In Kristiansand, new wood-burning stoves are being installed to improve the city’s air quality. This is the result of a research project which has shown that air quality in four Nordic cities is really nothing to write home about.
The SMARTer Greener Cities project aims to develop and test novel tools and processes for explicitly converging social, ecological, and technological systems approaches for improving life in cities.
NordicPATH’s overall objective is to establish a new model for citizens’ participation and collaborative planning in Nordic countries to create healthy and people-centred cities. The project is tackling complex environmental impacts such as air quality and climate change and is developing a method specifically targeted for the governance and the conditions of the Nordic countries with potential replicability and scalability to other countries.
Nordic cities have qualities to draw on when it comes to greenspace, social inclusion and public health. But they are also segregated, characterised by health-related divides and by differences in accessibility to urban amenities. Without careful consideration the health and well-being of city-dwellers can be negatively influenced in overly densified and congested cities, despite sustainability ambitions.
The development of smart cities of the future calls for innovative usage of emerging technologies, as well as for novel and effective forms of collaboration across a large number of heterogeneous stakeholders, such as municipal decision-makers, entrepreneurs, and citizens.
The aim of the research area is to promote cooperation between the knowledge communities in the Nordic countries in order to enhance opportunities and address challenges to sustainable urban development and smart cities
Linking the detailed information of the spatio-temporal distribution of air pollution levels and the chemical composition of the atmospheric particles with register data for mortality and morbidity, we have a unique opportunity in the Nordic countries to gain new understanding of the various health impacts from different kinds of air pollution from different kind of sources.
