Forum Virium Helsinki

Forum Virium Helsinki reports having 81 projects for co-created smart city solutions, in-volving 750 companies, 170 research facilities and 60 partner cities (Forum Virium, 2020).

The amount of participating private citizens is not mentioned. The many projects of Fo-rum Virium are loosely grouped under four main headlines: IoT, Smart City, Smart Mo-bility, and Forum Virium being the fourth headline under which there are two projects concentrating on the development of a European AI ecosystem and the cooperation of the smart city development of the six largest cities in Finland. The aim of Forum Virium is to make Helsinki the most functional smart city in the world.

The IoT initiative includes projects ranging from the development of disruptive ICT tech-nologies for the city infrastructure to the modelling of digital solutions to attract tourists to the Helsinki archipelago (Forum Virium, 2020). One project concentrates on the utili-sation of AI in the attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the partnering cities.

From the practical need of developing the charging and parking infrastructure for elec-tronic vehicles grew the larger project of developing the open standards and interfaces required to build an open innovation ecosystem to support new IoT system innovations.

There are also two separate air quality projects in the IoT initiative: one project seeks for solutions to the lack of high-resolution real-time air quality information, while the other experiments how the 5G networks could be utilised to transfer large data amounts, like the real-time air quality information. The IoT and the big data collected from housing companies are utilised in the project to control and reduce the energy consumption in the blocks of flats based on the actual needs of the residents. This project also faces the challenges related to the ownership and usage rights of the collected data between pri-vate residents, housing companies, changing service providers and public energy com-panies. Finally, there is also a project for developing digital technologies and operational models for the circular economy related to the re-utilisation of industrial side streams and earth masses from the earthworks.

The Smart Mobility initiative lists nine current projects (Forum Virium, 2020). However, many of the projects have overlapping elements: there are two separate projects for drone services, two projects for self-driving buses, two projects for smart neighbour-hood development, and two projects for the last mile problematics. One of the drone projects has the objective of piloting carbon neutrality in logistics, remote security and environmental supervision. The other project studies the last mile delivery problems, drone transportation being one of the study areas. The other last mile project includes the replacement of automobile deliveries by lighter, electricity-assisted, autonomous ve-hicles, and the goods delivery to shared local distribution stations. Both robot bus pro-jects study the first and last mile problematics using autonomous minibuses as part of public transportation services, seeking to find a systemic proof of concept for automated

last mile transport fleet operations integrated to an existing urban transport system. The projects concentrate on different neighbourhoods in Helsinki, and they have a slightly differing durations and schedules. At least one of these neighbourhood bus services has already stopped its operation (Helsinki RobobusLine, 2019). A special smart mobility test area is established in the Jätkäsaari neighbourhood. One aim of the test area is to recog-nise and boost start-up companies specialising in mobility, with support for their pilot projects. The Jätkäsaari test area is also one of the target locations for the last-mile mo-bility solution development. The momo-bility urban values project seeks to the change the mobility behaviour of the citizens to favour low-emission mobility choices with the help of gamification and illustration. Finally, a project between Helsinki and Tallinn experi-ments various solutions to tackle the increasing congestion at ferry terminals.

Many of the projects in the Smart City initiative take place in the Kalasatama smart city district which functions as a living lab for the projects (Forum Virium, 2020). One project drives carbon-neutral city planning and diverse use of green infrastructure first in Kala-satama and then in other new neighbourhoods. The flexi space project investigates how underused spaces could be utilised by the residents by making them more visible and accessible. The Kalasatama neighbourhood also belongs to the cooperation project for sharing of the best practices between other living labs in the Nordic Smart City Network.

The other projects in the Smart City initiative include a Get Home Safely project where the feeling of safety is enhanced with a smart lights system. There is also a health care project with the objective of enabling businesses and cities to co-create customer-ori-ented health and wellbeing solutions. The smart learning projects seeks to find better business opportunities for companies that develop education services, products, and technologies for smart learning environments. At the same time the project aims to pro-mote the development of user-oriented learning environments. The AI projects included in the IoT initiative are included also in the Smart City initiative. The Smart City initiative also drives the development of a European Union wide AI ecosystem.

What is notable about the smart city initiatives of Forum Virium Helsinki is that almost all projects are run in cooperation with several other cities, either domestically, between neighbouring or regional countries, or with an EU wide perspective. Large parts of the funding of the projects are also credited to coming from the European Union (Forum Virium, 2020).

There are three options to participate in the development of the Helsinki smart city with Forum Virium: First, the companies of all sizes are invited to participate in challenge-based open calls where the companies can propose solutions to the problems that Fo-rum Virium has defined. Secondly, the citizens are invited to join selected projects in the Smart City, IoT and Smart Mobility initiatives. Thirdly, the universities are invited to cre-ate collaborative research and innovation projects for which Forum Virium can provide funding (Forum Virium, 2020).