Stockholm Named the Smartest City In The World in 2019

The moment you are waiting for, the winner is Stockholm, Sweden. November, when Stockholm was named as the smartest city in the world, did that shock you? No, not really. This work acknowledges what we have done in Stockholm for many years. It's an honor, but... also a challenge because I think we still have a lot of things to do so I mean we have a goal to be the smartest city in the world in 2040 and I think there's so many things that I would like to see until 2040. In 2019 Stockholm Sweden took home one of the top awards in the smart city industry it was a stamp of approval for a city that's been investing heavily in technology for But ask around this Nordic city, and many will tell you that this is just the beginning. We have more unicorns, except from Silicon Valley, coming out of the Stockholm environment and anywhere else in the world. This city is considered the tech superstar of the North, and has made investments to support that innovation since the 80s. You had incentives during the 80s and 90s from the government to make it easier for Swedes to buy a home computer. I'm really... The city of Stockholm in the early 90s started a company called Stokab that provides all of the houses in the city with a fibre network really early. So connectivity has been really really good in this city for quite some time. Today that connectivity has become the foundation for dozens of smart city projects, many that have enabled the city to become one of the greenest in the world. For example, we are measuring... We have been measuring the emissions of CO2 in Stockholm for a long time, since 1990 actually. And we have been able to reduce the emissions by almost 60 % per capita since 1990. And that has taken a lot of efforts in both reducing emissions from buildings and from electricity and also from emissions from traffic. Stockholm began its smart city journey in 2006. We have been able to do it in 2006. when it outlined its long-term vision for sustainable growth. It was called Vision Stockholm 2030. It led to the development of an e-service program and new transport policies like the congestion charge and clean vehicle incentives. By 2014, Stockholm expanded on that vision to become the smartest city in the world from 2040. And by 2017, the city unveiled a smart and connected city strategy to make that happen. There were three different projects that... the most feasible ones and with a good economic return and one of those three prioritized products are lighting. Bjorn Lindelof is a lighting engineer with Stockholm's transport department responsible for the maintenance of the city's 150 ,000 street lights. Over the last couple of years as many as 30 ,000 street lights have been retrofitted to LEDs and now the hunt is on to find a citywide lighting control system. I think that the idea is to move towards having individually controlled luminaires rather than turning the power on and off in the lighting cabinet as we do today. That has a lot to do to do with the control to know when something happens in the installation. If the lamp fails we can get the error report automatically instead of waiting maybe a few months or a few weeks. This is a look at one of the testing grounds for smart lighting, a 1960s apartment complex in Stockholm's southern neighborhood of Arsta, where the city installed sensor controlled LED lights on pedestrian and bike paths. We were looking at could we introduce this kind of more smart light systems and how they work in our northern conditions and they have been working very well so we were able to reduce the energy was used with 32 to 50% with the technology. But as our electricity prices are so low, so we have very long payback time. So it's not the technology that is slowing us down. It's more that, OK, is it economically wise? This lighting solution was among a series of renovations carried out under the EU's Grow Smarter project. Stockholm was one of three lighthouse cities chosen to test solutions in infrastructure, transport and energy. Other cities included Barcelona and Cologne. But Stockholm was the one to walk away. with the title smartest city in the world at the 2019 smart city expo not only because of its solutions and lighting but also because of this this is mbac's latest waste system since the 1960s mbac has been transferring the waste underground using high pressure tubes but this system is different in that it uses only one inlet it uses optical sensors that sort the waste based off the color of the trash bag they can put the colored bag in front of the sensor here. So if you have a green bag, then it's recognized. Then you put it inside there and then you press the button. So we could have, we have now reduced the rest fraction that we call that one that you cannot use for any purpose. It cannot be recycled or used. It has to be reduced by 66%, so two thirds less. Large scale pilot projects are nothing new in this city. In fact, it's maintained. testing ground, known as the Kista Science City, is one of the biggest in the world, second only to Silicon Valley in size. It isn't unusual to see sensors and IoT equipment hanging from bus stations and lampposts. So we offer infrastructure for anyone who wants to do some kind of smart city activity. So it's, and these boxes, they are all connected to the fiber network of Stockholm, so we don't You have to worry about the bandwidth at least. That's Klaus Larsson with RISE. RISE is Sweden's research institute and innovation partner. I sat down with Larsson to learn about the obstacles Stockholm continues to face in becoming a smart city. You need to come to this stage where you can do something good with the data. And we're not really there yet. According to Larsson, Stockholm has no problem collecting data from sensors and IoT devices. not doing enough to make this data available across all areas of the government in order to gain true insights. So what we're trying is to work with this like a framework, a technical framework. How do you collect data and how do you make data available because the cities need to use the same standards, otherwise it will never be really scalable. That challenge is evident in Stockholm's development of a digital twin, a process that's been ongoing since 2015. Digital twins are real-time replicas of a city's roads, buildings, and public spaces. They enable cities to better monitor their infrastructure and plan for emergencies. But in Stockholm, that's been difficult to achieve as the city struggles with the organization of its data. We spoke to project manager Joanna Thorne to learn more. I work in the department where we take care of the... road maintenance so snow clearing and so that would be our focus point and when we started to like collect the data and we realized that all of these different type like organization parts need the same thing but they will use it in different ways and how can we make it so everyone can reach it and it's like available and correct data for them as well so just like trying reach this like organizational structure and going all across that's yeah that's a challenge we have started like a group where one person from each part of the organization is trying to like involve the right kind of people and we've created this website where everyone can put in their project and like kind of technologies we're using and so you can see like okay these people are using the same kind of technology how can we like collaborate among that looking ahead stockholm plans to launch an iot platform in 2021 the process is currently in the procurement phase if you have questions on anything mentioned this story be sure to click on the link below till next time i'm diana blast reporting for current insights