The Helsinki Innovation Districts project spread innovation activities from new areas to four suburban districts and the fastly growing Pasila area. The work continues within new projects in the districts. 

The Helsinki Innovation Districts project helped Helsinki to find smart everyday solutions and to create more functional urban space in Pasila, Malmi, Malminkartano and Mellunkylä. The innovation operations were brought to suburban regeneration areas from the developing new areas. These suburban districts have different needs and local networks to those of new areas, but the same co-creation methods still work.  

The Helsinki Innovation Districts project carried out three piloting programs and brought more than 20 pilots to the urban space. The role of the programs was to bring together businesses, the City’s experts, researchers and residents and to create collaboration. 

Agile pilots preceded the suburban regeneration projects and showed the local residents that the City is present in their district. For businesses, pilots provided an agile way to test their own solutions in a real-life environment in urban laboratories. With piloting, the objective is always to learn and discover as many things about new solutions as possible and do this openly, sharing the lessons learned.

“The agile pilots help us at the City develop our own processes,” stated Malmi Project Director Kimmo Kuisma from the City of Helsinki at the conclusion event of the Helsinki Innovation Districts project.

The suburban neighbourhoods as urban laboratories differed from one another in terms of their infrastructure and needs alike. This was taken into consideration in the solutions developed in the areas. The focus was on urban greenery and vacant spaces  in Malminkartano, on wood construction and solutions for children and young people that encourage spending leisure time in Mellunkylä, on guidance in Pasila, and on lighting and the use of outdoorspace in Malmi.

The pilots were connected more closely than before to the City’s own development work, such as renewal projects of urban space. The Helsinki Innovation Districts project envisioned possible futures of the areas with pilots, co-creation, and new methods.

The lessons learned from the pilots steered the City’s investments by showing what kinds of solutions would work in each area. The pilots yielded more information about the feasibility of new kinds of solutions, making viability assessments easier. They also facilitated developing functional solutions further, as the City invested in their development. 

For example, the innovative lighting experimented in Ala-Malmi Park was expanded after the pilot as the City of Helsinki ordered a new lighting plan that utilises interactivity for the surrounding area of the cultural centre Malmitalo. 

In several areas, the City also invested in modular green temporary pop-up spaces that make the urban space more attractive, implemented through RaivioBumann’s Parkly and Innogreen’s green wall solutions. The locals were heard in the planning and placement of the pop-ups.

Participatory foresight served as an important tool for co-creation with stakeholders throughout the project. The process used in the autumn of 2023 with the Nordic Works Collective yielded radically optimistic paths into the future, as well as bundles of ideas to steer cooperation in urban renewal areas in the future.

Five new projects have been launched to continue the themes of the Helsinki Innovation Districts project. These projects will result in many of the identified development needs, so the work in  the Helsinki Innovation Districts will continue at least until 2028. 

“It is great that collaboration with the local networks and the City’s divisions, businesses and residents will continue in the Helsinki Innovation Districts. Urban regeneration, co-creation, and innovation activities will provide a framework for creating radically optimistic futures,” comments Development Manager Kaisa Spilling from Forum Virium Helsinki. 

The urban labs of the suburban regeneration areas will focus on developing a verdant city in the upcoming years. For example, the Pilot Green project will bring green infrastructure pilots to Malminkartano, while the GreenIn Cities project will promote participatory design and innovative green area implementations that take climate change into account in Malmi. 

Urban food and wellbeing play an important role when creating lively and attractive urban environments. The Urban&Local project involves carrying out co-creation and pilots in areas such as the Ylä-Malmi market square to improve the availability of local food. 

The KauKo – kaupunki kokeilualustana (‘City as an innovation Platform’) project launched in the autumn of 2023 involves city districts serving as urban laboratories for solutions to promote wellbeing, health and physical activity.

Helsinki Innovation Districts project has utilised a wide variety of tools that support the innovation activities in the urban laboratories, from futures thinking to design sprints, and agile pilots. The key role of social innovation is highlighted in suburbs and suburban regeneration areas. 

The best methods used are presented with examples in the Co-Creating Innovative Districts -publication. The publication compiles key tools of innovation work and lessons learned, providing concrete examples of their utilisation in different districts. 

Smart City development is not just the joy of new districts, it is needed in the older districts as well. The city of the future is being built for an ever-increasing number of residents, retrofitting smart and sustainable solutions to the old infrastructure. Experimental and participatory development at the district level is crucial. Agile piloting is also a way for futures making, to actively build radically optimistic futures. 

In addition to Helsinki’s regeneration areas, the projects of Forum Virium Helsinki will continue to focus on the inner city, such as Pasila and the smart urban development model areas of Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari. 

The first photo: a clip from video made by The Flux
Other photos: Vesa Laitinen

In addition to suburbs, the projects of Forum Virium Helsinki will continue to focus on the inner city, such as Pasila and the smart urban development model areas of Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari. 

The first photo: a clip from video made by The Flux
Other photos: Vesa Laitinen

Helsinki Innovation Districts project develops smart city solutions for the needs of neighborhoods and residents. Our new publication places the spotlight on the tools used in five versatile urban areas.

Pleasant and green cities are co-created and co-designed with citizens, stakeholders, and companies. In Helsinki, The Helsinki Innovation Districts project has boosted the smart city development in versatile ways with a wide variety of co-development methods from futures thinking to street space analytics. 

Now, Co-Creating Innovative Districts: Tools for Urban Innovators publication presents the tools used in the project while also giving examples on how the work has been done. Previously, the tools have been utilised in new areas such as Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari but they can easily be applied to other areas as well. In Helsinki, they have recently been successfully used in suburban regeneration areas.

The tools for driving innovation in districts are meant for urban developers and fellow innovators, especially those working with different kinds of urban labs. The methods described are constantly developing, put in use in new ways, and complemented with new tools. 

When you try these or other urban development tools, please share your best experiences with us either via social media @forumvirium or by email at info@forumvirium.fi!

More places and activities for children and young people are needed in Mellunkylä. In summer 2023, these will be sought through pilots. The pilots start officially on Helsinki Day, 12.6. and continue until autumn.

The experiments are part of The Child-Friendly Municipality work.

FlyAR Augmented Reality Studio Oy, which focuses on augmented reality (AR) solutions, produces an interactive and playful “BALLZ!” game that can be played in front of the Kontula library on Snapchat.

In “BALLZ!”, players can play with large three-dimensional balls that collide with each other and the city space. AR content also includes surprising obstacles.

The experiment strives to determine whether local young people find the AR content brought to the city exciting and what kind of AR content they want to see. With the help of a functional and fun example, the aim is also to arouse the imagination and interest of the youth.

Creaamo, which specialises in learning and education solutions, designs a mobile game that takes place in an urban environment. The game encourages 9-15-year-olds to safely explore their local neighbourhood and get to know the services and sites. Mobile games are implemented on the Seppo.io platform.

The game in Kontula is aimed at middle schoolers, while the Mellunmäki game is aimed at elementary schoolers. The game aimed at younger children is meant to be played together with an adult. The games are created in cooperation with children in the area as part of school education and the activities of the community centre Me-talo Meltsi.

Remember to keep your location on while playing.

Local children and young people have wished for nice hangouts where you can organise small-scale events, spend time or eat snacks in Mellunkylä. RaivioBumann, specialising in participatory urban design, implements two pop-up spaces to Mellunkylä with Parkly furniture.

The pop-ups will be in front of Kontula Library and Mellunmäki Square, where there will also be a skateable module. The pop-ups offer places to hang out and play. The design takes into account the wishes and ideas of local children, which have been collected in idea and illustration workshops.

Come and meet us at the Circular Superweek! 

Date: Thursday 1 June, 17.00–20.00
Location: Kalasatama–Teurastamo
Map of the tour and link for registration here!

Welcome to a walking tour through the Kalasatama–Teurastamo neighbourhood close to downtown Helsinki. It is the hip part of the town, known also for its smart city solutions.

The walking tour will guide you to a shopping mall for some last-minute shopping for upcycled and recycled souvenirs and even food waste!

Come and meet Fiksu kaupunki – Helsinki Innovation Districts at the last station in the map, a popular restaurant area called Teurastamo. Stop by our tent and get to know the latest pilots and activities in the Helsinki Innovation Districts, discuss the circular lifestyles in cities and envision how to create an edible city.

After the tour, you can enjoy the Teurastamo atmosphere and explore what the local restaurants have to offer.

More information and link for registration here!

The Circular City Tour is an Accelerator Session at the World Circular Economy Forum 2023. The tour is organized by Helsinki-Uusimaa Circular Valley.

The Experimentation Evaluation Toolkit offers 20 metrics for observing urban space from different perspectives. It is collected for living labs use. 

The Experimentation Evaluation Toolkit is meant to be used in a living lab context to collect data from urban space experiments. It instructs what data can be collected with each metric and how to gather data online or on-site. 

The Metrics have been tested in an urban living lab in Malmi, Helsinki, during the summer 2022. They were used to observe and analyze the area from different perspectives. 

The goal was to build a set of tools that can be used in the future to evaluate experimentation in urban environments: The Experimentation Evaluation Toolkit. Anyone working with urban space experimentation can now use the metrics. 

The toolkit was carried out as part of the Nordic Healthy Cities project and produced by Miltton and SpinUnit together with Fiksu kaupunki – Helsinki Innovation Districts team.

The toolkit provides the framework to gain comparable data from the pilots in the Helsinki Innovation District.

Read more about testing

Download the Experimentation Evaluation Toolkit
Photo: Lauri Rotko / Helsinki Material Bank

A pilot project launched in Malmi in November involves testing an interface that allows residents to change the colour and colour temperature of outdoor lighting by using a smartphone.

As of November, local residents will be able to control the outdoor lighting in Ala-Malmi park, located next to Malmitalo. The area is being used to test a new kind of user interface that has never before been piloted in Finland. It allows anyone to change the colour and colour temperature of the lights installed in the park by their smartphones. 

The playful lighting system is intended to attract visitors to Ala-Malmi park and improve the pleasantness of the area. In addition, the aim is to test whether residents are interested in changing the colours of the street lights. The park and Malmitalo are venues for events, which the coloured lighting could enliven in the future. Moreover, the colourful lights have the potential to extend the event season from summer to autumn and even winter. 

“Lighting has traditionally been a static part of the urban environment, with areas either illuminated or not. The same has also been true of sites illuminated by lighting designers. Now, we are offering residents a chance to influence their environment,” says Jorma Tuuna-Väiskä, the CEO of the company behind the pilot, C2 SmartLight Oy. 

C2 SmartLight Oy is responsible for the solutions that control outdoor lighting in Helsinki, among other places. Their new pilot project is part of the Street Smarts pilot programme, which has sought innovative lighting and sensor solutions for Helsinki in the past. The programme’s previous pilots have involved testing solar-powered outdoor lighting and sensors that assess the slipperiness of streets in Malminkartano. 

Tuuna-Väiskä believes that the colour control pilot will provide information on what kind of lighting colours residents prefer and how they want to interact with outdoor lighting.

“We are monitoring the pilot with great interest, eager to learn how this kind of pilot is received and whether there is demand for this type of control solution,” Tuuna-Väiskä says. 

The pilot programme is part of the Helsinki Innovation Districts project, which brings innovation operations and smart city development to suburban regeneration areas in Malmi, Mellunkylä, Malminkartano-Kannelmäki and Pasila. The project is being carried out in cooperation between Forum Virium Helsinki and the City of Helsinki. Previous pilots carried out under the project have included the testing of movable urban green oases that diversify the use and increase the pleasantness of urban spaces in collaboration with Innogreen and Parkly.

A Street Smarts programme’s pilot will soon illuminate Ala-Malmi park.

Ala-Malmi park has been chosen for testing a browser-based open interface that allows residents to change the colour of the park’s outdoor lighting using their mobile phones. The pilot is the first of its kind in Finland and will run at least until the end of the year.

The purpose of the pilot is to find out how convenient the lighting is to adjust and how the new lighting affects the atmosphere of the park. In addition, the aim is to collect ideas and thoughts on where this kind of lighting solution could be utilised in the future. The collected feedback steers the future development of the service.

C2 SmartLight Oy provides the service, and the City of Helsinki’s Municipal Engineering unit is responsible for the procurement and installation of lighting. The pilot is part of the Helsinki Innovation Districts project’s Street Smarts pilot programme, which has previously sought innovative lighting and sensor solutions for Helsinki.

You can adjust the lights everyday when the regular streetlights turn on in the city.

1. Open a web browser on your phone and navigate to fvh.io/malminvalot. Select ‘Let’s try’. When using the service for the first time, you will be asked to allow the service to access your phone’s location data, which is mandatory for using the service.

2. You can change the language to Finnish, English or Swedish via the drop-down menu in the upper right corner of the page.

3. After the start window, you will be presented with a map view. The application will search for nearby controllable lights and display them on the map. The circle shown on the map indicates your location. You can only control lights that fall within the circle.

4. You can differentiate between the available lights by zooming the map window in and out using the plus and minus buttons. The symbols on the lights indicate the colour of the light. Select a light to open the control window.

5. Change the colour of the light by selecting a colour from the menu. The selected colour will be highlighted. After this, press the ‘Use’ button to apply the colour.

6. After selecting a colour, you will be asked to complete a captcha before the change is applied.

7. All done! After the colour has changed, the symbol on the light in the map view will be updated to reflect the new colour.

Co-creating smart & green neighborhoods, blocks and spaces event will gather the latest insights from Helsinki and other Nordic cities. 

When: 10th June 2022 10.00–12.00 EEST / 9.00–11.00 CET
Where: Webinar
Register with the form below

Co-creating smart & green neighborhoods, blocks and spaces is an online-event organised by The Helsinki Innovations Districts -programme. Come and join the stream to hear fresh insights from the projects. 

The Helsinki Innovation District -programme has expanded smart city development to the suburbs and older districts under development. The talks include perspectives on retrofitting the smart city and we getting inspired on experiences from the sharing cities in Sweden. We will also talk about experimentation with citizen engagement in planning of green spaces and get fresh insights on how the behaviour changes can be measured within urban spaces. 

Welcome
Maija Bergström, Project Manager, Helsinki Innovation Districts

Retrofitting the Smart City 
Kerkko Vanhanen, Programme Director, Forum Virium Helsinki  
Elina Eskelä, Senior Planning Officer, City of Helsinki

Sharing Cities
Charlie Gullström, PhD, Architect SAR/MSA, Research and Innovation Strategist, Sweco

Reflections:
Kimmo Rönkä, Future Living Specialist, Rönkä Consulting oy 

Experimentation in Circular Green Blocks
Annamaria Rossi, Project Manager, Forum Virium Helsinki

Nordic Collaboration: Healthy Liveable Neighbourhoods
Kaisa Spilling, Development Manager, Forum Virium Helsinki

Reflections:
Lauri Lemmenlehti, Senior Technical Expert, City of Helsinki
Magnus Egelund Thomsen, Project Manager, Copenhagen Solutions Lab 

How to Measure Change in Placemaking Interventions
TBC

Q&A + Discussion

Photo: Lauri Rotko / Helsinki City Material Bank

Northern Kalasatama is being planned in a unique way, with the area’s urban planning team being assisted by technical expert Lauri Lemmenlehti from the B.Green project.

To help with the land use planning, he is building a digital model of the planned district’s green spaces and parks, the level of detail of which extends all the way down to the plants in city block courtyards and the green roofs of buildings. These types of 3D tools are already commonplace in building design.

“Three-dimensional data models can be used to easily calculate things like the number and price of bricks needed in a building, for example,” Lemmenlehti explains.

A digital model makes it easy to create different design options and cost calculations. It can also be used to visualise what the designs will look like in practice for the benefit of decision-makers and prospective homeowners.

By contrast, the 3D-modelling of natural environments is still in its infancy. Park plans are still being drafted as two-dimensional maps. The reason for this is clear, however.

“The data models used by building designers are not very good for 3D-modelling natural environments because nature is constantly changing,” says Lauri Lemmenlehti.

Modern technology makes it easy to create 3D models of roads and buildings to speed up planning. But modelling natural environments, which are essential for the well-being of city residents, is significantly more challenging.

The potential applications of 3D models of natural environments are numerous. They could be used for smart green planning to make increasingly densely built districts much more pleasant for residents. Trees could be planted in locations where they would provide the most protection against the sun and wind. Green roofs and rainwater retention pools could be placed at key locations to prevent flooding as rain volumes increase due to climate change.

In addition to traditional urban parks, new city districts are also designed to include green walls and roofs, flood parks and stormwater streets. Assessing how all these features impact things like the microclimate or windiness of the city is, however, impossible without digital modelling tools.

Lauri Lemmenlehti from the B.Green project is a landscape architect by education – and the top expert on virtual natural environments in Finland. This expertise was already apparent from his final thesis in landscape architecture, for which he created a simplified model of the natural environments of Finland, suitable for use in video games. The idea was to provide video game developers with a basis for building game worlds set in Finnish environments.

“Modelling natural environments requires new modelling philosophies and methods, which will most likely be built upon video game engine technologies,” Lemmenlehti predicts. 

The fictional Fineland that Lemmenlehti created for his thesis was a framework for a digital environmental model of Finland. It modelled the weather, the changing of the seasons and the growth of plants over the years. These types of digital environmental models could be utilised in city planning to see what planned areas will look like in the future once the trees have grown to their full height or in sleety rain in November instead of the perpetually sunny conditions depicted in contemporary architectural visualisations. Video game technologies could even be harnessed to examine the living conditions or simulate the movements of different animals, such as pollinating insects.

Lemmenlehti’s dream is to create a digital twin of Helsinki encompassing the entire physical city, including natural environments modelled with the same level of detail as seen in video games like Grand Theft Auto 5, which features a 120-square-kilometre, fictionalised version of California, complete with the Hollywood Hills and vineyards.

Video games serve as a good accelerator for developers of digital landscaping tools.

“Nowadays, the most widely enjoyed landscapes in the world are no longer natural landscapes, but virtual ones found in games like GTA5,” Lemmenlehti assesses.

The resources that the video game industry has for creating these landscapes are also vast. For example, the ‘natural’ landscapes of GTA5 were modelled by a team of 30 people over a period of over two years.

Forum Virium Helsinki’s B.Green project is testing new ways of modelling natural environments and utilising the resulting digital models in the planning of Kalasatama.

One of the pilot projects thought up by Lemmenlehti was carried out in collaboration with startup company Anarky Labs. The pilot involved Lauri Lemmenlehti using a virtual reality headset and a flying drone to get a bird’s eye view of the city. This makes it easy to map the green spaces of the city: the drone positions the trees it sees on a map, and the landscape architect is left with identifying the species and determining the size of the virtual tree located with an augmented reality headset. In the future, even the determination of the species can be automated.

Another B.Green pilot project gives the residents of Kalasatama a chance to see what Loviseholminpuisto Park, which is currently being built in Sompasaari, will look like once it is finished. Residents can download an augmented reality application onto their own phones and then use their phone screen to see how the park will fit into the current urban landscape once the trees reach their full height.

Lemmenlehti believes that these types of approaches to showcasing city plans will soon become commonplace.

“You will be able to go to the site to examine 3D plans on your own. All you need is your smartphone or an augmented reality headset to see what a new building or park will look like once finished.”

The urban planners of Kalasatama already got to try out a new approach to planning green spaces in the Virtual Verdure project that preceded B.Green.

“Green spaces are becoming increasingly important as the city grows denser,” says architect Janni Backberg, one of the urban planners of Kalasatama.

 The workshops of the Virtual Verdure project brought together the area’s land use planners, transport and landscape designers and stormwater experts to examine model blocks and street cross-sections and come up with ways of connecting public and private green spaces to each other. Making green spaces a part of streets and buildings requires close cooperation.

“The ecological system of a residential area consists of both public parks and private yards. Natural environments need to be built into a network that is connected to existing natural environments,” says Lemmenlehti.

The digital tools being developed in the B.Green project promise to make this type of cooperation easier than ever while also allowing local residents to participate in the planning. The urban planners of Kalasatama have high hopes for the project.

“Hopefully we will soon have a digital twin of northern Kalasatama that also models natural environments,” says Janni Backberg.

The digital environmental model could show residents what the area will look like 40 years from now. It could also be used by green space planners to simulate the wind conditions of the area or model stormwater runoff as early as the planning stage.

“Helsinki is investing heavily in environmental planning. My hope is that digital models of natural environments will have a positive impact on planning quality,” Lemmenlehti ponders.

 The land use planning for the southern part of Kalasatama was completed years ago. The construction is currently in full swing, and Lemmenlehti is pleased with how the new Sompasaari area is turning out. However, the first thing that many people who visit the seaside area for the first time notice is how windy it is.

“The area could be further improved with smart green construction between the buildings,” Lemmenlehti points out.

Creating green infrastructure is easiest when it is taken into consideration long before the actual construction, during the drafting of the local detailed plan for the area.

Text: Petja Partanen
Photos: Maija Astikainen

Propose your solution for the agile piloting programme: The Helsinki Innovation Districts project is seeking bold and inventive smart lighting and street space analytics solutions that make use of smart technologies to improve the pleasantness and safety of the urban environment. The maximum value of an individual pilot is EUR 15,000 (VAT 0%). The number of pilots procured will be 2–5, and all of the pilots will be carried out simultaneously.

The aim of agile pilots is to facilitate the development of good concepts into service innovations and new business. The proposed solutions will be tested in a real urban environment for a period of a few months.

The Helsinki Innovation Districts project will help launch the pilots, find suitable places for them and communicate about them. In addition to this, implementers will be provided with assistance in regard to reaching out to users and co-developing solutions with residents and experts.

The goal of the pilot programme is to gain information on new and innovative lighting solutions that are especially well-suited to short-term and temporary guidance needs, such as indicating routes for events, marking construction sites or other short-term signage.

In addition to this, the goal is to learn about new technologies for collecting data from street spaces to support city planning and increase understanding of how these kinds of data collection methods could be incorporated into lighting infrastructure in the future.

Individual pilots do not need to fulfil all of these goals to be included in the pilot programme.

The districts of Malminkartano and Malmi will serve as the testbeds for the solutions to be piloted. These districts offer diverse environments for testing new services and products. Significant re-development is planned for both districts in the coming years, with the pilots intended to forecast upcoming changes.

The solutions to be piloted will provide user feedback, insight and practical experience. They will provide the companies carrying out the pilots and the City with information on what kind of solutions could work in Malmi, Malminkartano and elsewhere in Helsinki.

See the introductory videos for Malmi and Malminkartano.

The information event was held on 8 November 2021 at 15:00–16:00. Watch the recording!

Check the open call for the pilot procurement (in Finnish)
Propose a pilot using the form (in Finnish)

The pilots selected to participate in the programme will be announced in December and carried out by the end of May. This is the first open call for pilots of the Helsinki Innovation Districts project.

The Helsinki Innovation Districts project is being carried out by Forum Virium Helsinki and the City of Helsinki.

Helsinki Innovation Districts is bringing pilot projects to and driving smart urban development in Malmi, Mellunkylä, Malminkartano-Kannelmäki and Pasila. The project is being carried out by Forum Virium Helsinki and the City of Helsinki’s Urban Development unit.