The early bird application for the 6th Guangzhou International Award for Urban Innovation (Guangzhou Award) will be closed on July 31.

In preparing for the evaluation, how to describe your urban innovation initiatives to increase your competitiveness? Please refer to this interpretation of the Guangzhou Award selection criteria:

What is urban innovation?

(1) The Guangzhou Award stipulates that urban innovation must include one or more of the following:

• New policies; 
• New implementation strategies; 
• New business models (including financing options); 
• New forms of partnerships; 
• Engagement and collaboration; 
• New approaches to governance;
• Use of technology.

(2) The five domains of previous Guangzhou Award initiatives:

• Social & Cultural: youth empowerment, women’s empowerment, child development, inclusive communities......
• Economic: industrial structure, tax policy, market players, management organization model......
• Environmental: sponge city, climate change, waste management, biodiversity
• Governance: participatory planning, urban renewal, governance efficiency, refined governance......
• Technology: smart city, information security, digital government, artificial intelligence......

What kind of initiatives are we looking for?

(1) According to the selection criteria of the Guangzhou Award, there are two types of urban innovation:

• Revolutionary: A new policy, strategy, business model, governance system or technology that has never been applied before to bring about more sustainable urbanization and urban development that has impacted other countries, regions and cities.
• Evolutionary: learning by doing and learning from others. Being inspired by borrowing ideas that have worked elsewhere and adapting to local context and/or improving upon them. A critical aspect is experimentation and learning from past errors or mistakes.

(2) We would like to learn from the answers to the following questions about your initiative:

• What can other cities learn from your initiative?
• What did not work well and why?
• What were the obstacles to change and how were they overcome?
• Was leadership recognized at all levels? True leadership is leadership that listens and takes into account voices at all levels, from the street to the neighborhood, to the city.
• Have you referred to the SDGs? A key deciding factor is how your initiative helps other cities understand how to make progress on the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda.
• Did you use a systems approach? A major obstacle to sustainable development is the compartmentalization or sectoral approach to problem-solving. Cities and regions have to look at problems holistically and take decisions and allocate resources that cross departmental and jurisdictional boundaries.

(3) Keywords to keep in mind when introducing your initiative:

• Change: What has changed compared to before and how?
• Sustainability: But especially sustainability for whom? The rich and the powerful or the poor and the vulnerable?
• Revolutionary and evolutionary: Most award-winning initiatives are evolutionary. What distinguishes them is how they learned from their own mistakes or the mistakes of others.
• Learning: What did the city learn from the process and how can these lessons be of benefit to others.

Samples for reference:

We recommend you visit the GUANGZHOU AWARD URBAN INNOVATION DATABASE (www.urban-innovations.org), where you can find almost all the past initiatives of the Guangzhou Award as samples for your application.