Peggy Bauer heads commercial and area development at the company Helsingin Leijona.
Photo Kimmo Brandt
By Johanna Lemola
Helsingin Leijona steers development, enlivenment and marketing of the historical Helsinki city-centre blocks.
“The ideal entrepreneur in the Tori Quarters is an independent player who represents the new spirit of the place,” says Peggy Bauer. She heads commercial and area development at Helsingin Leijona, a City-of-Helsinki owned development company focusing on the blocks of Kiseleff, Bock and Govinius, so named after 18th century merchants and their houses.
The main goal of the development is to turn the Tori Quarters into a living and dynamic part of the larger Helsinki city centre with new vibrant activity that brings people in – cafés and restaurants, shops and boutiques, and a variety of creative services. In Bauer’s words, the Tori Quarters project turns the Old Town new.
“When the work starts from the grassroots level and moves up, then we can succeed,” Bauer asserts. She also wants citizens to come to the Quarters to carry out their own creative projects, for example, in the streets and in the inner courtyards turned into public spaces.
“The Tori Quarters have magnificently many layers. We’re now building a new layer, which is a colourful and modern one. We’re building the city of the 2020’s by responding to the needs and wishes of the Helsinki resident of the next decade.”
Bauer ties the success of the Tori Quarters project to the general atmosphere in Helsinki. “There is a really good progressive vibe in the city today,” she says, mentioning the hugely popular Restaurant Day (when anyone can open a pop-up restaurant for one day) as an example of the new city culture of Helsinki.
The City of Helsinki renovates Tori Quarters property, and Helsingin Leijona leases the renovated space as well as promoting the overall concept of “New Old Town”. The renovation work is halfway through, but a great deal remains to be done to sell the Tori Quarters concept to residents through marketing and communication. Signs and logos have newly appeared in the Quarters, and a new city media outlet has been launched on the project’s Web site www.torikorttelit.fi.
The work on property will be completed in 2017. Bauer wants to see definite outcomes from the marketing and communications work by that time: “I want to see that citizens will have owned the concept and see the area as a platform for their own activities.”