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The millions of cars, trucks, and buses on São Paulo's roads account for over 90% of all air pollution. With residents spending up to five hours a day commuting, the metropolis is constantly gridlocked. To address this, What Design Can Do and the IKEA Foundation are calling on creative professionals from around the world to develop radical, innovative solutions for more sustainable flows of people and goods in the city.
It is understandable that many Brazilians rely heavily on cars, as much of the population lacks viable mobility alternatives. Public transportation in São Paulo is limited and inadequate for a metropolis of its size, while bike paths remain scarce or non-existent, particularly in peripheral neighborhoods. For lower-income residents without a car, commuting across the city is a major challenge. Furthermore, vehicle emissions pose a severe threat to public health and quality of life.
On September 4, the Clean Energy Challenge São Paulo began accepting proposals for radical solutions to the city's traffic issues. Submissions should address how to reduce dependence on motorized vehicles through walking and cycling, or how to encourage shared transportation to decrease the number of cars on the road.
5 Continents, 5 Cities, 5 Challenges
In this new global design challenge, the design platform What Design Can Do and the IKEA Foundation aim to find new solutions to energy issues in five global cities: Delhi, Nairobi, São Paulo, Mexico City, and Amsterdam. Each urban center has its own focus: housing (Delhi), food (Nairobi), mobility (São Paulo), waste management (Mexico City), and clean energy (Amsterdam).
The central question for all these cities is: how can we rethink energy production, distribution, and consumption in rapidly expanding metropolitan areas? For São Paulo, the challenge is: how can we reduce air pollution in the face of projected population growth?
What Is Expected?
The Clean Energy Challenge São Paulo seeks locally anchored solutions, bottom-up strategies, and projects that combine innovation with traditional knowledge and local networks. Submissions are open to both local designers living in the participating cities and practitioners from around the world.
The best projects will be those that are simultaneously innovative, practical, scalable, affordable, and easy to understand. Selected by an international jury, the winners will share a prize package that includes a €10,000 development budget, a tailored acceleration program designed to bring winning ideas, prototypes, or startups to market, mentorship from dedicated experts, and access to a global network of partners.
Call for entries: September 4 to November 15, 2018. To apply, click here
Via CicloVivo.
This article was written by CicloVivo. The translation is powered by AI.
