Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

The fifth edition of “The Proactive City”, the challenge for the city’s innovation ecosystem, focuses on the drought and the shortage of water, and how cities can play a key role in improving people’s quality of life. Projects can be submitted from now until 21 May.

The call has been developed by the Fundació BIT Habitat, the municipal urban innovation agency, together with the municipal company Barcelona Cicle de l’Aigua and the Municipal Office for Climate Change and Sustainability.

This edition has a budget of 400,000 euros, which will be used to fund up to 80% of the projects chosen that have a budget of between 30,000 and 100,000 euros. The goal is to improve the relationship that the city and its inhabitants have with water, in the context of the climate emergency and in particular the drought emergency.

Projects seeking subsidies must fall within one of the following three areas:

• Management of water and public, community and collective space, with solutions capable of optimising water use in the short and long term: drainage and purification, renaturalisation, management and use of water at facilities, cleaning and watering systems, ornamental springs, drinking springs etc.
• Infrastructure of water systems in buildings, with solutions that bring substantial improvements in the management of water in housing and other existing buildings, to help towards comprehensive water savings.
• Joint responsibility and awareness regarding water, with innovative solutions or actions that involve different economic sectors or generate a systematic change in the use of water in specific spheres, such as tourism, sport and commerce.

The solutions put forward must be scaleable and replicable so that their implementation can be planned in the city’s global context. Since the first edition in 2020, the solutions chosen in this call have been tested in a real urban environment in Barcelona.

Projects must be submitted through the Virtual Procedures Office. The deadline is 21 May and projects will be chosen in the summer.