Collaboration brings shared learnings within the Nordic Urban Labs -project.
Nordic Urban Labs – accelerating learning and smart solutions within Nordic cities
The project financed by Nordic Innovation emphasized collaboration and sharing of best practice among the partner cities of the Nordic Smart Cities Network. Five thematic projects were kickstarted in the fall 2018 and have been running in 2019. The collaborative mode of working has enabled sharing of best practices and living lab methods in many ways.
The collaboration projects all gathered together cities working with the same themes. Some of the of the projects were seeking inspiration and experiences from outside the Nordics. Besides the learnings on smart solutions, also methods of living lab work and public private collaboration were shared as part of the process. One example is the Agile Piloting Programme to accelerate public private collaboration within smart city development used in the Finnish 6 cities, that took first steps in Norway during fall 2019. Furthermore the model of market dialogue run by Copenhagen Solutions Lab was able to reach companies from Nordics widely.
Get to know the projects:
Bergen: Mobility hub academy
The overall goal was to share learnings and best practices from the city of Bergen and encourage other cities as urban labs to develop their own solutions. The mobility hub is a concept for promoting shared mobility in cities, based on the City of Bremen’s “mobil.punkt” concept. The Mobility hubs are promoting environmentally friendly travel solving the last/first mile challenge and coupling different modes of transport in one physical place, and thereby facilitating multi-modal transport for citizens.
The key activities in the collaboration project consisted of a workshop in Bergen with the city of Bremen and the Nordic follower cities. The follower cities Stavanger, Vejle, Tampere, Reykjavik and Tromsø are in different stages in implementing their own mobility hubs. Gaining understanding on digital content in the mobility hubs and the social aspects were the most valuable elements for the follower cities. Live visits at the hubs and discussion during workshop days served as collaboration activities that help to transfer knowledge to build better services for citizens. The learnings supported the development work in the follower cities.
Copenhagen: People and Flow
People and flow project run by the city of Copenhagen brought understanding on how new infrastructure influences how people move around the city as pedestrians or on bikes. The project was seeking the best possible ways to collect people flow data. A market dialogue was run with 30+ companies with several international companies attending. The results brought new understanding on the benefits of different data gathering methods. The insights were shared with the network cities in a report and in a workshop organized for the follower cities.
A pilot is currently running testing how 24h a day counts from thermal sensors can inform cityplanners. The sensors are installed at the Town Hall Square, where a new metro station recently opened. The data is compared with manual pedestrian counting methods, to see what are the strengths and weaknesses in both collection methods. The data will be gathered until August 2020. The next steps will continue with be methods of analysis. So far, he project has provided learnings on the processes from privacy issues (GDPR) to securing power at mounting places and how it affects the technology and reach of sensors.
Helsinki: Wayfinding and better city experience
How might cities design and develop wayfinding and city guidance to enable better city experience? This collaboration project lead by Forum Virium Helsinki, brought together the cities of Helsinki with Tampere and Stavanger and Tromsø as collaborators and followers to explore the smart city wayfinding. A fruitful collaboration was created between the Nordic cities and the Finnish Smart City Guidance project, the cities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Turku were running with several agile pilots ongoing.
The collaboration project focused on the models of public-private partnerships, and user centered design for creating a better city experience for travelers and citizens. Helsinki was able to share their earlier experiences from wayfinding the urban screens, that served the current projects in the other cities. A joint excursion to London in January 2019 brought understanding of use of data and content on urban screens and introduced several cases on designing wayfinding systems. The collaboration enabled to share insights from the cities that were on different stages in their own plans and projects
The learnings emphasized user understanding to create better services. The pilot run in the Helsinki Smart City District Kalasatama explored how people flow data and data visualizations can bring a deeper understanding the people flows and needs for guidance. The pilot served as a link to the People and flows project run by the city of Copenhagen.A Nordic seminar was arranged in Helsinki to open up the insights and experiences for the Network, and further open discussion also with private sector.
The collaboration also introduced the Agile piloting programme, a method of public-private collaboration. Developed by Forum Virium Helsinki the programme format was scaled up from the Finnish cities to Stavanger that launched their first Agile Piloting programme during the fall 2019.
Stockholm: Nordic Openlab +
The Openlab in Stockholm was sharing the best their Living Lab methods in the collaboration project. The follower cities were Kristiansand, Norway and later the city of Syddjurs in Denmark joined in. A workshop was organized with representatives from the city of Kristiansand and the University of Agder. The learnings resulted to University of Agdger establishing their own living lab called UiA CoLab in 2019. The city of Syddjurs is planning to develop their own living lab in the future.
Reykjavik Smart Bins
The project run by the city of Reykjavik proposed to assess the benefits of smart solutions regarding waste collection in cities. At the end of year 2019, a pilot project with bins, sensors and four different software platforms was fully implemented in Klambratún park and downtown area of the city of Reykjavík.
During the project, interviews with cities and solution providers were conducted in order to gather experience and information from existing projects and solutions. The project will launch a report providing guidelines and study cases covering the key learnings of the project. According to the project manager the key learning was to look at the users first – instead of the hardware. It is essential to focus on the problems the city waste management is facing and mapping thoroughly the stakeholders involved and their interests. The experiences showed that smart solutions can heavily impact the efficiency of existing systems. And again the learning was that collaboration with other cities is the key for successful implementation.
And yes, the Nordic cities agree that closer collaboration is the way to continue. The Nordic Smart Cities Network with currently 20 participating cities is starting a new collaboration project on Healthy Cities starting during spring 2020.