Overview
From budget constraints to public safety to influxes of new residents, cities are now dealing with a myriad of challenges in many different arenas. At the same time, developments in technological capacity, open data, open source, and knowledge distribution have fostered an environment where anything can be created by anyone, and where new solutions to difficult problems can flourish.

This summer, the World Cities Summit in Singapore will bring an unprecedented amount of attention to cities that can help understand, support, and effectively implement advances in creative technology. In the lead-up to this event, the UP Singapore Festival will take advantage of the growing number of visiting and Singaporean entrepreneurs, designers, and developers in order to seed ground-up innovation around making cities better.

Leveraging a powerful community of visiting and Singapore based developers and creative minds, UP Singapore will curate two months of focused innovation around urban issues - generating dozens of prototype solutions that will become an integral part of the public dialogue on the direction of our cities.

By encouraging innovation at the edges (of disciplines, of skill sets, of communities) we will discover together just how powerful our creative capacity can be.

UP Singapore will:

1. Create a platform for public awareness around the potential for creating Smarter Cities
2. Build on the lessons learnt from the ‘Summer of Smart’ in San Francisco and other events such as NYC BigApps 
3. Continue to establish a framework for bottom-up innovation that can be replicated in other leading cities around the world 
4. Crowdsource community feedback and participation to encourage civic action
5. Spark imagination and call attention to possibilities while empowering stakeholders 

Festival Prizes
Through UP Singapore’s celebration of urban innovation, Singapore citizens will build and vote on dozens of prototype projects. The winning projects from the festival will be invited into the Newton Circus incubator, NC Venture Partners. Here, teams will have the opportunity to receive up to $250,000 worth of funding and mentorship to develop their idea into a sustainable business.

UP Singapore is a 2-month Urban Innovation Festival ending on July 4th.

Through a series of lectures, workshops and "urban prototyping weekends", UP Festival brings together Singapore’s brightest thinkers, entrepreneurs, researchers, government employees, and engaged citizens (as well as a selection of global innovators) to showcase, develop and prototype innovative solutions that will make our cities smarter, more efficient and simply better places to call home.

By implementing the UP Festival, Singapore will be the leading Asian city to work hand-in-hand with citizens to improve city services from the ground-up. The festival committee expects to see the development of projects that can help Singapore facilitate lifestyles of health and sustainability, innovate in the areas of education and tourism, bolster community engagement and support the creative arts. 

UP Singapore culminates at The World City Summit - a three-day event for global government leaders and industry experts that addresses livable and sustainable city challenges, shares integrated urban solutions and forges working partnerships. At the summit, the UP Festival’s ground-up community innovation process and and its urban-prototypes will be unveiled and showcased to global leaders as part of the Economic Development Board’s “Data City Pavilion”. 

SENATUS is an Official Partner of UP Singapore.