The specific theme of the Finnish Presidency at the area of urban development is to provide concrete insights into digital innovation and its potential within cities, by partnering with cities. Finnish Presidency aims at go ‘beyond the smart city’, changing the perspective from a technology-dominated approach towards a human-centric and more holistic approach to the digital city. From this viewpoint, digitalization is an opportunity that can lead both to better cities and opened new markets. The main question is: What new solutions based on digitalisation can increase quality of life and green development in cities while, under favourable circumstances, also accelerate economic growth?

One of the goals is to highlight what are promising cities and national approaches that get the best out of people-driven digitalisation. Specifically, in relation to the Urban Agenda, the goal is to interconnect the  partnerships’ themes in a cross-thematic manner, and find synergies and integration between the themes, using digitalization as an example. At the EU community level, goal is to support an evolving development of related initiatives and instruments within the EU