Helsinki at a historic juncture

Helsinki is entering the biggest construction boom in the city’s history, following the move of former cargo port operations away from central city sites to a new harbour in Vuosaari in eastern Helsinki. The move has vacated large areas for redevelopment for residences, services and commerce.

The redevelopment of the former port sites and other new development projects will create compact city sections. The development takes place on the “mixed-use principle” – jobs are mixed with many types of housing for different income groups, to avoid segregation along income lines and long commutes. Helsinki seeks to strengthen the city’s concentrations of excellence in arts and sciences by creating specialized districts, such as Viikki built around the University of Helsinki’s biosciences departments.

City planning plays a crucial role as Helsinki redefines its future.

City according to plan

City planning has traditionally been a strong force in the development of Helsinki. As early as 1810, two years before Helsinki was made the capital of Finland (which was an autonomous Grand Dutchy of Russia at the time), work got underway from scratch to prepare a plan for Helsinki. The plan was drawn up by Johan Albrekt Ehrenström, and the main buildings were designed by Berlin architect Carl Ludwig Engel. The result was Helsinki’s Neo-Classical city centre.

In 1918, just after Finnish independence, world-famous Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen produced a master plan for Greater Helsinki, with a vision of a capital city of an independent nation. Reflections of this plan can still be seen in today’s Helsinki. Later another world-famous Finnish architect, modernist Alvar Aalto drew a master plan for the city centre. Many other significant architects have planned Helsinki.

City planning today

Since 1964, city planning in Helsinki has been the responsibility of the City Planning Department. The department’s tasks are the structural and architectural development of Helsinki and include master planning and town planning. The department’s responsibilities also include traffic planning. The staff numbers close to 300, one-third of whom are architects and another third engineers.

The Helsinki Master Plan is a general plan for organizing traffic and land use, which covers the entire city and controls town planning. A new master plan is approved at approximately every ten years. Town planning is a continuous process because of the constant changes that take place in society.

A large number of city planning projects are underway at the City Planning Department at any time. The department posts the names of responsible architects and teams on its web pages (in Finnish).

A planning competition named Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 was organized in 2006-07 to help draft the Helsinki region’s future in land use, housing and traffic to 2050. The winner was an entry titled Emerald by WSP Finland.

City planning in service of the public

Helsinki city planning is an interactive process with the general public. Every citizen has an opportunity to obtain information on current plans and express opinions on the plans.

Every year the Helsinki City Planning Department prints a city planning review, a complete report on all planning projects in the city, and distributes this to all Helsinki households free of charge. The review is in Finnish and Swedish.

The department runs a city-planning gallery named Laituri in a former bus terminal building in downtown Helsinki, which organizes exhibitions and displays on how Helsinki will develop.