Insight
Smart Retro took place during the peak of the smart city boom, in 2014–2015. At that time, most smart city projects were focused on building entirely new districts equipped with cutting-edge digital infrastructure, usually in partnership with large technology providers. Our perspective was deliberately different.
We asked: What if the focus shifted from building new to updating the existing? After all, in Europe and North America, most people live in 20th-century neighbourhoods built in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. These buildings represent a vast share of national wealth, but also a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions. They are now in urgent need of renovation. And rebuilding everything from scratch would be both environmentally and economically unsustainable.
The grand idea behind Smart Retro was to incubate place-based digital services in these ageing neighbourhoods. Smart services that would improve everyday life, while encouraging more sustainable lifestyles. Renovations are necessary, but they are costly, and not guaranteed to make residents value their neighbourhoods more. Services, on the other hand, shape daily experience. They create convenience, quality, and connection. They help a place stand out from the endless carpet of urban dwellings. And, importantly, services and community tend to grow together.
This is often overlooked. Too much urban development remains fixated on simply producing dwellings, offices, and retail spaces – even as retail itself is disrupted by digital commerce. Smart services offer another path: Layering sharing, pooling of resources, data-driven personalisation, and community-based solutions onto the physical fabric of old neighbourhoods.
That was the spirit of Smart Retro: Reimagining the future not through shiny new districts, but by breathing new life into the places where people already live.
Process
As part of the project, the Peloton Smart Retro Accelerator Program brought together 13 startups with 12 partner corporations and public organisations to create new innovations and business models. The method was rapid experimentation – putting ideas directly into the hands of real users in real urban settings.
Smart Retro tested this approach in two Nordic neighbourhoods: The city centre of Lahti in Finland and Bagarmossen in southern Stockholm. In each location we organised two-day camps where startups (or “smartups”), local authorities, real estate companies, and retail businesses came together. The aim was simple but ambitious: Build concrete test cases that linked the creativity of startups with the established channels and reach of incumbents.
The result was a wave of urban experimentation. Pop-up public libraries in sea containers. Peer-to-peer grocery delivery for the elderly. Smart thermostats adapted to the heating systems of mid-century buildings. Shared office spaces in private homes, complete with scripts for daily working routines. Yhteismaa’s “Nifty Neighbour” community platform. The Urban Fruit Initiative, making use of apples from backyards and neighbourhood trees. Each idea was small in itself, but together they pointed toward new ways of living in old neighbourhoods.
We documented these processes and modelled the logic of experimentation and foresight that underpinned them. The result was a report, Nordic Cities Beyond Digital Disruption – a distinctly Nordic model of smart city development. The report mapped the state and challenges of Nordic cities, presented three backcasting scenarios for their futures, and drew together lessons from the accelerator.
Smart Retro showed that the future of cities can be imagined and tested not only through blueprints and new districts, but through living experiments in the very neighbourhoods where people already make their lives.
Outcomes
Smart Retro left its mark in many ways. We produced two reports that outlined a new approach to retrofitting smart cities, rather than building them from scratch. A series of blog posts reached more than 200,000 readers, spreading the ideas far beyond the project itself.
Startups, established companies, and public organisations carried out a set of concrete experiments, testing smart solutions directly in neighbourhoods. And the work fed into the City of Lahti’s pioneering Green City programme – an effort that would later be recognised with the title of European Green Capital.
Partners
Citycon, City of Lahti , Granlund, Kesko, KTH CESC, Nordic Innovation Nordic Built, Oslo National Academy of Arts, PiggyBaggy, Stockholms hem, Stockholm Business Region, Yhteismaa, YIT
Reflection
In the early 2010s, the smart city was a grand promise. A digital layer on top of urban life that would optimise energy, spaces, and resources. A future where sharing could replace ownership, where people might come closer together, where retrofitting old buildings could become a better business than building new.
But the promise quickly faltered. Smart cities became entangled with surveillance capitalism – or perhaps the concept was simply a marketing-driven fad. By the mid-2020s, the term itself had largely disappeared. The high-profile failures of Songdo in South Korea and Masdar City in Abu Dhabi were well documented, and they made clear that something very different was needed.
Smart Retro was one such alternative. We argued that the future was not in endless new construction, but in retrofitting and repurposing what already exists. That smart services should be rooted in place, enhancing neighbourhoods rather than erasing them. That the digital economy should be governed in ways that strengthen local economies. And that cities, corporations, startups, and universities should be trained to collaborate, co-create, and experiment together.
Much of this still holds true. These ideas remain high on the agenda of urban, environmental, economic, and digital policies across Europe. And yet, the spirit of acceleration and experimentation that animated Smart Retro feels more distant now – overshadowed by the dominance of big players in everything digital. Perhaps it is also a matter of timing. Some experiments fail to fly on their first attempt. They need patience, new conditions, and fresh courage to take off again.
Smart Retro
