The FinEst Centre for Smart Cities has started the 3rd round of the Smart City Challenge, where they are looking to invest 4 million euros into 4 new ideas to develop and pilot in two cities. In the pilot projects, interdisciplinary scalable solutions for complex urban challenges will be developed to make cities better living environments.
Now a significant milestone is achieved! By the end of September, 33 challenges from 23 cities, counties, and campuses from 8 different countries (Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Croatia, Ireland, Turkey, Israel, and Colombia) is gathered.
Challenges from different areas
The challenges collected from this diverse international pool all highlight a common theme - a strong focus on transitioning towards climate neutrality and creating better living environments for citizens.
Circular Economy Challenges: Six challenges addressed various aspects of the circular economy. These included waste management, motivating communities to recycle, and developing demolition processes and techniques for reusing building parts.
Environmental Focus: Six challenges centred around environmental concerns, including usage of drinking water and bathing water quality, community inclusive urban brownfields transformation, need for a carbon impact planning tool, lack of a comprehensive and cost-effective system for real-time urban monitoring (air quality, road damage, parking, graffiti, littering, …) and a problem with noise pollution.
Mobility Planning and Management: Eight challenges tackled various aspects of mobility planning and management, highlighting the growing importance of efficient transportation systems and data collecting in urban areas.
Citizen-Centric Challenges: Six challenges aimed to integrate citizens' needs, health, and well-being more comprehensively into city planning and service delivery, emphasizing community engagement.
City Planning: Five challenges focused on city planning, particularly creating a digital twin of city’s underground infrastructure, modelling historic environment, creating datasets for local governments and developing a smart city roadmap.
Energy: Two challenges focus on energy-related issues, such as democratizing access to solar energy and providing green energy options for citizens.
Get to know proposed challenges here.
Explore the challenges proposed and think about solutions
Now FinEst Centre for Smart Cities invites all researchers and developers familiarize themselves with the challenges by visiting FinEst Centre’s homepage and assess if they can provide solutions to any of them. If they identify opportunities, they are encouraged to register for the October 18 workshop. This workshop offers a platform to engage with cities, ask clarifying questions, and establish valuable contacts. Onsite participation is definitely recommended for participants from Estonia and close by countries to establish good contacts for forming the team and preparing the pilot proposal.
Researchers and developers are also welcome to contact already the cities via e-mails next to the challenge to discuss your solution ideas and find out more about their challenge in practice. The deadline for proposing the initial ideas by the researchers is November 30. Each pilot project would need at least one city from Estonia and one from another country as piloting partners.
Why should researchers and developers participate in the Smart City Challenge?
- Pilot development and piloting costs covered 100%
- Test your research results in real cities
- Develop an innovative solution with international market potential
- Win from synergies from working in an interdisciplinary team
- Get data for your long-term research needs
More information about Smart City Challenge 2023