C40 and 18 cities, including Buenos Aires, New Delhi, Paris and Los Angeles, today launched “Students Reinventing Cities”, an international competition that seeks out the best ideas to transform neighbourhoods and promote a green recovery after the Covid pandemic.

The competition looks to transform cities as part of their fight against climate change, promoting active collaboration between cities and specialists in climate action. The competition is hoping to receive creative and tangible proposals to decarbonise neighbourhoods, and promote more resilient cities with a better quality of life for their residents.

Applicants are invited to pitch their ideas for projects in Auckland, Barcelona, ​​Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Dakar, Dubai, Los Angeles, Madrid, Melbourne, Montreal, New Delhi, Paris, Quezon City, Quito, Reykjavik, Seattle and Washington DC. Interested academics and students can learn more at www.c40reinventingcities.org.

The deadline for entries is March 2021. Finalists will be selected and invited to submit their final proposals by May 2021. A jury from each city and C40 will select a winner for each city project, to be announced during a ceremony in July 2021. The winning projects will be showcased in a global communication campaign and the winning students will be invited to present their projects in front of business leaders, city officials and climate organizations.

Horacio Rodríguez Larreta, Buenos Aires mayor and vice president of C40, said: “Many young people are inspiring the world with their climate mobilization. We can see that they are ready to provide solutions, and this competition will give them the opportunity to share their ideas, creativity and passion for making change.”

With this competition, C40 brings together multidisciplinary teams of students from urban planning, architecture and environmental fields, as well as from business, real estate and engineering. Students will be asked to apply and share innovative solutions to environmental and social challenges, considering models such as the “15-minute city” or the “20-minute neighbourhoods”, increasingly adopted as guiding principles in urban planning.

For her part, Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, said: “Now more than ever, we have a real opportunity to reshape our cities and neighbourhoods so that city residents can adopt a more local lifestyle. Here in Paris we are committed to rethinking our neighbourhoods to accelerate the urban green transition and enable us to develop communities with local amenities. We are promoting what we call the '15-minute city' paradigm, to reduce our impact on the climate and live locally to develop more sustainable and inclusive urban neighbourhoods for all."

The competition has the support of academic leaders from around the world, some of whom were instrumental in the development of the Academic Manifesto for a Green and Fair Future. This Manifesto calls on academic institutions to intensify the fight against climate change, and to cooperate with cities participating in the campaign for a Global Green New Deal.

Carlos Moreno, associate professor and scientific director of "Entrepreneurship, Territory, Innovation" at the Sorbonne University Business School, is a sponsor of the competition and was one of the first signatories of the Academic Manifesto for a green and fair future. “Cities are the principle location for transformation when it comes to tackling the climate emergency. This is where we must focus our efforts to achieve a green and just transition. We need to rethink our cities around four guiding principles: ecology, proximity, solidarity and participation, which are the concept on which the ‘15-minute city’ is based,” he explained.