‘Does it spark joy?’ Tampere rethinks smart city KPIs

As Tampere’s first smart city strategy draws to a close, Teppo Rantanen, the city’s Executive Director of Innovation, reflects on lessons learned and the next phase.

During an interview at the recent Cities Today Institute Leadership Forum in London, attended by digital and innovation leaders from local governments across Europe, Rantanen said one key conclusion from the last five years is that the ecosystem approach – bringing together companies, academia, the public sector and citizens – is a good way to implement and scale pilots,

The next focus for Tampere is on a ‘data-driven city for citizens’ programme.

“We are looking more from the citizen angle,” he told Cities Today. “The previous smart city programme was maybe starting more from the technology side and technical things that were ‘cool’. Now we’re looking [more] at what it means for people and how the everyday lives of our citizens can be improved using data and technology.”

Digital twins are common to create virtual replicas of physical buildings or systems – working with the Finnish government, Tampere is looking at the possibility of a ‘digital twin for people’. City, government or public sector data could be brought together to make a digital twin of a person to represent their needs but without being connected to the individual, to ensure privacy. This work is at an early exploratory phase.

Another potential area is rethinking smart city success metrics.

Rantanen explained: “We want to go back and look at [KPIs] from the citizen angle – what does it mean for them?” This could include finding ways to measure improvements in quality of life and joy, and a reduction in stress and uncertainty.

“We need to [think about] a totally new way of looking at KPIs,” Rantanen said. “That is quite exciting,”

Rantanen added: “One of the things [we know] is that to be successful with data you need to have trust.”

He said in Finland there is generally a high level of trust in the government and an increasingly important idea is ensuring people understand how their data is being used and giving them more control over this.