Authors: Janina Käyhkö & Francesco Venuti
In the Transformative Cities, a team of researchers from the University of Helsinki and the University of Eastern Finland co-developed a city planning game with the City of Helsinki and Sova3D that explores the implementation of urban planning and its impacts on urban structures and systems. This research game, set in Helsinki, offers a simplified model of reality to illustrate the city’s diverse sustainability challenges and goals, as well as the complex decision-making processes to achieve them while allowing the city to grow. By investing in various growth, climate, and biodiversity measures, players must tackle climate challenges and declining urban biodiversity while providing additional housing and functional transport systems. The game is set in the near future, where climate and biodiversity targets become more ambitious and strictly regulated than today.
The policy and legal analysis carried out in the game development phase allowed the research team to design alternative planning options that would unlock synergistic urban development decisions despite the expected tightening of climate and biodiversity protection regulations. For example, the team devised changes in the land use planning legal framework to allow for the introduction of a flood risk management ‘super principle’ requiring municipalities to prioritise, where most effective, natural means to manage flood risk over economically more profitable land uses. Similarly, the team envisioned amendments to the Finnish Expropriation Act (603/1977) to include flood risk management as one of the possible justifications for expropriation.
The game has been played in controlled settings with urban planning experts and higher education students. These game sessions have provided robust evidence of the usefulness and usability of the game as well as contextual insights on the challenges and opportunities related to achieving climate and biodiversity targets in Helsinki by 2040.
Key messages:
- As a result of the rich research-based background information on the current urban planning policies and legislation in Helsinki provided by the game, participants with various backgrounds gain experience on the complexity of urban planning decision-making and become familiar with the catalogue of measures needed for implementing the City’s current strategic targets.
- The game allows even the more experienced planners to broaden their view on the interconnectedness of the urban planning impacts and the cross-cutting nature of urban sustainability.
- The game facilitates cross-disciplinary collaboration to find solutions to complex trade-offs as it simulates urban planning decision-making in a realistic legal and policy context.
- The game results suggest that the growth expectation is deeply rooted in the planning paradigm in the City of Helsinki, consequently reducing the drive to implement proactive climate and biodiversity conservation measures that would be more cost-effective to implement earlier than later.
- However, the results also show that there are possible legal ways out of the current situation, clarifying what regulatory pathways are required to tackle exacerbating environmental challenges while accommodating inevitable urban expansion.
The game is openly available with instructions and thorough background information via this link: https://tc.kunta3d.fi/?helsinki – Hope you enjoy planning the transformation of the City of Helsinki!
Read more on the research about the game from an openly available research publication: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-025-00296-8
