Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing

In the coming months, Barcelona will have a new byelaw for promoting innovation and experimentation in the city. The aim is to create a regulatory framework to streamline and simply the procedures and processes for authorising pilot trials in the city under secure conditions.

The BIT Habitat Foundation is an expert in launching challenges that seek to find solutions to everyday urban problems and thus improve people’s lives: new more sustainable paving tiles, prefabricated modules for quickly refurbishing old buildings, structures that create shade in public spaces where it is not possible to plant trees, and so on. All these prototypes have to be tried out safely and securely in real public spaces to check that they work correctly and effectively.

Because of this need, the City Council has announced the launch of a process to develop a new regulatory text to regulate these pilot trials. This means the City Council will put the necessary tools and procedures in place to safely and securely manage the application of innovative solutions in the city to ensure a secure and controlled environment in which prototypes can be tested. The new regulation will entail setting up a bank of public, private and community assets that will be made available to the innovation ecosystem to carry out these tests, such as spaces on streets or at the Olympic Port, facilities such as offices, libraries or sports spaces, or events in the city such as music festivals, local festivals and sporting competitions.

The Minister Diana Morant presents the ‘Sandbox’ guide

The announcement was made on Wednesday during a conference organised by BIT Habitat in Ca l’Alier to present the guide ‘Sandbox: entender e implementar. Guía para entornos controlados de pruebas’. [Sandbox: understanding and implementing. Guide to controlled testing environments]. This is a document produced by the General Secretariat of Innovation of the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities on creating a controlled and delimited space in which to test projects.

A number of discussion panels were held at the presentation featuring experts from a number of fields. Also participating in the event were the mayor Jaume Collboni; Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning, Ecological Transition, Urban Services and Housing, Laia Bonet, and the Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities, Diana Morant.