Winter 2021: Smart Living Environment
The greatest challenge for Estonian towns and rural municipalities is to move from governing to enabling. An enabling locality facilitates its residents’ initiative and cooperation between local actors .
The FinEst Twins Smart City Centre of Excellence aims to establish a platform for Estonian smart cities to match Estonia’s high-level presence as a digital state. What are the challenges that Estonian municipalities must face when creating a smart living environment?
This article is based on Demos Helsinki's report 'People First: A Vision for the Global Urban Age' published in June 2020.
Smart cities are not merely for people and robots. Due to climate change and biodiversity decline, the combination of the physical and the digital is increasingly related to the needs of all species. Combining the natural and built worlds can be assisted by biotechnology, for instance, the use of bioreactors as a source of energy and by the smart application of landscape data in urban design, for instance, by means of biodigital twins or augmented reality. It shifts our perspective and poses the most critical and intriguing challenge of a smart living environment—how to adopt a life-centred rather than human-centred approach.
