Co-operation and sharing of best practices for living labs and urban development through a network of Nordic Smart Cities. That’s the goal of the cities’ common project called Nordic Urban Labs.
The Nordic Smart City Network is a Nordic collaboration initiative with already 19 cities with a common goal: to explore the Nordic way to create livable and sustainable cities. Nordic smart cities have many shared values and visions, such as open data and the active role of citizens. The cities can benefit from closer collaboration by sharing experiences and provide each other a critical mass. Learning from each other can save time and make the cities smarter so resources can be used more effectively to create new innovative solutions.
Scaling up in progress
Nordic Urban Labs is a joint project of the Nordic Network of Smart Cities financed by Nordic Innovation. The aim is to share best practices for living labs and urban development – and so has been done within several thematic projects related to different areas from people flow data to wayfinding and smart waste. Working together can lead to many good outcomes. Collaboration within the wayfinding theme led the City of Stavanger to adopt the model for Agile Piloting, created for accelerating smart city development and startup collaboration in Helsinki, in the Smart Kalasatama project and used by the collaborating cities in the 6Aika Ecosystem of guidance project.
The Nordic cities represent a market with approximately 5.300.000 million citizens and can affect their everyday life. The Nordic Smart City Network contributes to the advancement of Nordic-wide innovation and smart city solutions by aligning common activities, new technology, data and co-creation.
Read more about the Nordic Smart Cities Network
Cities participating in Nordic Urban Labs- project include Aarhus, København, Vejle, Bergen, Trondheim, Oslo, Stavanger, Reykjavik, Tromsø, Kristiansand, Tampere, Oulu, Helsinki (represented by Forum Virium Helsinki) and Stockholm.
Photo: Matti Pyykkö / Helsinki Marketing