IMAGE: Helsinki Marketing

A Smart, Sustainable City by the Sea

Helsinki claims it is “the most functional and sustainable city in the world, built on social cohesion, famous for its design and high-tech, committed to bringing people together through authentic experiences, interesting spaces and nature explorations.”

It’s a bold claim, but you’d be hard pushed to find evidence to the contrary. Helsinki is in the top 5 in the GDS-Index and in 2018 alone, it claimed 9 top positions in smart city surveys, including Best in Smart Tourism and Best Digital Mobility Services, plus second places in a European smart city survey and a home base for start-ups list. The Financial Times named the Helsinki-Uusimaa region the best place for foreign direct investment among mid-sized European regions.

Helsinki has been focused on accessibility and sustainability for a long time and aims to be carbon neutral by 2035. Significant progress has already been made; in 2017, Helsinki’s emissions were 24% lower than in 1990, even though there were 150,000 more residents. It’s also Helsinki one of three Lighthouse cities in the EU-financed mySMARTLife project, developing smart solutions to cut urban energy use by 10–20% and increase renewable energy use.

Helsinki knows that becoming carbon-neutral requires residents, the City, businesses and organisations to work together; its public-private-people-partnerships approach generates new solutions and new business while helping to solve global challenges.

Hundreds of experts, residents and corporate representatives participated via workshops and the Stadinilmasto.fi website to formulate the city’s action plan, Carbon Neutral Helsinki 2035—and here is how Helsinki is bringing about the changes needed.

Testing and developing sustainable solutions

Key players in Helsinki smart city development include Forum Virium Helsinki, an urban innovations unit; investment promotion agency Helsinki Business Hub; the Smart & Clean Foundation; the City of Helsinki Economic Development division and its innovation unit; and the Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council. Helsinki Marketing promotes City of Helsinki expertise internationally. Helsinki also attracts private businesses wanting to test solutions and Google has chosen it for its drone transport experiments.

The Helsinki region is home to 70 platforms where change can be managed in a controlled environment. Some are digital, like the Helsinki Region Infoshare databank, and others are physical, like Jätkäsaari Mobility Lab, Stormwater Quality Management and demand response systems for district heating in homes developed within the mySMARTLife project and Kalasatama. Kalasatama is a smart city district with 3,000 residents which acts as a showroom for Helsinki’s smart urban solutions, including a smart waste collection system, extensive electric car capabilities, flexible shared spaces with smart locks, and on-site renewable energy production.

Smart city development is people-oriented rather than technology-driven here: nearly one-third of Kalasatama’s residents have participated in co-creating solutions and the benchmark for success here is for new digital services to give residents one extra hour a day freed from everyday chores.

Clean energy and energy-efficient buildings

Heating accounts for over half of Helsinki’s emissions. The greatest potential reduction lies in implementing energy-efficiency measures during renovations, which could reduce emissions from buildings by 80%. Helsinki has produced a semantic 3D city model and used this as a basis for a 3D map application called the Helsinki Energy and Climate Atlas, which holds real and calculated energy-related data on city building stock. This enables specific building assessments, citywide energy analyses and simulations, and identification of potential energy efficiency improvements. Only a small percentage of Helsinki’s buildings are owned by the City, representing just 11% of the emission reduction potential in Helsinki’s building stock, so residents are encouraged to renovate themselves, and advised on energy renovations and renewable energy. The Smart & Clean Foundation’s RenoLeap project focuses on renovating old Helsinki building stock using prefabricated elements, modular components and smart solutions.

The City is increasingly steering district planning towards carbon neutrality, energy efficiency and renewable energy use in the City’s buildings, replacing outdoor lights with more energy-efficient alternatives, using thermal and wind energy, and promoting wooden construction. For instance, LED lighting controlled by area occupancy and environmental conditions has been installed at Helsinki Zoo and the Paloheinä recreational area.

The City’s energy company, Helen Oy, is working to reduce district heating emissions by 74% by 2035 by utilising waste heat, implementing heat pumps, utilising the demand response for heat and electricity, switching from fossil fuel to renewable electricity production and using electricity storage facilities. The goal is to stop using coal entirely by the 2030s.

Kalasatama’s smart grid is producing Innovative demand response solutions including a V2G (vehicle-to-grid) electric vehicle charging station, which not only charges electric vehicles but also allows them to feed electricity to the grid to ease peak demand.

IMAGE: Helsinki Marketing

Powering change: open data and IoT

IT is big in Helsinki. The University of Helsinki and Aalto University produce top-class data experts and the City of Helsinki employs diverse data professionals to fulfil the aims of its digitalisation strategy, completed in spring 2019.

In 2009, Helsinki was among the first capital cities to start publishing its data as open data. It’s now standard practice here, with all City decisions and documents freely available to all. City interfaces are increasingly open too, allowing developers outside City operations to use them to produce apps that benefit residents and generate new business. The Chinese conglomerate Tencent collaborated with the City and Helsinki mobile operator MaaS Global to develop the WeChat mobile app, which allows Chinese tourists to find their way around Helsinki and make payments.

5G data networks are expanding in Finland and Helsinki, offering new opportunities with the Internet of Things and smart mobility, e.g. navigation of self-driving buses and networking sensors throughout the city, including state-of-the-art air quality sensors used by the Helsinki Air Quality Testbed.

Helsinki collaborates closely with 5G development companies, including Nokia, Elisa and Telia, and together they’ve produced the world’s first liquid-cooled base station, which produces considerably fewer emissions than conventional cooling. The waste heat generated is recovered and used to heat the residential building that houses the base station.

Hosting your Green Event in Helsinki

Helsinki is the 14th most popular congress city in the world (UIA Union of International Associations) and it’s easy to get to: Helsinki airport has direct flights from over 140 destinations and is just 19 kilometres from the city centre (that’s 27 minutes away via a direct train every 10 minutes, and slightly longer by airport shuttle bus, every 20 minutes). Of course, you can also arrive by ferry from Estonia, Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Russia, or by train from many cities, including St. Petersburg, Russia.

Once you’re here, getting around green-style is easy too. The rail system criss-crosses the whole city and there are more than 300 daily bus routes. There’s also the metro or environmentally-friendly trams, plus 3,450 City bikes at 238 bike stations, just waiting to be hired and cycled along bike routes through amazing forests and parks. However, nearly everything in Helsinki is in walking distance! It’s no wonder that private cars only account for around 1 in 5 trips here.

The city is welcoming. It’s ranked highly for accessibility and multilingual ‘Helsinki Helpers’ are stationed at main attractions to offer assistance. The Helsinki Convention Bureau is on hand to help event organisers through every part of the event-organising process, from the bidding process through to selecting the best facilities, partners and service providers and promoting the event.

Incentive breaks, breakout activities and evenings out can all be enjoyed sustainably. Want to dine out? The criteria for more sustainable choices state that restaurants should have at least one well-balanced vegan meal (preferably several) on the menu, plus an emphasis on organic, fair-trade and locally produced food.

If you want to sample Helsinki’s famous urban sauna culture, there’s a huge choice, ranging from the traditional to the ultra-modern, and many are environmentally-friendly, made from sustainable wood and powered by water, solar heating and wind. But if you want something more energetic, there’s canoeing, stand-up paddling, or, for the more adrenaline-driven, snow-mobile and RIB boat safaris. In winter, you can try a traditional kicksled or a snowshoe hike.

What about a guided tour of Helsinki’s design landmarks or a private tour of Helsinki Distilling Company’s production facilities (with a taste of their hand-crafted whiskey or gin?). Or a cruise around some of the city’s 300 islands by traditional wooden sailing ship? You can take a ferry to the sea fortress too, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, and there’s more history to be found at Helsinki’s cathedral, museums and Observatory. There are also plenty of green spaces including the Pukkisaari Iron-Age Trading Post and the Old Church Park, Töölönlahti with its charming Linnunlaulu “Birdsong” district and Kaisaniemi with its Botanic Garden.