Digital technology can both be a challenge and an opportunity when developing the city of the future. Aarhus has found an answer in the Smart City initiatives, known collectively as Smart Aarhus.

Here, the focus is on bringing forward alternative suggestions for new decision logics, where citizens, companies, knowledge institutions and authorities work together to develop the city.
 

Learn more about Smart Aarhus: 

Smart Aarhus proposes a new way of organising the efforts being made to find effective and sustainable solutions to the challenges faced by many cities today. Through collaboration between the public and the private sectors, citizens, the business community and knowledge institutions, Smart Aarhus offers a platform for everyone wanting to make use of the opportunities offered by digitalisation across sectors and hierarchies. 

Smart Aarhus involves citizens in the development of projects such as the Digital Neighbourhood project, where the traditional communication model is turned on its head, and issues raised by citizens form the basis of new city initiatives. Smart Aarhus favours sustainable solutions, as can be seen in the project RADICAL, where a digital chip for bicycles makes traffic lights turn green and helps to ensure that cyclists have a smooth ride through the city.

The idea is to make the city so smart that it becomes better, easier and more fun to be a citizen of Aarhus. The vast majority of people in the world live in cities like Aarhus, which is somewhere between a big city and a village. Smart Aarhus strives to serve as an inspiration for other cities worldwide.

Smart Aarhus promotes national and international collaboration across cities and regions to ensure that efforts are coordinated broadly. The Smart Aarhus Secretariat has assumed a leading role in coordinating activities in the Danish Smart City Network and in the Connected Smart Cities Network, which provides an international forum for smart city solutions.

Internationally, Smart Aarhus is considered a Scandinavian third way that offers a model for urban development based on the practice of stakeholder and citizen involvement, and which differs from both the more commercial American and the more centrally controlled Asian traditions. In addition, social, economic and environmental sustainability plays a central role in Scandinavia – and for Smart Aarhus.