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.

The City of Stavanger in Norway was looking for a flexible way to develop and test new urban services and increase co-operation between the city and startup companies. To this end, Stavanger is now starting to adopt the urban development model called Agile Piloting, which was created for similar needs in Helsinki, Finland in the Smart Kalasatama project. 

How to test what urban services are needed in cities next and what are the residents’ thoughts in all of this? And how to gain information of what kind of services might be needed in the future when the service offering doesn’t exist yet or is in a very early stage? These kind of challenges many growing cities tackle with.

The City of Stavanger with its smart city roadmap was looking for a way to accelerate smart city development and run small scale pilots with startups and small companies with innovative solutions.

A functional way to do this was found in the Agile Piloting model, with a good track record and proven cases in Helsinki and wider in the Finnish cities within the Six City Strategy 6Aika, originally designed, tested and developed in the Smart Kalasatama project.

“We were looking especially a way to involve smaller companies in our doing. That’s why we got interested in the Agile Piloting model. First we had to of course convince the decision makers about this approach and with their approval we are now starting to test this”, tells Gunnar Crawford from the City of Stavanger.
 

Co-creating with the community

In Helsinki already 21 agile pilots have been facilitated in the Smart Kalasatama project, coordinated by the city owned innovation company Forum Virium Helsinki. The pilots are run in a 6 month long period. The goal is to maximise learning: all stakeholder groups engaged, including public authorities and established companies in the field. The model has been widely adopted in other Finnish cities. Stavanger is the first city outside Finland to adopt it.

“We didn’t have to build everything from scratch. Instead, we can now utilise all learnings and information, that has been gathered in Helsinki and build on that”, he says.
 

Sharing ideas between Nordic smart cities

The Agile Piloting model was first introduced to the Nordic audience through the Nordic Network of Smart Cities, where the cities share their learnings and best practices. Forum Virium Helsinki and the city of Stavanger have created a good basis for collaboration within the network activities financed by Nordic Innovation.

“Meeting people from Forum Virium Helsinki and discussing the idea with them has been valuable. Materials like The Cookbook for Agile Piloting have been very beneficial. With this background and learnings, we are now excited to start our own own agile pilots”, Gunnar Crawford says.

In order to scale up the learnings and introduce the model to a wider audience of smart city developers Forum Virium Helsinki has produced a workshop format and materials, for example, The Cookbook for Agile Piloting. Currently, the flexible model has been used in several sectors of the city in Helsinki such as smart & clean, health & wellbeing, mobility and school environment.

Wayfinding and beyond

How might cities design and develop wayfinding and guidance to enable better city experience? The Nordic cities are sharing the aim to make the city space a better experience for citizens and visitors. The Nordic seminar in Allas Seapool Helsinki gathered the Nordic Smart Cities Network and the Finnish 6AIKA Smart City Guidance project to discuss and share the insights gathered in a collaborative project on wayfinding and better city experience.

1. People first

City wayfinding is an integral part of urban development, and one central issue related to the domain with multiple stakeholders is how to tackle challenges for public-private collaboration. Mike Rawlinson from the design agency City ID opened the day by giving us an introduction to the topic from the design perspective: how to put people first, and how wayfinding serves to create better walkable cities. It can be a strategic tool to make cities more welcoming, convenient, and easy to use concentrating on cities' accessibility for pedestrians. Wayfinding design is humanizing the cities.

2. Co-designing with stakeholders

Helsinki has been working with wayfinding from many angles. Anu Kiiskinen from the Urban Environment sector gave an introduction to how sustainable use of public space is being carried out in the city. Furthermore, she opened how wayfinding and information services have been co-designed with stakeholders in the 6Aika Smart City Guidance -project. A pilot project last summer opened the many boat routes from the city center to the archipelago.

3. Public-private collaboration

Public-private collaboration is a key element in creating smart infrastructure in the public space - this has been a common interest for the Nordic cities. The cities of Tampere and Stavanger presented their recent pilots and projects.  Anni Joela from the city of Tampere presented their recent info-kiosks providing better city guidance and bringing the city cultural services and events for the users as well as a map view and routes. Gunnar Crawford from Stavanger was showcasing the digital directional signs, info kiosks, and bus stops that have been   recently piloted in the Norwegian smart city. The key element in these services lies in sustainable collaboration models, and not the least in producing compelling content. 

4. Design from user perspective

In order to go people first, there is a  need to understand the content and context  from the user's perspective.  “Cities are living systems. Let's design accordingly”, states Sami Niemelä from strategic design and innovation consultancy Nordkapp, who gave a deep dive into designing technology and services for the city, its residents and tourists. Maarit Kahila from Maptionnaire opened how crowdsourcing citizen insights can be done in an effective way and gave a real life case from planning the pedestrian routes in the city center in Helsinki. The map based survey collected over 1600 answers, with 900 responses related to routes that need improvement. These results will serve as the foundation for Helsinki’s walkability development program. 

5. Utilizing data

People flow data is a relevant  tool to track and to understand peoples behavior and routes.  Pekka Koponen from Forum Virium Helsinki, Kim Spielberg from the city of Copenhagen and Anni Joela from the city of Tampere shared experiences on how the cities are collecting people flow data and using it for urban planning and designing city services. Challenges in cities are similar: it’s essential to solve the ownership of data, it’s use and privacy issues. Although the technology infra needed is available, cities are still tackling problems such as installing sensors that need electricity.

Nordic Urban Labs -project financed by Nordic Innovation is a joint project bringing together the  Nordic Smart Cities Network to collaborate in thematic Urban Lab- cases.

Page main image: Mika Huisman / Amos Rex