Helsinki, Finland

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Edge Laboratory Tut, Arkkitehtistudio M&y

Extension - Sipoo

Although the required estimated size of greater Helsinki area, two million inhabitants, might at first glance seem enormous, and compared to daily efforts made for intensification and sustainable future even a bit high flying, it opens up a major dilemma in Finnish urban planning. At the same time the emerging urban structure seems to contain more and more outcomes that don’t fit in the picture. One might even paradoxically say that the task of spatial planning is hardly a spatial issue. The key issue in planning isn’t actually the space itself, but rather to decide how to take advantage of the existing state of urbanism and how to guide the proposed change. Therefore the urban visionary for next half century is not only a spatial arrangement plan, but more like a test bed for persuading successful strategies. The competition entry focuses on inevitable shift of planning strategies and their physical outcome of Greater Helsinki metropolitan area. To turn the existing spacious urban tissue and vast growth of population and decreasing occupancy rate into a true competition advantage of global scale the focus ought to be turned on successive multi-player strategies. The current land use scheme of polarized interests on either global mobility or local protectionism is to be negotiated over. The delicate, but clear target is to steer planning from dominating land ownership and determinism of established property rights into more beneficial production of urban space. The solution for this to re-evaluate the implicit spatial practices evolved from singular stakeholder perspective and concentrate on more elegant explicitly formulated spatial policies.Due to these objectives the entry consists of three different spatial strategies or types of planning activity. The planning types are not naturally completely separable from each other, but vary on degree of intervention, investment and the inertia of existing structures that the selected partition is justified. Also the strategies have rough but distinct correspondence with location in metropolitan field. The planning strategies are: -Design based planning – Infrastructure based planning – Policy based planning. The design based planning, that has dominated the Finnish planning tradition is most suitable for locating large quantities and volumes in areas where the land ownership is not shredded. The main objective for design based planning is to avoid unreasonable externalities via regulation. Typical implementation areas are extensions of continuous built structure, where virgin landscape is urbanized. Locations are typically by the extensions of radial transportation lines and Ring road III area. The infrastructure based planning is most effective in suburban fringe, where existing structure already contains resistance for change and totalistic design based strategies lead easily into opportunistic and unhealthy land speculation. The strategy in more evolutionary based and guides the development by targeting investments according to infrastructure allocation and supporting certain specified general development patterns for land use. The main objective for infrastructural based planning is to encourage voluntary activity by channeling investments.The policy based planning sets the general framework for development in outer fringe areas where allocation of large investments or detailed regulation and is neither smart nor possible. Therefore the main objective for policy based planning is to bind up the true land use potential with spatial typology characteristic for it.

Infrastructure Activation - Silvoila reservoir

From tactics to typologies.

Multimodal Node - Pasila

Connectivity increasing is a technique to open up a new potential in local neighborhoods to allow evolution of land to fill the economic needs of essential supporting activities that are otherwise seek from outside. Typical implementations are in areas where a pioneer single function usage dominates land use and creates unbearable externalities to immediate surroundings, for example in terms of overwhelming car usage. The specialized production and maintenance of urban infrastructure has a tendency to allocate superfluous spatial buffers to ensure their imaginable future needs. Infrastructural buffer intensification is a recall for diverse actors of urban field to negotiate acceptable solution and backup plans. Typically this happens in traffic arteries, but is in fact more related to single-minded land holding issues and also found for example in waterworks and so called ecological corridorsThe zoning laws have created an illusion of an absolute space where aerial labels and land parcels have one to one correspondence. Relaxation of functional separation is a tactic to explore the spatial potential from inwards and actively promote diversity of urban activities to create new characteristics and flexibility for unpredictable future. Edge articulation is a primary tactic to reach beyond administrative boundaries that have created spatial practices of their own. Often border zones, whether being ones of regions, municipalities, districts, land tenant or landscape, has the highest level of potential for multiple usage, but are poorly activated due to practical single scale centre-periphery setting. Spatial code reversal is a tactic resulted from observing each location in multiple perspectives. Diverse viewpoints allow planners to find most usable level of connectivity and focus on potentially most fruitful neighborhood size for development. Instances of spatial code reversal can be seen for example in creation of new lot-street interface, edge framing or in emergent node and edge city formations.

Multimodal Node - Ring road 3

Implementation of typologies.

New Edge - Kaivoksela

As a synthesis of previous spatial tactics alternative urban typologies may be created. Selected typologies in this entry are: Urban extension, Edge framing, Urban infill, Urban strip, Buffer activation, Multimodal node, Fallow mix and Connecting node. Examples of each of these are presented in the material.

Urban Infill - Ring road 1

Vision 2050.

Urban Strip - Vantaanlaaksontie

The vision of the competition entry proposes multiple starting point approach to handle potential drawbacks in actual planning process. The benefits of intensifying structure are their biggest at loosely interconnected suburban fringe, so there also locates the nexus of various planning strategies as well. Some of the allocated land use are traditional new extensions at the metropolitan edge and largely connected with heavy rail transport. The novel strategy for Helsinki is to dig into the space between and encourage negotiation for alternative solutions. All abovementioned eight typologies are therefore in active use there, even though it is obvious that the more complex the spatial tactics are required the more effort is required from organizations involved in production of urban space. Therefore a shown solution is only a one single possibility to wrap up the set of spatial activities, but the tactic and typological tools are efficient enough to end up with same desired solution even though the schedule of implementation of then might vary conciderably. Entry preserves the green structure of a metropolis as a backbone of urban development, but in contrary to present practices actively turns typological solutions to use it more efficiently and seeks new local identities from it. The transportation concerns are mainly related with the keeping up with the mobility in existing or soon realized arteries. An competitive suburban transport is implemented to pass by the most crowded location at the CBD and provides an alternative connection with the networking new nodes. The main new connections are planned according to their spatial connections ad qualities, and is operated for example with light rail transport. To simulate the potential steps to year 2050 the planning period is divided into nine five year phases, two of which are simulated according to existing municipal land-use strategies. To reach the 2 million mark a slightly larger growth must take place and simulation of population dynamics is carried out with following sized growth of a building stock.

Boards 1-2

2005-2010 5.44 milj. sq m

Boards 3-6

2010-2015 5.80 milj. sq m

Connector Node - Pakila

2015-2020 9.25 milj sq m

2020-2025 8.63 milj. sq m

2025-2030 10.78 milj.sq m

2030-2035 7.09 milj. sq m

2035-2040 11.49 milj.sq m

2040-2045 8.22 milj. sq m

2045-2050 9.30 milj. sq m

The following sequence of population changes from five year period to another shows clearly the need for large scale spatial strategies to carry out the proposed planning challenge. The thematic maps show the relative change of inhabitants from the previous five years period according to one possible scheduling scheme. The areas gaining population are shown green, the ones loosing population, shown red and stable ones in gray/white. A proposed typological regeneration in the target areas lead into an overall population of Greater Helsinki that is shown in lower right hand corner of each image. The main land use – transportation quality corridor in each period is shown on next set of graphs.

Europaconcorsi Beta

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