Helsinki makes sustainability a guiding principle for development

Helsinki

WHEN his tour as the American ambassador to Finland ended in 2015, Bruce Oreck decided to linger. Part of the draw was a business opportunity. In a neighbourhood just north of the city centre, he paid about 11 million euros (now about S$17.7 million) for a vast, abandoned, century-old train factory.

He has been transforming the site into a market and community centre that he intends to be a model of green building and consumerism. But Mr Oreck, who was a New Orleans tax lawyer and professional bodybuilder before he became an Obama political appointee, said he stayed because he was enchanted by something besides the potential for real estate success.

"You don't hear about it unless you spend time here, but something is happening in Helsinki that isn't happening almost anywhere else," Mr Oreck said. "Helsinki is a city full of people waiting for the revolution. They really want to make the world a better place, and they're trying to lead by example. Which is a paradox, because Finns are decidedly not showy people."

The qualities he is referring to are sometimes summed up by the term sustainability. In the world's second most northern capital, sustainability has moved from concept to guiding principle. It's rare for a day to pass without hearing a form of the word deployed multiple times as an environmentally friendly noun, adjective or adverb.

But Helsinki has a parallel goal: The city has endorsed measures it hopes will earn it recognition as the world's most functional city.

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In Helsinki, this aspiration will be judged against a measurable and widely shared benefit: New master-planned communities must integrate features allowing inhabitants to enjoy an extra hour of free time each day.

Nowhere are these ambitions more apparent than in Kalasatama, a 174-ha neighbourhood east of the city center. Rising on an area previously used as docklands, the buildings are all commercially developed. The city retains ownership of about a third of the units, which it leases as government-subsidised housing. Yet, even within projects entirely financed with private funds, the emphasis on community building is central.

"What we are seeing is developers working with buyers before construction to create more and new kinds of shared spaces than they would usually offer, because that's what buyers are asking for," said Maija Bergstrom, a project manager for Forum Virium Helsinki, the city agency overseeing planning in Kalasatama.

One such building is Sumppi, a co-housing project where costs were jointly financed by a group of about 70 people who, until the process began, had been strangers. Residents chose the building's name for its double meaning. In Finnish, sumppi is slang for "let's have coffee," but the word also means "small fish", appropriate for a building across the street from a Baltic seafront.

In November 2019, residents moved into 39 units in a structure that is eight floors at its highest, with a six-floor wing. During the year-and-a-half planning phase and the 19-month development phase, the future occupants met regularly with the construction manager to review costs and inspect progress.

A wine cellar was cancelled in favour of solar panels. There is also a geothermal heating system, and windows have three panes for energy efficiency. The building has underground parking, but there are fewer spaces than units. At one of their first meetings, in the communal living room, residents spiritedly debated whether to purchase four electric cars to share.

"Before construction even started, the owners agreed on some core values," said Salla Korpela, a driving force behind the resurgence of co-housing in Finland and a partner in the firm Sagarak, which advised Sumpii's builders.

"For instance, the best places would be reserved for community use, and when choices had to be made, we should be guided by what would make life fun, easier and cheaper."

The final cost was about 5,000 euros per square metre (sq m), or roughly US$550 per square foot, around 20 per cent over the initial estimate. But that was still considerably less than the average cost of a developer-built project nearby, which is closer to 8,000 euros per sq m.

Apartments range in size from studios to four bedrooms, and the layout of every unit is customised, owners having co-designed their spaces with the architects. One unit features a large art studio. In another, once the owners' children reach adulthood, the rooms can be separated into two units.

All the apartments have large windows, and some have outdoor terraces. The best have views facing south-west across the bay to the city centre, where the tallest structures remain the tops of churches.

The most inviting shared spaces are the top floors of the two wings, with their large saunas. A rooftop terrace has a garden as well as space for yoga classes and summer barbecues.

Residents moved into Sumppi about a month before Finland sealed its borders against the pandemic. One of their first group activities was to form an in-house coronavirus committee led by two doctors. For the past several months, common spaces have not been used, and the saunas are available for only one family for one hour at a time. On Tuesdays, the communal laundry facilities are reserved for residents with pre-existing conditions.

So far, about 4,000 people have moved to the Kalasatama community. By 2030, that number is expected to grow to about 25,000, and there will be office space for 10,000 workers. Most of the neighbourhood will be composed of mid-rises under 10 floors, but the area is home to the city's first skyscraper, 32 floors high. Within a few years, Kalasatama is expected to have eight skyscrapers from 32 to 37 floors in height.

Progress in Kalasatama is sufficiently advanced that residents can enjoy at least a portion of that sought-after extra leisure time.

In the skyscrapers, the time-saving starts as residents put on their shoes and use a smartphone app to signal an elevator to wait for them. They can use an app to order from a grocery store, where a robot will pluck the items from the shelves and deliver them to the apartment.

Kalasatama residents are not required to carry recycling to the street, nor are they stuck in traffic behind garbage trucks.

Every building in the neighbourhood is connected to a network of pneumatic tubes that propel seven categories of trash to a central collection point, where the materials arrive pre-sorted.

Until recently, another neighbourhood feature was a driverless "last mile" electric bus that would whisk passengers in less than five minutes to a metro station, but Helsinki's growing fleet of autonomous buses has been shifted to other neighbourhoods for testing, in settings with more bustling traffic.

"The area was designed to reduce the need for cars" said Kimmo Tupala, a communications manager for Unicef Finland who lives in the area. "Maybe they did too good of a job, because I hardly see any cars on the road. Before moving here, I spent at least 40 minutes a day in my car. Since last September, I've hardly used my car ever, and I'm thinking of selling it." NYTIMES