water consumption in urban households, using a single sensor that enables data and personalised recommendations to be offered to users on their consumption, and which can detect any leaks.
• RegCom – Regeneting water from the community (Constraula S.A.U., Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), Societat Orgànica, Naturalea): this is a nature-based solution for regenerating and saving water which will enable an innovative phytoremediation greywater treatment system to be implemented and tested on a community rooftop, in combination with participatory solutions for collection, renaturalisation and improving usage habits.
• SwiftOn – Smart showers (SWIFTON Innoveering S.L.): this proposal is a device that uses Artificial Intelligence and features a screen to help hotel guests to save water with optimised showers, .

Right now in Barcelona there are 29 initiatives under way that have been launched within the framework of “La Ciutat Proactiva”, in addition to these six new proposals.