Barcelona wins 'Thinking Cities' Award

For the first time, the Thinking Cities Award, supported by Mastercard, was handed out in the framework of the Polis 2015 annual conference to reward a smart urban mobility solution presented at the conference. At the official conference dinner on Thursday night, the city of Barcelona was revealed as the winner of the first Thinking Cities Award for its new approach to link social data and mobility planning.

The award was presented to Adria Gomila, Mobility Director of the City of Barcelona, by Polis Secretary General Karen Vancluysen and Christophe Merer, Vice President Europe for Government & Public Sector at MasterCard.

Karen Vancluysen praised Barcelona for how it makes use of crowd-sourced data, for example from smart phone applications, to inform and support its sustainable mobility planning. She highlighted this innovative measure as a really interesting spin-off to open data, which is relevant for many other cities and regions across Europe and beyond. Christophe Merer highlighted that Barcelona received the Thinking Cities Award because their approach helps tackling the challenge of sustainable mobility planning by innovative means, thus contributing to achieving policy objectives, and is highly transferable to Barcelona’s counterparts across Europe. He added that Mastercard is pleased to support this ever first edition of the Thinking Cities award and looks forward to learning more about the most innovative initiatives that cities in Europe and beyond are undertaking.

The award winner was chosen among all abstracts that have been submitted for the 2015 Polis Conference. The Thinking Cities Award is associated to the magazine "Thinking Cities", published twice a year by H3B Media in cooperation with Polis.

Access Barcelona's presentation on "Social data tools, cycling & mobility planning” here.