Tackling Climate Change and Shaping Urban Design with Tech
In October 2017, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city’s Chief Technology Officer Miguel Gamiño announced the NYCx initiative, a public-private collaboration between the mayor’s office and the city’s growing tech industry. NYCx’s mission is to tackle environmental and urban design challenges by harnessing the power of technology.
To date, NYCx has put forward two ‘co-lab challenges’ and two ‘moonshot challenges’. Co-lab challenges are challenges that enable direct collaboration between New York City residents and entrepreneurs to jointly identify neighborhood problems, come up with solutions to these problems, and apply the appropriate technologies to achieve these solutions. Moonshot challenges are aimed at more ambitious problems like climate change and bring in entrepreneurs at the global level to help the City tackle them.
The two co-lab challenges are both centered on Brownsville, Brooklyn, and involve creating safe and thriving nighttime urban spaces that generate zero waste. Taken together, these challenges aim to eliminate assaults, arrests, and vacancies, and increase recycling, the presence of waste-free open space, and responsible trash disposal in Brownsville’s public spaces and corridors.
The first of the two moonshot challenges involves transitioning the entire city to the exclusive use of electric vehicles within the next decade by installing charging stations throughout the five boroughs and creating new technologies to charge electric vehicles. The second moonshot challenge is to deploy high-speed wireless connectivity on Governor’s Island in less than a week and for less than $100,000.
The application period for each of these challenges has ended; winners will be selected by a 11-person Advisory Council made up of local tech leaders like Fred Wilson and Kevin Ryan. The winning teams will be announced at the end of April and awarded up to $20,000 to work with the city and realize their proposals. Techies and regular New Yorkers alike will undoubtedly be watching how it all unfolds closely.
