Enabling Smart Cities in Brazil - Open Call

Future Cities Catapult invites UK businesses with products and services that can provide or enable solutions to urban mobility issues to the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte.

Transporting half a million passengers each day, the most popular way to travel around Belo Horizonte is the bus system. This is a feeder and trunk Bus Rapid Transit system managed and operated by the transport authority of Belo Horizonte (BHTrans). Serving mainly Belo Horizonte neighbourhoods, the feeder bus system is operated by local bus companies.

As part of the Enabling Smart Cities in Brazil project, the Catapult has worked with both citizens who are using the system and local stakeholders, to identify and investigate the ‘bottlenecks’ they encounter when travelling by bus. The Catapult would like to share this knowledge with innovative and forward thinking businesses to enable business to consider how their solutions could address these and make a difference to the overall journey experience for Belo Horizonte citizens.

Future Cities Catapult is working in close collaboration with our partner, WRI, a global research institute located in Brazil on the “Enabling Smart Cities In Brazil” project. The project is aiming to understand issues around urban mobility and make recommendations to improve the lives of people living locally in the cities in which the Catapult are working. In order to do this we are working together with the local governmental body responsible for public transportation in the metropolitan area of Belo Horizonte, BHTrans.

The vision of this project is to find and showcase solutions from UK businesses that can help enhance and improve the end-to-end user journey experience of Belo Horizonte bus services. Through this project we would like to enhance the profile, visibility and outreach of UK business both in UK and in Brazil. The Catapult will consider a diverse range of solutions that may address the challenges stated below faced within Belo Horizonte, ranging from physical assets to innovative strategies.

The Catapult has identified some key challenge areas via its qualitative and quantitative research with BHtrans officials and people who use public transport. These challenges spanned across all phases of people’s reaching and engaging with the public transportation system. The Catapult is excited to hear about new designs, methods, apps, products or services which might address one or more of these challenge areas in new and innovative ways. The Catapult would also welcome integrated approaches that could provide solutions to the challenges in a seamless way.

For more information about the project and the competition please follow this link: http://futurecities.catapult.org.uk/opportunity/enabling-smart-cities-brazil/

Additional information: For more information about the project and the competition please follow this link: http://futurecities.catapult.org.uk/opportunity/enabling-smart-cities-brazil/

All questions regarding the project must be received via brazil@futurecities.catapult.org.uk.