In the summer of 2026, the FinEst Centre has once again the joy of hosting two interns from Stanford University.

Interns are visiting Estonia through the Stanford Baltics Exchange Program, coordinated by Vabamu.

The third consecutive internship is part of an ongoing effort to build continuous collaboration between the smart cities’ research community between Stanford and Estonia.

This summer, one of our interns, Sydney, is bringing her passion for sustainable architecture and climate resilience from Stanford to the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities. Read on to learn about her journey and what inspires her work.

How do your studies connect to smart cities, sustainability, or urban innovation?

As the name of my major suggests, I plan to dedicate my life to all three of these goals. Through intelligent design and well-thought-out energy planning, we can make smarter, more sustainable, and more innovative cities.

A well-designed building takes advantage of passive heating, cooling, and lighting, which increases human comfort while reducing energy usage. A robust, distributed, and renewable energy grid reduces the likelihood of power outages and minimizes damage to the planet.

What made you interested in spending your summer in Estonia and at the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities?

Prior to this internship, most of my work and studies have been in the United States, but Estonia and the EU are major innovators in sustainable urban and infrastructure development, so I was eager to participate in the research here and bring this new knowledge back to California.

What projects are you currently working on, and what have you learned from them so far?

I am working on developing the Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) course on Smart Cities and Sustainable Solutions, which will debut this fall. This course will pair student teams with city leaders across the EU to innovate creative solutions to the largest sustainability challenges facing cities today.

While developing course materials, I have enjoyed many fruitful conversations with the mentors for this course, many of whom are also involved with the FinEst Center. They are experts in architecture, engineering, smart cities, and urban development for human wellbeing, among other specialties. In addition to gaining their perspective on the CBL course, hearing about their research has been fascinating.

I am also working with Ergo Pikas (one of the CBL mentors) on developing more effective digital tools to encourage renovation standards and codes in the land use planning and construction sectors. Existing building stock can often be very energy-inefficient, but effective renovations can minimize inefficiency and avoid the carbon emissions that would come from tearing a building down and constructing a whole new one in its place.

I have been developing my knowledge of energy use modeling and learning about the energy goals and building development frameworks that currently exist in Estonia.

If you could solve one urban challenge anywhere in the world, what would it be and why? 

The actions of developed countries have an outsized effect on developing countries, but I hope that we can prevent this through effective reuse of materials.

Last summer, I went to Ghana and took a Stanford class on African urban studies in Ghana. I visited the largest electronics waste dump in the world, Agbogbloshie, located in Accra, Ghana’s capital and largest city.

There are also such massive imports of chemical-filled fast fashion that some urban regions nearby are built on top of layers of poor-quality used clothing. The chemicals from these electronics and clothes have poisoned the water and the air around those regions, leading to massive human health complications. We need a circular economy that reuses materials rather than exporting them as waste to other countries.