The First Smart City Exchange Forum is the culmination of one year of work and progress by the members of the FinEst Twins research streams. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we were forced to revisit the Smart City Conference originally planned for the 5th of November of 2020 in Tallinn and transform it into the current First Smart City Exchange Forum to be held online the 21st of January of 2021.

The new approach to this event is to gather content from a series of smaller talks and seminars which lead to the First Smart City Exchange Forum. The Forum is an online one-day event for the researchers involved in FinEst Twins to communicate their ideas and plans as well as to share their research and find new connections with practitioners and cities. On Friday there is also a two-hour discussions based on the forum. Among other things, city receptions (bring your own bottles :-).

The aim of the Forum is to communicate the research content of FinEst Twins and to enhance cooperation and networking between researchers from Estonia and Finland as well as between cities, policy makers, citizens, NGO-s, SMES and other relevant stakeholders for developing sustainable, resilient and smarter urban environment.

Event title: Smart City Exchange Forum

The Forum title, benchmarked from other  Smart City Conferences, includes the word Exchange” to emphasise its main goal: to function as an open space for stakeholders to exchange experiences and knowledge related to smart cities, discuss their needs and collaboration possibilities related to  he FinEst Twins project actions like the Large Scale Piloting Programme and facilitated by FinEst Twins Smart City Center of Excellence.

The First Smart City Exchange Forum is organised as a platform for discussion and not as only an academic or research focused event.

Main goal and target groups

As most of the smart city thematic is covered by the large scale ITS conferences and expos, that have separate presentations for public officials, urban planners and developers and academics, The First Smart City Exchange Forum functions as an interdisciplinary meeting-point for key stakeholders of the FinEst Twins, where it is possible to form new partnerships, set research project goals and look back to the lessons learned during 2020. 

The main target groups for this occasion are cities involved in FinEst Twins (those who have participated or plan to take part from the FinestTwins City Challenge competition) and the five FinEst Twins research streams from Aalto University and TalTech (figure 1). 

A long-term goal of the Forum is to become a well-known, independent and high-quality annual event for smart city researchers, practitioners and institutions to share best practices in innovation and find new ways to collaborate.

For the following editions, the Smart City Exchange Forum will involve potential partners for piloting, research and R&I project development, as well as cities from Europe and the rest of the world. The main participants are smart city experts, researchers and communities of innovators.