A key task for Oslo will be to translate this into a positive new normal, one where governments and individuals no longer think about ‘digital’ as something separate, but take seriously how the city is now ‘blended’ and how this in turn creates new opportunities and risks to Oslo’s competitiveness.
In a post-Covid world, gaps will open up between cities that see digital simply as a driver of remote working and a threat to city centres, and those who see it as part of a much wider hybrid future for the city, and so use digital as a tool for enhancing public trust, improving how government operates, supporting a culture of entrepreneurship, and raising productivity of people and land.
How well will Oslo ‘blends’ the physical and the digital will be essential both to its success, and to its long-term appeal among prospective visitors, residents, investors and entrepreneurs.
A hybrid city is one that embraces the flexibility that remote working and virtual interaction can offer, yet also provides the public and private spaces to meet face-to-face, deepen relationships, socialise with friends and relatives, and collaborate and invent in person. A hybrid city harnesses the power of technology to make it easier and more efficient to work, access services, enjoy lifestyle, and participate in civic culture. Yet it also requires a step change to ensure that:
These issues are especially important for Oslo because they strike to the heart of the region’s differentiation – its commitment to diversify, innovate and include everyone.
This means that becoming a leader in blending digital with city life will be important to Oslo’s competitiveness.
Figure 21: The different dimensions of competitiveness that digital can support post-Covid
Will Oslo make it seamless to live, work and visit?
Will Oslo’s advanced digital specialisations thrive?
Will people in Oslo achieve more, in less time and with lower use of resources?
Will Oslo use digital technologies to enhance government efficiency?
Can Oslo continue to engage its citizens?
Can Oslo raise its profile through digital channels?
The move to the hybrid city has the potential to amplify Oslo’s leadership on key agendas of sustainability and wellbeing. More emphasis than ever before is being placed on generating, collecting and evaluating citizen data, and using this to guide better decisions in our cities in support of public health and planetary sustainability.96 The pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to listen to the needs of citizens in how services are delivered and to build deeper partnerships between the public and private sector.
But the rapid acceleration of digital in our lives also means that Oslo will need to be vigilant to make sure Oslo is superbly connected, communicating to the outside world in new ways, finding the right balance to foster the data economy, and ensuring governments and institutions embrace technology to improve how they work. Oslo’s push for attracting more specialist international talent, innovators and entrepreneurs will depend on addressing these imperatives head-on.
Digital competitiveness will be crucial to the success of Oslo’s companies, start-ups and institutions.104 The latest evidence suggests that up to 85% of leading firms have accelerated digitisation since the pandemic hit, including through increased adoption of automation and AI. Cities are becoming known as digital ready, or digital unready. Businesses and talent will gravitate to those places where the adjustment is seamless and where the whole larger region is digitally as well as physically connected.
The early signs are that Oslo's digital economy – the companies and sectors where digital capability is fundamental to their edge - has really accelerated through Covid-19 and has great momentum and potential to develop further. Ongoing efforts to diversify the economy and grow the number of digital and tech-oriented firms, together with the Covid-19 pandemic, have spurred many Oslo-based digital firms to attract global attention and recognition. These include the secure Norwegian video conferencing company Pexip, a rival to zoom, and the new AI platform Exabel, which recently won 1 of 5 places for fintechs through the Investment Association’s innovation hub. By summer 2020, Oslo’s innovative businesses had one of the highest levels of specialisation in sectors allied to digital technologies across smaller and medium-sized peers (see Figure 22).
Source: Crunchbase (July 2020 data).
Figure 22: Percentage of tech enabled firm HQs specialising in advanced digital sectors
Oslo’s digital speeds across the region remain competitive, but the shift towards remote working means government needs to be up to the challenge of ensuring that residents in all parts of the region have access to fast, reliable broadband.
Investment in digital infrastructure is likely to be very important to cities’ long-term recovery.112 Although people worked predominantly in offices and workplaces prior to the pandemic, over the past year there has been a profound shift to remote working that many think will be here to stay. This means workers and entrepreneurs are more reliant on lower bandwidth residential networks.113 Cities such as Oslo will therefore face new imperatives to rise to the challenge of ensuring that citizens have fast, reliable broadband in their homes and that high internet speeds are available city-wide as opposed to concentrated in the city centre.
Oslo’s average internet speeds are high by global standards, and put it in the top 30% among similar cities.114 But a new survey undertaken just before the pandemic showed that Oslo ranks 19th out of 28 peers for the share of residents who agree that current speeds meet reliability and connectivity needs.115 Oslo also has the 11th highest variability in regional internet speeds among its peer group.116 The recent city-wide commitments to 5G, and the impact of the city’s new fibre agreement on the stability of international traffic, could see improvements into the middle of the 2020s, but Oslo will need to remain vigilant to ensure that it remains as well connected as the best.
Figure 23: Modified trimean internet speeds in Oslo and peer cities
Source: MLab (Q1 2021).
Despite high uptake of digital technologies, Oslo’s residents remain more cautious than other cities about the use of open data. The region scores highly in measures of how well digital has been used. Oslo has the 2nd highest proportion of non-cash transactions amongst 28 peer regions, with 85% of purchases being completed without cash compared to a peer average of 74%.117 However, citizens are less comfortable with the use of facial recognition technologies to prevent crime (22nd / 28 cities), and despite recent moves to enable more widespread access to information on the availability of vehicles, registrations and drivers licenses, are also less willing to concede personal data to improve traffic congestion in the city (15th / 28 cities).118
Figure 24: Oslo’s position across the different dimensions of digital competitiveness
Source: IMD Smart City Index.
Technology aspirations depend on the government becoming more digitally equipped. Oslo is in the middle of the pack for the proportion of residents who agree that online platforms to propose ideas have improved city life (10th / 28), or that online voting procedures have improved citizen engagement and participation (11th / 28).119 But the city scores even less highly in perception measures of the extent to which local government information and services are easily accessible online, where it is behind the European average. In this measure, Oslo ranks 13th of 17 city regions, and is ahead Barcelona, Berlin and Rome, but behind Copenhagen and Vienna.120
Moving forwards, a key question for Oslo will be whether the pace of digitising government and public services is too slow. Together with fairly high public caution about the data economy, it will be important to avoid the risk this inhibits local demand for expertise of digital businesses, and, in turn, holds back Oslo’s regional progress as a future leader in digital entrepreneurship.
Data and digitisation are fast emerging as a means of making urban destinations more compelling, visible and accessible. Accelerated digitisation will place a premium on destinations that provide enriched and meaningful experiences that cannot be replicated online. Digital will be a key enabler of agility, specificity and consumer confidence among urban dwellers. The appetite for a digital future will continue into a post-COVID world, adding urgency to the imperative for regions like Oslo to mainstream the use of data and digital tools in industries such as retail, hospitality and leisure.
The global comparative evidence suggests that Oslo’s ability to stay relevant and grow its appeal to the next generation of consumers will depend on scaling efforts to re-imagine its retail stores and accelerate the integration of digital tools in cultural settings. A global survey undertaken before the pandemic hit showed Oslo ranked 20th among its 28 peers for resident perceptions of the impact of digital purchasing and booking options on the seamlessness of cultural attendance and participation.121
The latest data also shows that relative to its size, Oslo is behind for innovation specialisation in sectors allied to the future of retail, hospitality and leisure. As of the start of 2021, Oslo ranks 27th among 29 peers for the number of innovative tech firm HQs specialising in these sectors, with more than 25% fewer such firm HQs per resident compared to on average among its peer group.122 Looking to the future, Oslo can accelerate efforts to re-imagine stores and cultural spaces in order to create more immersive and distinctive experiences for customers and users, as has recently been done in Oslo’s Moniker store on the city’s high-end shopping street Bogstadveien.
Oslo is less visible on online and digital platforms than other cities. With so much global travel and physical exchange on pause, proactiveness on digital promotion and visibility is more important than ever before.123 Throughout the crisis social media, news outlets and informal online forums have been where much of the conversation about which cities to visit or move to once the pandemic has subsided has taken place. Oslo is well placed to build its digital profile and access new opportunities in a post-Covid world, but will need to be up to the challenge of emerging from the pandemic on the front foot with a clearer and more digital friendly proposition. This can underpin a renewed cycle of confidence in and enthusiasm for the region among prospective visitors, residents and investors.
Recently, Oslo has garnered significant global media attention for its safe streets and lack of pedestrian related deaths. The city is also commonly recognised for leading the charge on uptake and testing of electric and autonomous vehicles. But overall attention on Oslo, including on social media platforms and in the news more broadly, remains behind. Oslo held steady at 142nd globally for the quantity of stories, references and recommendations shared about the city online in 2020 and stands out as a city that is much less visible online than in comparative studies of city performance (see Figure 25).124
Figure 25: Difference in ranking between visibility in global benchmarks and visibility in the online conversation
Sources: Resonance World’s Best Cities; The Business of Cities research.