Urban Run

The world is getting increasingly urban and levels of physical activity are dropping. The prevalence of NCDs, non-communicable diseases, are arising. Actual Urban life means sedentary lifestyle and NCDs: a pandemic of inactivity in a urbanising world.

Our solution - the approach, the project, and the technology platform, empowers cities and people to take healthy steps. Physical activity and sport are known to bring many benefits in improving well-being and enhancing social and mental health. More active people mean more healthy people. More walkable and cyclable cities means safer, cleaner and more inclusive environments.

Scaled globally will help people to change their attitudes, to incorporate healthy habits, reduce NCDs, and to take health and happiness to cities and slums. Our solution habilitates the potential of cities to enhance the individual and collective well-being of their population, and to adopt a new inclusive, innovative, and integrated approach of prevention.

Modern urban life fosters unhealthy lifestyles. Changes in dietary patterns and food systems have led to increasing consumption of highly processed foods. Physical labour is reduced and advances in technology allow us to shop online or order dinner. According to recent statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO), one in four adults is not sufficiently active. More worrying is the fact that more than 80 per cent of the world’s adolescent population is insufficiently physically active, according to WHO recommended standards. A recent study in England found that adults are 20 per cent less active today than they were in the 1960s.

Cities also contribute to a more stressful life and there is evidence that stress-related pathologies, burn-outs, and various forms of mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and addictions, are more prevalent in city environments. Recent research in psychiatry has indeed established a robust link between urban living and psychosis. Generating an active, healthy environment is crucial for Cities to reverse the impact of unhealthy lifestyles on public health. Sedentary behaviour is one of the risk factors for noncommunicable diseases that represent the main cause of death in the big cities of the world.

We have implemented Urban Run solution in Buenos Aires as part of the “Buenos Aires Ciudad Activa” program. As part of the program, is free and accessible to all residents and visitors. Nevertheless, our project target to the most vulnerable segments detected through local research. City statistics show that more than 40% of children and youth are overweight, that women present lower physical activity levels than men, that low physical activity is predominant among older adults and that it is also higher among lower-socioeconomic status households.

Urban Run as the main activity of the Buenos Aires Active City program is committed to promote and empower families and communities to make positive decisions in terms of lifestyles and habits.

Sports facilities and physical activities under the Urban Run event are offered free of charge and accessible to everyone. But since it aims to fulfill the WHO’s health and physical activity recommendations, it is also specially targeted to the most vulnerable segments. Buenos Aires city diagnosis and research showed that children and youth, together with women, older adults and economically disadvantaged populations were the ones who needed more support to achieve a healthy lifestyle and better quality of life.

Urban Run uses activities and sports as a way to make a community or city inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Our solution promote inclusive and sustainable development.

Discover The City, is an-Urban activity similar to a treasure hunt in the entire City, which can be done in teams of two members or individual, in which everyone can participate, adults and children. 

To participate it is not necessary to have knowledge of the city, nor be an athlete.

Download the UrbanRun App from the IOS & Android app stores for free. Select your Urban Run in the cities schedule and register. You will receive a Registration Code by email, upload it and you are ready to be part of "Discover the City" ... the countdown begins.

On the screen of your cell phone, inside the App, you will find all the information about the event you registered for - delivery of technical shirt, starting and arrival points and aditional data.

When the countdown reaches ZERO, on the screen of your App you will see many slogans, distributed throughout the City.

Each slogan will have a different score according to its degree of difficulty.

Your mission, to add the most points, during the duration of "Discover the City". You will be responsible for putting together the best strategy to reach them, being able to use public transportation, walking or running. You could define how many km you run, walk, or travel by bus or subway. It is not allowed to travel by bike, car, taxi, and if you do, the App will penalize or disqualify.

When you reach each slogan, the condition for adding the points is to take a selfie - if you participate in a team, both together, if you do it individually, you alone; together with the slogan - monument, street sign, etc., and send the selfie from the App. If the Application recognizes that you are in the right place, it will automatically add the points.

Have you ever imagined running or walking at your pace on the sidewalks of the city, going through different neighborhoods, entering a museum, seeing a hidden sculpture, or climbing the stairs to the top floor with the best view  from the highest tower to make you an Urban Selfie?

Discover the City is a different inclusive activity that has all the condiments so that everyone can participate and have fun.

Urban Run is an innovative solution focus on transform the Cities in Healthy Cities based on the main drivers of inclusión, diversity, activity, health and education. We combine a new approach to the Smart Cities, a clear strategy, and new technology.

The approach include “tangible legacy”, focused in urban development of the city, and “intangible legacy”, focused on the opportunity to connect healthy and physical activities to mass participation with the objective to increase physical activity levels and reduce sedentary behaviours. This application will focus in the “Intangible” strategy called “Buenos Aires Active City”.

Good Health and Well-being are center of our innovation model, and the following objectives:

- Quality Education

- Gender Equality

- Reduced Inequalities

- Sustainable Cities and Communities

- Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

- Partnerships

Our Business Model and the Urban Run process, relies on technology as the key component. We build an App – for Android and iOs, and are availables in their stores for free. The technology, hosted in the Amazon Web Cloud, was built with .Net, and was included as one of the main StartUps in the IBM Argentina portfolio. Includes GeoReferentiation and AI as part of the control main process during the control of an Event.

The active city model provides the city 3 innovative approaches to a Sustainable Cities and Communities:

- Implies the alignment and common vision within the government of all departments related with physical activity

- Requires an ecosystem approach, building an active city network with key stakeholders in order to make sustainable change

- Focusing on citizens’ long-term needs offered a new promising model that uses sport as a way to make a community settlement or city inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

In this context, and as an example, Buenos Aires city uses Urban Run as an excuse to fasten the implementation to promote inclusive and sustainable development within the community settlement or city where it operates.

Buenos Aires city is committed to promote and empower families and communities to make positive decisions in terms of lifestyles and habits, so our solution benefits all of its residents. Physical activities programs thourgh Urban Run are offered free of charge and accessible to everyone. But since it aims to fulfill the who’s health and physical activity recommendations, it is also specially targeted to the most vulnerable segments.

The Buenos Aires city diagnosis and research showed that children and youth, together with women, older adults and economically disadvantaged populations were the ones who needed more support to achieve a healthy lifestyle and better quality of life.

The current number of people we’re serving, are based on the participants of Buenos Aires “Discover the City” events, and are 5.000+ citizens.

In one year, thanks to geographical expantion and new business, we expect to serve 100.000+ citizens, and in five years we should achieve 5.000.000 citizens.

A few examples of the city’s specially targeted actions are the thousands of children who take part in summer camps, the sport initiation activities to encourage the practice of physical activity, school talks with professional athletes, adapted sports activities and adapted summer camps for children, and social sport activities held in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods of the cities together with local NGOs.

In the period 2020-2025 we expect to transform and impact millons of lives in different cities of the world. In Buenos Aires several initiatives are held in place with great results. For example, the amount of users of public sport facilities increased more than three-fold after improvements; 1.2 million people have used the “Healthy Stations” service for health and nutritional advice; training was provided to 7,000+ health and physical activity practitioners; 400,000+ citizens annually participate in free sport events and activities; and there has been a significant increase in sustainable transport following a cycle lanes plan.

Regarding youth, sports initiation activities are attended by 2,300+ children each year; talks with athletes are attended by 8,000+ students annually and sports clinics by 30,998 children. Additionally, specific interventions such as the “Buenos Aires 2018 goes to schools” project encouraged the dissemination of sports.

All of the Active City initiatives are free and accessible to all residents and visitors. Nevertheless, we have specific projects targeted to the most vulnerable segments detected through local research. City statistics show that +40% of children and youth are overweight, that women present lower physical activity levels than men, that low physical activity is predominant among older adults and that it is also higher among lower-socioeconomic status households. Some specially targeted initiatives are:

• Adapted sports: children and young adults with disabilities participate in theatre, sports initiation, corrective gymnastics, art and recreational activities.

• Sport for social inclusion: sport and recreational activities in vulnerable city neighbourhoods reach children and adolescents.

Barriers are mainly in the financial and geographical expantion areas.

We plan to overcome the financial barrier looking at for Business Angels, VCs, Partnerships, or Sponsors, who would habilitate us to growth our Team, implement the Solution & Product Roadmap, and expand in new countries.
For the expantion Strategic Plan, found a Partner or an Sponsor should be key.

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Full-time staff: 2

Part-time staff: 6

Contractors: 15

Integrants of the Full-team-staff, are extremely experienced in events organisations, urban running races, entrepreneurships, business developments, Start-ups development, and a full state-of-the-art technology knowledge.

Adrian Gluck and Marcelo J. Tear have led some successful business separately.

Current partnerships are with: OneInfo Consulting, I love Run, IBM, Amazon, and Buenos Aires City.

We consider sports and physical activity as tools for the promotion of health, social harmony, and joy. The world is becoming more urban and its population less physically active. Cities fase the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, obesity and diabetes, which make the largest contribution to morbidity and mortality. NCDs kill 40 million people each year, equivalent to 70% of all deaths globally. This includes 15 million people who die prematurely between the ages of 30 and 69 years.

Most of these premature deaths from NCDs are largely preventable by reinforcing health systems and influencing public policies in sectors outside health that tackle shared risk factors. It is well known that the environment in which people live and work, and their lifestyles, influence their health and well-being. Behavioural risk factors, an unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, harmful tobacco, alcohol and drug use, as well as increased traffic and pollution, ageing, social inequalities, migration, unequal access to education about healthy lifestyles and NCD prevention, can all contribute to the burden of NCDs.

Urban Run Solution is life-centric. It focuses its attention and energy

on the positive determinants of physical, mental and social health, and the promotion of individual and collective well-being, whilst always respecting the natural environment. The accent is placed on the promotion of well-being and accessibility to sustainable, healthy lifestyles. We propose a shift from the largely pathogenic paradigm of illness treatment in which the world currently operate.

Finnacial sustainability based on a sustainable revenue model will come from:

-        Partners [monthly income from a marketing revenue drive]

-        Sponsors & Brands [monthly revenue base model]

-        Events [periodically with at least 5 events per month in 2H of 2020]

We are applying to Solve in order to scale our transformational and change life approach globally.

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MIT

UN 

US Government

NYC Government

Global Cities of the Active well-being initiative

IoT companies

Google

IBM

AI companies

We will optimize the Urban Run proposal both for participants and to the organization and control committee.

Our Urban Run model encourages everyone to think differently, to adopt a new paradigm to face today’s world challenges, and to work transversally and inclusively. We offer a new approach to design, plan and operate cities and neighbourhoods. We believes in innovation; the efficient and impactful use of existing resources; reinforcement of health systems, education and coordination of health care professionals; and consideration of new jobs, new functions and new roles which need to be engineered.

The Urban Run model has been tested and proven in a diverse sample of pilot cities.

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A focus on women and youth is needed. Our young people have stopped moving. Evidence shows that children are spending more time sitting down or not moving at a higher frequency than ever before. In the UK, for example, only 10 per cent of children aged 2-5
are believed to be achieving the Chief Medical Officer’s recommendations for 180 minutes of physical activity every day (Early Years Physical Activity Manifesto – British Heart Foundation National Centre - 2016). In Canada, only 5 per cent of the 12-to-17-year-olds meet the international guidelines for weekly physical activity (Active Healthy Kids Canada, 2011). 
It is well known that the early years are critical for developing physical capacities and the pleasure of movement. Physical activity is critical for  hildren’s self-esteem and well-being. It contributes to their physical, cognitive and emotional development.
Their brain functions and their academic achievement are stronger when they can grow being physically active. And yet many children, particularly those from poorer communities, enter primary school with low physical literacy and a tendency to be overweight.

It is also important to note that equal access to physical activity directly influences people’s health. More equal and inclusive access to safe physical activity facilities and places is indeed known to be a key factor.

In Europe, the cost of physical inactivity has even been assessed, and is estimated to have led to direct and indirect costs to the EU-28 that exceed 80 billion euros per year through the four major NCDs and through the indirect costs of inactivity-related mood and anxiety disorders (CEBR Report 2015, The Economic Cost of Physical Inactivity).

We Will use data of our solution to improve rates, reduce NCDs and optimize investments. Data is manage without personal identification.

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