It takes an entire university to understand what a city is. To understand how cities are changed sustainably by technology is an urgent, global challenge

AU Smart Cities is an interdisciplinary research network within Aarhus University. Its aim is to bring together the knowledge, expertise and perspectives across disciplines that are needed in order to understand digital urban living.

Smart Aarhus is a local partnership between the university, the city of Aarhus, the region, businesses and NGOs to spread the effort even broader.

Sustainability has many meanings: environmental, economic, civic. All of them are important.

As the majority of the planet’s population is moving into urbanized areas, the cities of the world are meeting new challenges across sectors. But not only are cities faced with fewer resources to tackle environmental and logistic challenges more efficiently. They also meet increasing expectations in terms of quality of life and diversity in public services.

Cities and regions around the world are trying to meet these societal challenges with an increased focus on digitization and smart technologies. The potential for these technologies is only surpassed by the consequences for how we organize society, cities, governance and even the concept of citizenship.

By coordinating a large number of research efforts, the AU Smart Cities network approaches some of the fundamental issues of digital urban living:

• What happens when every digital device is connected in an intertwined digital layer, and the city becomes responsive on the scale of the street, plaza and community?
• What happens when each and every citizen produces massive amounts of real-time data, throughout their interactions with the city? Who owns the data, who can build businesses and services upon that digital layer? How?
• How should education meet these challenges? How are the citizens and visitors enabled to navigate and appropriate the complex field of open data and context-aware media platforms?
• How should a city organize its digital “layer”? And prioritize it?

Cities around the world are just now beginning to tackle these problems, across sectors.

Aarhus University takes a Scandinavian perspective on creating sustainable smart cities of the future.

For more information, please contact: Associate Professor Martin Brynskov, Department of Aesthetics and Communication – Information Studies. Tel.: (+45) 3068 0424 - Email: brynskov@imv.au.dk

• Digital Urban Living. www.digitalurbanliving.dk
• Smart Aarhus. www.smartaarhus.eu