Examining Finnish cities

We systematically collect key data from four cities of different sizes and with different sustainable mobility targets, challenges and opportunities

CITY

Oulu

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CITY

Lahti

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CITY

Espoo

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CITY

Helsinki

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CITY

Oulu

more info

CITY

Lahti

more info

CITY

Espoo

more info

CITY

Helsinki

more info

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CITY

Oulu

The city of Oulu contributes strongly to the Oulu region’s climate strategy supporting Finnish targets to be carbon neutral by 2030. The city of Oulu is strongly emphasising digitalisation opportunities, sustainable growth, and sustainability in land-use planning.

Challenges:
- How to rapidly promote the fast bike lane network to favour mobility by bikes and e-bikes as a trade-off to car accessibility.
- How to measure and simulate the efficiency and influence of infrastructure investments promoting sustainable modes of transport across different seasons.
Solutions:
- New mobility modelling methods to show the spatial and temporal effects of new investments in a fast bike lane network.

Photo by Lassi Häkkinen / City of Lahti

CITY

Lahti

The city of Lahti was the European Green Capital in 2021, aims at becoming carbon neutral in 2025, and has been ambitiously developing participatory planning practices (i.e. active sensing with citizens). In 2023, Lahti started to co-lead a 10-year program Nature Step to Health that actively promotes co-benefits from more sustainable lifestyles and a living environment emphasising human health and wellbeing.

Challenges:
- How to plan and develop the city for people and promote a culture of active mobility, which goes hand in hand with urban greening targets as well as biodiversity and climate objectives.
Solutions:
- Combined active and passive sensing methods for spatially identifying various lifestyles and mobility behaviours.
- Exploring political, administrative, policy and legal bottlenecks to new mobility, nature-based and climate solutions and ways to address them through new forms of cross-sectoral decision-making.

Photo by Mikko Raskinen

CITY

Espoo

Espoo’s sustainable development work involves developing, testing, and implementing sustainable urban solutions to support a safe, healthy and smooth daily life in a carbon-neutral city.

Challenges:
- How combined active and passive sensing data can be used to inform new active mobility options that support safe, healthy, and functional everyday life in a carbon-neutral city.
Solutions:
- New sustainable lifestyle indicators and behavioural interventions for testing the effect of new active mobility infrastructures on citizens’ mobility, attitudes, and wider behavioural patterns.
- New practices for influential participatory planning to support sustainability transformation tested through the lifestyles and behaviour of residents.

CITY

Helsinki

The city of Helsinki believes in environmentally friendly and energy-efficient and socially sustainable urban developments. In support of this goal, it has densification plans to respond to the increasing need of new housing and other infrastructure for the growing population. The local master plan of the environment of the Länsiväylä region in Western Helsinki is currently in a scenario stage.

Challenges:
- How to reconcile the various boundary conditions related to urban planning with ambitious climate change and no-net biodiversity loss targets by 2030 and beyond.
Solutions:
Serious games as an important future foresight tool, run at:
- the ongoing Länsiväylä local master plan level with actual procedural, legal and land use limitations.
- the city level to explore trade-offs if biodiversity restoration and climate change mitigation are prioritised.