21 Great Ways to Hack Your City
The Paris Innovation Fellowship could be a new model for urban changemaking.
Cities today are almost obsessively trying to become innovative, and for a good reason. As cities grow larger and larger the challenges they face become more complex and require new kinds of solutions — ones based on creative thinking, advanced technology and new approaches.
But while so many cities strive to implement innovation, only few succeed — mostly due to two main barriers. First and foremost, budgetary reasons prevent cities from investing in innovation. Municipalities’ budget obligations usually don’t leave much room for the costly and demanding R&D processes required to spark innovation.
Second, local governments are often heavy, old-fashioned organizations, and therefore many times don’t have the organizational flexibility necessary to experiment and try different solutions, a crucial step for sparking innovation.
But have no fear. It seems that Paris, France has found a new and inspiring way to overcome these barriers. Right now a group of 21 young urban changemakers (including yours truly) is convening in the french capitol for two weeks of hacking urban solutions in the first ever Paris Summer Innovation Fellowship.
During these two weeks fellows are building REAL solutions to REAL challenges defined by the city, working hand in hand with local stakeholders, experts and mentors, and receiving all the resources they need to carry out their projects — data, materials, unique access and so on.
The Fellowship is an initiative of fivebyfive.io, a creative data and innovation team based in Paris, and was made possible due to close collaborations with the city of Paris and an impressive list of civic society and commercial partners.
So what are we working on?
The different groups of changemakers are working on projects tailored to address challenges put forth by the city and other local stakeholders. One group, for example, is building a data based platform to raise awareness to possible dangers in Paris and the ways to protect yourself in case of an emergency. Another is creating an algorithm to anonymize court and city records, in order to allow sharing it with the public without hurting people’s privacy. A third group is building a prototype for a low-cost, tiny house for refugees to answer the need of the many people arriving in the city. and other groups are working on enriching public space with playful ideas like DIY swings or happy robots.
Our group is tackling the city’s transportation problem — we’re building a platform to encourage walkability and transit use by providing meaningful contextual information to people, in order to motivate them to walk or help them use public transit. We’re doing it with minimum connectivity using Beacon sensors, so that people without data plans can enjoy the service as well.
A new model for sparking innovation
This program provides a unique solution to the aforementioned blockers. with a very low budget (mostly to cover travel and living expenses of the fellows) the city is outsourcing its need for innovation for a limited, concentrated effort, which will hopefully result in real world solutions.
The most important thing about the Paris Innovation Fellowship is that it is a win-win situation — the city taps into the resource of urban innovation from around the world to create actual solutions to pressing problems, while the young professionals get a pretty sweet deal as well — all of the resources to carry out their projects (we just love getting access to data) plus a chance to develop their skills and network in a comfortable, funded getaway in Paris. This balance makes the fellowship a sustainable approach to sparking innovative solutions.
Can this model be adopted by other cities?
Sure, and very easily. An interested city needs to simply leverage its own resources. The main motivation for many of the fellows to join was a chance to build projects they were excited about, and could only be done with resources a city has — data, regulatory flexibility and so on. The relationship between cities and young changemakers has the potential to be lucrative for both parties, since both sides have something the other wants.
The main question that remains is will these projects manage to create a real impact on the city. To answer that, we will need to see the two weeks through, but so far it’s looking good. And if you want to find out for yourself, join us on the closing day on July 29th to see what we’ll accomplish.
