Veberöd has been home for a few years now with the website Veberod.nu and a Veberödsapp. There, businesses and citizens interact and the platform serves as a hub for the village's development. Jan Malmgrens and the company Byare behind the collaboration, which has also spread to Södra Sandby. The platform includes a network of several hundred companies involved in the region.

In early summer 2018, Bydevelopement became part of the SOM project and a gateway for LoRa technology was installed on a mast in Veberöd. This made it possible to connect the cows' water supply to the Kristoffersson family's garden. Shortly after, it became clear for a project with a connected bicycle. It is the Swedish bicycle manufacturer Degavi that hires Insolidex in Veberöd in cooperation with By. In the autumn, Village Development also started Smart Villages.

“Smart villages are for creating rural development and we are thus a test bed for IoT in a village,” says Jan Malmgren of ByAB in a 2018 interview. It's a complement to what's happening in smart cities. Sweden is mostly rural, so smart villages are needed. I would like to claim that Veberöd is Sweden's first smart village for rural development.

Since its inception as a smart village, a lot has happened. In September 2018, Veberöd became a unique village because Telia set up masts for NB-IoT, which is Telia's sensor network. In October, Björkhaga nursery hooked up its newly planted trees by using sensors that measure soil moisture. In November, Byhas been in Kristianstad at the trade fair Smarta Samemet and Veberöd has also started a collaboration with the company WSP, which is a global company that works with community development and drives the development of digitalization.

“Villages can be different from cities in many ways, such as thinking differently and entrepreneurs investing in other things,” said Jan Malmgren. If you want to develop the whole of Sweden, you have to look at both smart cities and smart villages. Our flexibility and smallness are our advantage. Here you can test things easily and quickly, and we already have a platform in the form of an app where we can discuss things with the villagers, and it's a forum for near-democracy.

One possibility is to have projects where we test public functions faster and cheaper than what you can do in a large venue. Veberöd is simply a test bed and a research village where municipalities, companies and individuals can see what we can do together to create benefits.

Smart Villages impressed IoT Sweden's program manager Jin Moen who said this in an interview in December 2018.

“It's great fun with the Smart Villages project. There is a lot of talk about smart cities but Sweden we don't have that many big cities. If you count the whole of Sweden, our total of just over ten million is just a small town internationally. That's why we need to co-mingle cities, villages and countryside and talk smart communities.

In Veberöd we want to work with the UN's 17 goals in Agenda 2030, and working with young people is an obvious element. So in November 2018, the work on Unga Smarta Villages started.

What happened next?

At the end of 2020, Smarta Byar decorated its new premises in the centre of Veberöd. The idea is to create a meeting place where, with the help of villagers, businesses and academia, they can explore what is smart and sustainable.

“We want to examine what total sustainability means, something that encompasses all the aspects of Agenda 2030. An important part of this is to acquire knowledge of how a circular economy works.

In the premises there is a Fablab where, among other things, they test 3D printing in clay.

What was the result?

In Veberöd, many different projects with sensors have been implemented and sensors in the cows' watersheds, support securing bicycles, connected trees and more have all worked. The projects showed that sensors can also be used to create a smart village as a complement to the smart city — which is important because large parts of Sweden are rural.

The 3D model built during the project is used as a digital twin where the vision is that the villagers will be able to communicate with, for example, the municipality but where different actors can also follow the sensor data in real time.

How is the project taken forward?

The digital twin is used as an offer to universities and colleges to conduct research in the village. The intention is that students and researchers will be able to connect sensors in the village and conduct experiments that they can follow both on site and in the digital twin remotely. In return, the village receives data that can bring interesting knowledge that is expected to lay the foundation for increased sustainability both in Veberöd and in other communities.

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Facts: the Smart Villages sub-project

The project is a sub-project of the SOM project is part of the strategic innovation programme for the Internet of Things, IoT Sweden funded by Vinnova. Anders Trana at Future by Lund was the project manager for the entire project. The project started on 1 September 2017 and ran until December 2020.