The scale of the undertaking sets it apart from typical innovation contests. Rather than crowning a single global winner, TMF and its partners, Challenge Works and the World Resources Institute, spent three years working city by city, first soliciting hundreds of proposals from around the world, then narrowing the field and coaching finalists as their ideas matured into solutions tailored to each host city’s particular texture of streets, rivers, and rush hours.
A City-by-City Approach to a Global Problem
What makes the Sustainable Cities Challenge distinctive is its refusal to treat urban mobility as a one-size-fits-all problem. Detroit’s Eastern Market needed a cleaner way to move produce and goods through one of the city’s busiest commercial corridors. Venice, already flush with bike lanes and electric buses, needed residents to actually use what the city had built. And Varanasi, the ancient pilgrimage city on the banks of the Ganges, needed to help millions of annual visitors navigate a labyrinthine old quarter without overwhelming it.
That divergence was by design. TMF’s stated goal was twofold: solve each city’s immediate mobility challenge while building solutions robust enough to be shared with other cities facing similar constraints. Every winning project now enters what the foundation calls a legacy phase, in which pilots are expected to scale into lasting infrastructure rather than fade as one-off demonstrations.
Varanasi Tackles the Crowds of Kashi
In Varanasi’s old city, the challenge centered on pedestrian congestion in a place where sacred geography and modern crowd sizes collide daily. Two winning teams took markedly different approaches to the same problem. CITYDATA, Inc., working alongside Nippon Koei, built CityFlow, a cloud-based platform that draws on big data, computer vision, and generative AI to measure and manage crowd movement in real time, using what the company calls its Measure, Analyze, Simulate, and Intervene framework alongside its own patented sensors.
The Urbanizer, an Indian urban design and architecture firm, took a lower-tech but no less ambitious route with Jan Jatra, a wayfinding system built around color-coded signage and dynamic digital displays designed to help both pilgrims and residents find safer paths through the old city. Two additional projects, Behtarway from VOGIC AI and Nayichaal from Prameya Consulting, earned honorable mentions for their focus on hyperlocal pedestrian navigation and accessibility for vulnerable populations, respectively.
Venice Bets on Behavioral Nudges Over New Infrastructure
Venice arrived at the Challenge already well equipped, having built nearly 200 kilometers of bike lanes and begun rolling out electric and hybrid buses and waterbuses across its canals. Its problem wasn’t a lack of sustainable options but a lack of uptake, and its two winning teams responded with behavioral, rather than structural, solutions.
BetterPoints Ltd, based in Surrey, England, brought its Bella Mossa app to Venice, using gamification and local rewards to nudge residents toward walking, cycling, and public transit. Between October 2025 and February 2026, the program is credited with replacing 45,000 car trips and generating 1,570 kilometers of bicycle travel among people who hadn’t previously ridden regularly. Factual Consulting SL, a Barcelona-based strategy firm working with OpenMove, took a similar tack with Andemo, a platform built around small, incentive-driven rewards. During its pilot, Andemo logged 1,750 downloads, with the large majority of users opening the app multiple times a day, and survey data showing that most participants felt it had meaningfully improved how they got around the city.
Detroit Reimagines the Last Mile of Food Delivery
In Detroit, the Challenge zeroed in on Eastern Market, the historic hub of the city’s food economy, where the movement of goods still leans heavily on fossil fuels. The three winning companies attacked the problem from different angles, spanning vehicles, charging infrastructure, and power generation.
Civilized Cycles, a Detroit manufacturer of ultra-light electric cargo vehicles, has been scaling its patented semi-trike as an alternative to traditional delivery vans, recently selling a unit to local company Grounded EVs for use as the base of a mini-RV. ElectricFish Energy Inc, which focuses on distributed fast-charging infrastructure, has since launched a 400-kilowatt battery-integrated fast charger called 400squared and a deployment program aimed at gas stations and fleet sites, drawing coverage from MotorTrend and Axios along the way. Neology, a clean-technology startup, has spent its time since being named a finalist running more than ten live demonstrations of its ammonia-based power system across the city, generating roughly 300 kilowatt-hours of energy and producing about 20 kilograms of hydrogen in the process.
What Comes Next
For TMF and its partners, the naming of winners marks not an endpoint but a transition. Ryan Klem, the foundation’s director of programs, described the work ahead as evolving pilots into practical models that other cities can learn from and adapt. Kathy Nothstine of Challenge Works pointed to the three-year arc of the competition as evidence that city-led, human-centered design can produce solutions with global relevance, while Benjamin Welle of the World Resources Institute framed the winners’ progress as a benefit not just to Detroit, Venice, and Varanasi but to cities everywhere grappling with similar mobility constraints.
Whether color-coded signage in Varanasi, reward-based apps in Venice, or electric cargo trikes in Detroit ultimately reshape how other cities move remains to be tested. But the Sustainable Cities Challenge was built from the outset with that broader ambition in mind, treating each host city’s solution as a prototype for a much larger map.