Kalasatama Smart City
A recent article in the New York Times described the emerging residential district of Kalasatama in Helsinki, Finland in glowing environmental terms. Images of the vast area covering about 53 hectares showed a relatively humdrum northern-European urban block, what some might describe as somewhat dreary given the windswept seaside location in a capital as far north as Helsinki, the impression of the photography further compromised by the greyscale printing. However, a closer look into the features that are driving this district to be featured in international publications reveals a more complex and captivating story.
Kalasatama is part of a masterplan development for a region of Helsinki that like many other Western post-industrial urban brownfield sites, is in dire need of regeneration. Coupled with an increase in housing demand for the capital, attention was clearly focussed on turning Kalasatama into a residential district. What makes this scheme so different to other city-centre regenerative schemes is that this one incorporates a radical rethink of urban and community life.
For example, homes in Kalasatama prominently incorporate electric solar panels, are part of a geothermal heating system network, and all windows are triple-glazed for energy efficiency; a high-speed waste-collection network covers the whole of Kalasatama; the concept of “sustainability” here has actively been incorporated as a guiding principle. In one building, Sumppi, developers worked alongside buyers before construction even began, creating more and new kinds of publicly shared spaces than what they would usually offer. Buyers agreed on a shared set of guiding principles at spirited meetings: the best places in the building would be reserved for community use, and when choices had to be made, the result must make life fun, easier and cheaper.
Shared spaces in the building include two large top-floor saunas with arresting views, a rooftop terrace garden with space for group yoga classes and summer barbecues; there are shared laundry facilities; the ground floor features a large common living room with sofas and armchairs, and feels like a members’ club. Alongside this ambition to create shared living spaces came a communal sense of civic participation, so when Finland closed its borders due to the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, an in-house coronavirus committee was formed, led by two doctors. Residents have taken it upon themselves to care for quarantined neighbours, shopping and cooking for them as required.
This is perhaps what is most exciting about such a community-driven and community-centred development: the creation of a place where people will feel cared for. By actively engaging in the developmental process, residents helped create a building, and in turn this will engender a sense of pride and belonging. Further, this participatory type of development helped drive the creation of other typologies in Kalasatama: owner-developed co-housing and multi-generational housing, where homes themselves are smaller than other new-to-market developments but where a fifth of the total space is reserved for common spaces like gyms, cinemas, libraries, music rooms, gardens and terraces.
What about the cost of buyer-driven-developments? One of the blocks in Kalasatama resulted in approximately €5000 per square metre, but to put this price-tag into context, a solely developer-led project in another neighbourhood in Helsinki resulted in €8000 per square metre; the average house price in Helsinki is €4323 per square metre*. The point of revealing the price-tag of a buyer-driven-development is to show that there are cost-savings to be made where buyers participate in the creation of their homes, and crucially, this involvement results in more engaged, happier, and more community-centred residents.
Kalasatama in Helsinki provides an unexpected and welcome alternative to the types of housing developments that increasingly seem to dominate european cities. There is then an alternative to the atomised apartment block, where inhabitants are not just neighbours, but citizens.
*It is important to consider these price tags in the context of an advanced, northern-european economy. In a Portuguese context, the median cost of new-build homes in the first quarter of 2020 was €1209 per square metre, rising to €1950 per square metre in Lisbon. This shocking disparity in house prices between these two European countries is an indicator of structurally-complex differences - which are beyond the scope of this post.
Map showing high-speed recycling points in Kalasatama
Diagram showing Kalasatama’s waste collection system