Tartu City Government
Tartu Linnavalitsus
Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia and the capital of South-Estonia. The population of Tartu is around 100,000 people. Tartu is known as a green, innovative and environment-friendly city. The slogan of Tartu is "The City of Good Thoughts". Tartu is also known as a city of youth, education and traditional university town. Our flag-ship Tartu University was founded in 1632 already. Concerning the new branches of economy in Tartu, enterprises of biotechnology, material science and information technology have favourable prospective for further growth. Tartu City Government has continuously developed its e-services and paperless administration. Thanks to the national (mandatory) ID-card system of Estonia today most of the documentation in city government is processed and archived only digitally.
Tartu ranks 15th in the European Smart Cities benchmark for smart people. Tartu has been the first in the world in many smart solutions.
Role in the project
The main idea of the Tartu in the SmartEnCity project is to renovate the old soviet-time block houses into smart ones (from hrustsovkas into ‘smartovkas’ ) with accompanying innovative solutions in transportation, district heating, street lighting and monitoring. The aim of the investments is to create a high-quality living environment that inspires the pilot area community to make environmentally conscious decisions and change their patterns of behaviour. A smart and participative community in combination with integrated and innovative technological solutions will create a new experience that can also be replicated elsewhere. In the project, we propose a social innovation model that will be tested in the communities of the project pilot area. It is a learning model which is based on smart technologies, new business models and ICT.