Jyväskylä “City on the Move”
The strategy of City of Jyväskylä, titled “Ahead of its time”, challenges us to be innovative, intelligent, and develop user-driven digital services.
City of Jyväskylä aims for sustainable growth, which the city organisation facilitates and advances. We are actively pursuing various smart city solutions in energy, waste management, citizen participation, and circular economy. Through Intelligent Cities Challenge, we want to aim higher.
Transforming industry, green manufacturing and clean production act as one of the spearhead’s in the area’s expertise. We aim at creating Europe’s most modern digital service hub for manufacturing in Jyväskylä.
One of our goals is to be the sports capital of Finland. For us, this means a very broad understanding of health, physical activity and wellbeing. Vital assets and tools to achieve these goals are data and AI possibilities, which still are under-utilised. The health data could spark various innovations, when used and gathered purposefully. There is lots of data on citizens’ health and wellbeing, which could be better utilised to generate data business and startups. This is something we wish to enhance through the ICC.
Jyväskylä is a university city, hosting the oldest teacher training seminar in Finland. We want to put our expertise to action. As the working life is transforming, even before COVID19, there is a significant need for re- and up-skilling, or as we call it, lifelong learning. There is a need for a creative take and looking our practises from the outside and challenging the ways we understand education.
City of Jyväskylä in the heart of the beautiful Finnish Lakeland is by nature a smart and sustainable tourist destination. In this city and the surrounding region, the responsible visitor will find nature experiences crafted in a sustainable manner and enjoy a feeling of wellbeing. The key elements that contribute to this are lakes and forested areas. In addition, the unique local culture, the strong Finnish sauna culture around the region and a wide range of typical nature activities show how the social and cultural sustainability is taken into action. In Jyväskylä, smart and sustainable tourism is not simply a trend. It is the way we define tourism both now and in the future. We want to enhance this ideology also in recovery of COVID-19.
We have been looking for smart city networks that would benefit our strategic goals and through which we could learn and make vital contacts. As the world is increasingly interlinked, no city should try to reach its goals alone. The best examples and cities with which to cooperate might not be found in the same country, but on the other side of Europe. Through the ICC, we gain not only expert support, but also thematic, strategic networks of cities with similar challenges. As our goals are quite ambitious, the ICC would help us to reach them by assisting with transforming data into business, harnessing creative intelligent solutions, learning from other cities, and creating new opportunities for better quality of life.
