From Smart City Vision to Reality: Smart Solutions Around Us
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Founding Director and Assistant Professor, FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, Tallinn University of Technology
The concept of a smart city is open to many interpretations and has changed over time.
It focuses on digitalisation and climate neutrality, but the important thing is that the smart city is first of all concerned with the well-being of its inhabitants. The main challenge that the smart city addresses is the demographic change in cities.
Urban problems cannot be solved with technology alone, strategy and part-nerships are also needed for that. The FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, which started as a cooperation between Estonia and Finland, has organised several competitions for ideas to solve the problems of cities. Through the competitions for ideas, re-searchers have the opportunity to cooperate with the representatives of cities and take their research work directly to the city streets.
Several smart city services have been developed. Diagnostics of city dweller’s well-being is a novel method that combines psychological and physiological indica-tors to assess the impact of the city environment on people’s well-being. Energy ef-ficiency and interior climate audit of buildings enables to observe the energy use and air quality of buildings in real time. Renovation strategy tool helps local go-vernments prepare and carry out comprehensive renovation projects. The platform for efficient management of energy flows uses microgrids and energy storage, ma-king it possible to use local renewable energy. Digital solutions for planning the green areas of the city and a safety analysis method for autonomous vehicles have also been developed.
You can learn more about the activities of the Centre for Smart Cities as well as all pilot projects and the solutions created at www.finestcentre.eu