Smart City Challenge 2023: A glimpse into city challenges

Published on 05.10.2023

The FinEst Centre for Smart Cities has achieved a significant milestone in its ongoing Smart City Challenge 2023. By the end of September, we collected complex urban challenges from cities, municipalities, and campuses to develop smart, science-based solutions in collaboration with researchers and developers.

We received a total of 33 complex urban challenges from 23 cities, counties, and campuses spanning eight different countries. These countries include Estonia, Latvia, Finland, Croatia, Ireland, Turkey, Israel, and Colombia.

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, creation of 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 invites all cities, municipalities bordering cities, and campuses to review the challenges proposed by others. We encourage you to explore these challenges with the aim of identifying any similarities between the urban issues you are confronting and those put forward by others. Choose 1-5 challenges that are also very important for your city and vote Here until Oct 16.

The more cities we have with similar challenge the more need there is to develop the solution. Please also register to the Oct 18 workshop to get to know more about the challenges of other cities, introduce your own challenge and build relationships with researchers who have capabilities and willingness to offer solutions. 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 can familiarize themselves with the challenges by visiting our homepage and assess if they can provide solutions to any of them. If they identify opportunities, we encourage them to register for the October 18 workshop. This workshop offers a platform to engage with cities, ask clarifying questions, and establish valuable contacts. While the workshop is physically hosted in Tallinn, international participants can also join remotely online. 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 welcome also 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.

FinEst Centre for Smart Cities has got 4 million euros to carry out four pilot projects as the result of this round of the Smart City Challenge. Each pilot project will involve a minimum of two cities, one from Estonia and another from a different country.

More information about Smart City Challenge 2023