Pasig City has been named one of the 24 winners of the Bloomberg Philanthropies 2025-2026 Mayors Challenge, a competition to spur local government innovation that improves lives in cities around the world, the city government announced on Tuesday, 24 February.

The sixth challenge awards municipalities that have proposed and tested the best breakthrough ideas to bolster essential services at scale.

As a winner, Pasig City will receive $1 million as well as operational support and additional funding for dedicated staff to co-design floating parks with its residents so that it can create more community spaces that reconnect Pasigueños to the historic Pasig River.

“Through the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayors Challenge, the city government of Pasig will address the lack of open, usable spaces through floating parks along our historical river. But more than building new or floating parks, we want to do this in a way that models participatory governance. We want Pasigueños to be involved—from designing, building, and managing or operating these parks, and not just mere visitors of the parks," said Mayor Vico Sotto.

“As one of the winners, the Pasig City Team is looking forward to being able to connect and get inputs from a larger community of experts through the Bloomberg Philanthropies’ network. In particular, we are eager to improve how we do things in the City Government, how we plan for projects, and how we can further get inputs from our stakeholders to make the LGU's development programs more sustainable and fruitful.”

The 24 winning city halls represent 20 countries and serve over 35 million residents. Together, they reflect the significant role municipalities play in tackling complex public service challenges—and the ingenuity that animates local governments across the globe.

Selected from more than 630 applications, and the prototypes developed by 50 cities during the finalist phase, when each pressure-tested core hypotheses with residents, the winners were chosen for their ideas’ novelty, potential impact, and strength of implementation plans. They include: As-Salt, Jordan; Barcelona, Spain; Beira, Mozambique; Belfast, United Kingdom; Benin City, Nigeria; Boise, United States; Budapest, Hungary; Cape Town, South Africa; Cartagena, Colombia; Fez, Morocco; Fukuoka, Japan; Ghaziabad, India; Ghent, Belgium; Kanifing, The Gambia; Lafayette, United States; Medellín, Colombia; Netanya, Israel; Pasig, Philippines; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; South Bend, United States; Surabaya, Indonesia; Toronto, Canada; Turku, Finland; and Visakhapatnam, India.

“The most effective city halls are bold, creative, and proactive in solving problems and meeting residents’ needs – and we launched the Mayors Challenge to help more of them succeed,” said Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg Philanthropies and Bloomberg L.P., and three-term mayor of New York City. “We look forward to supporting this year’s 24 winners as they bring their innovative projects to life – and to seeing their ideas spread to more cities around the world.”

Now, Pasig City will have the resources to execute and expand its Mayors Challenge-winning program. Over the coming weeks and months, Pasig City will begin work to finalize the design and begin construction of the floating parks and riverside easements; continue consulting with the communities to form a Governance Council for Parks, building on the insights from the previous workshops with them during the prototyping phase; and working with the private sector to increase the impact of this project.

The 2025-2026 Mayors Challenge was launched by Mike Bloomberg in October 2024 at Bloomberg CityLab in Mexico City. More than 630 cities applied. In July 2025, 200 municipal chiefs from the 50 finalist cities — including top officials from Pasig City— gathered at Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Ideas Camp in Bogotá to hone their concepts with experts and peers.

As a finalist, Pasig City received $50,000 and technical guidance to prototype its idea locally. This enabled Pasig City officials to gain valuable resident feedback and fine-tune the proposal based on what worked. During the finalist phase, Pasig City pivoted its initial proposal from crafting a masterplan for a unified parks system, to actually piloting a floating parks system. This shift informed Pasig’s prototyping and led to more resident engagement that validated the design and acceptability of floating parks.

It also made it more urgent to discuss with national government agencies on the regulatory framework around floating parks, and to carry out deeper studies of the site conditions that may affect design and construction techniques.

For pilot implementation, the shift means that the City Government can immediately engage communities in project implementation.

As part of the ongoing Mayors Challenge program, Pasig City will continue to use these innovation practices to implement the Bloomberg Philanthropies-supported intervention.

The 2025-2026 Mayors Challenge builds on more than 10 years of work led by Bloomberg Philanthropies to discover, nurture, and drive innovation in cities. The awards across five previous rounds of competition have provided 38 winning municipalities with funding and technical assistance to realize their ideas for addressing civic issues.

By supporting the replication of the most successful winning ideas — from Providence Talks, an early literacy program that boosts childhood learning, to Visor Urbano, Guadalajara’s pioneering initiative to digitize permitting and reduce corruption — Bloomberg Philanthropies has expanded the impact of the Mayors Challenge to 337 cities globally, reaching over 100 million residents.