Tampereen kaupunki–City of Tampere

Talking about smart cities has for long been about different technical features, new ways of managing traffic, energy, waste, air quality, or measuring people flow for different purposes. All this requires a collection of different kinds of equipment with sensors, and a way to communicate it, connectivity. One of the first things with our Smart City program in Tampere was to focus on connectivity. We looked for WiFi, 4G, 5G, Lorawan, different kinds of mesh technologies. We were successful in having a private 5G test network already in 2018, and commercial 5G as the first city in Finland at the end of 2018. However, we realised that the more sensors we have, the more connectivity we have, we will have more data available. And how should we deal with the data. We become so interested in the whole concept of data with the city, that we even planned to set up a data utility company for the city.

At the same time, we had for a long time a principle of open data. All possible data was available for different parties to use it and build products and solutions on it (www.data.tampere.fi). But we also wanted to understand better what we could do with the data, how the data could help us improve the everyday life of our citizens. For a couple of years already we had geared our thinking in the city towards People first- thinking. We wanted to make sure all of our efforts would lead to improving our citizens' wellbeing. What were the possibilities we might have to be leading this development?

We started by thinking about the principles of ownership and usage of data. In principle all data belongs to people themselves, so we have to find a way to get permission from people. We are participating in Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra’s work on IHAN, a new European standard for the exchange of human knowledge. We are keen on promoting the European way of handling data, with legislation like GDPR in place, and with the fair and ethical use of data as a key principle.

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One way of piloting this is a project we are doing together with Danish and Norwegian cities around the use of health data. This project is aimed at studying how we could combine the public health data with private data, especially data coming from wearables. We will look at how this combined data could help health care organizers (municipalities in Finland) to optimise the use of resources but also how for individuals this combined data could be used for preventive healthcare for people themselves.

Overall, the data we are getting from all of the sources combined is very valuable for the cities and their authorities, but also it potentially has huge commercial value. I believe new business models will be built around the use of data, for example, our MaaS (Mobility as a Service) vision is to find a business model based on data instead of just the physical movement of people (and goods). This creates a challenge for cities to consider how they might be using evergrowing amount of data, should the cities be more active building up their capabilities on analytics and AI, and perhaps utilise the commercial value coming from the data. This has not traditionally been the role of cities, but might be one of the options for the future. And as we see it in Tampere, all of this should be done in an ecosystem, combining the skills of public sector entities (like cities), academia, and research community and business, ranging from big global companies to new startups.