شهرهای هوشمند با Nordic twist؟
Abstract
1- Introduction
2- Materials and methods
3- Smart city and the Nordic context
4- Analysis
5- Results and discussion
Acknowledgement
References
Abstract
The article studies the urban digitalization and smart city development in the context of Nordic society. The exploration focuses on city officials’ views concerning the two largest cities in Finland, Helsinki and Espoo. Both cities are investing heavily on urban digitalization, and they are also building specific smart city districts. The central contexts for the study are the Nordic welfare state model and Finnish cities’ role in society as crucial service providers. The article follows especially conceptualizations connected to urban data which have been highlighted in recent critical smart city research and are also at the heart of the studied cities’ digitalization programmes.
Introduction
In this article, we identify the specific circumstances of Nordic cities as they come face to face with urban digitalization and smart city agenda. More specifically, we investigate the topic in the context of the Finnish model, where cities are responsible for providing a wide array of services to their citizens. The motivation of this article lies in the notion that there is an urgent need to study ongoing smart city (referred to also as SC) development in different contexts in order to gain more nuanced understandings of its local manifestations and practical impact; only through this we can escape overly utopian or dystopian stances. It is of utmost importance to begin to grasp best practices and think how they could be applied in critical, context-sensitive and pragmatic ways (cf. McFarlane and Söderström, 2017). It is clear that SC can take different forms within different political, social, cultural and economic contexts. The European Union constitutes a completely different environment for SC development than for example, the United States, China or India. The Nordic Countries with their welfare state model, high living standards and highly developed ICT infrastructure and know-how are their own specific context within Europe and the EU.