A neighbourhood in the shadow of a coal power station on the outskirts of Helsinki, Finland, might seem an unlikely place to evangelise about its environmental credentials. But here in the former cargo port of Kalasatama, a 31-year mega project is under way to build a model green urban district that should eventually be home to 30,000 people.
About 9000 have already moved in. “It’s getting better and better by the day,” says Hetta Huittinen-Naskali, who has lived in Kalasatama for four years. “What I like is that there are always people moving around.” For her, that means walking, the city’s popular bike-hire scheme, the metro and, in her husband’s case, a car too.
The neighbourhood is billed by city authorities as a test bed for new ideas that might be rolled out to the rest of the capital: last year saw a driverless bus pilot project and robots delivering food to older residents. Perhaps most importantly, the area is grappling with ways to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels to meet Helsinki’s goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2030.
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The Hanasaari coal plant overlooking the school attended by Huittinen-Naskali’s daughter is due to close in a year’s time, a step towards that target. Another coal plant elsewhere in the city will shut a year later. High gas prices and the invasion of Ukraine by Finland’s neighbour, Russia, haven’t changed the phase-out plans, says Anni Sinnemäki, Helsinki’s deputy mayor. “What it has meant to us is to accelerate the climate work, to accelerate those measures which diminish our dependency on Russian energy.”
Walking through Kalasatama’s mix of new high-rise towers and streets of town houses and flats clustered around courtyards, it is clear that these environmental aspirations go beyond energy. A big appeal for residents such as Paavo Tikkanen is the metro station that takes you to Helsinki’s centre in 10 minutes. “We’re not getting any younger,” says Tikkanen, who is now retired. Shops, schools and homes are densely packed, in the spirit of the “15-minute city” concept of essentials being within 15 minutes of walking or cycling. An uninhabited, forested island just across a bridge is a big draw.
City planners have tried to deter car ownership, which is relatively high in Helsinki due to the capital’s low density, by limiting car parking spaces. Pasi Rajala, head of master planning for Helsinki, says there are about 50 per cent fewer spaces per resident in Kalasatama than the city average. Nonetheless, many of the residents żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ spoke to own a car. “We have political parties that don’t like that we [restrict] the private car, so it takes time,” says Rajala.
Kaisa-Reeta Koskinen, head of the city’s climate unit, says there will have to be a shift away from driving to reach zero emissions. “It’s not enough that you change your car to electric,” she says.
There is one vehicle that is largely absent on the neighbourhood’s roads: rubbish trucks. Residents instead sort their waste and dump it into one of five hatches built in and around homes, where it is whisked away by vacuum to an underground system for recycling or burning to generate energy.
The fabric of most buildings here has been built to demanding energy efficiency standards, and a small number of solar panels dot the roofs of some. Tikkanen proudly says that he rarely turns on his radiators. Almost all the homes are kept warm with a heat network, where a central boiler pipes hot water to many homes, and in some cases several streets. This is an efficient option, but one that is overwhelmingly powered by coal and gas today.
The scale of new construction is dizzying: one in seven new homes built in Helsinki each year is in Kalasatama. More families are moving in than expected – Jenni Tyynela, a teacher, says her kindergarten in the area has a waiting list. Two more are coming, one being built with a timber frame erected under a huge tent. Officials hope that more buildings here will be made from wood, locking away carbon and offering a lower-emission alternative to cement and steel. Climate experts in the UK .
By the time Kalasatama is complete 18 years from now, Sinnemäki hopes Helsinki will start being “carbon negative”, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The district has little room for more trees, so this could mean building facilities that extract CO2 directly from the air, but Koskinen concedes that the details have yet to be worked out.
Still, she is clear about the near term: burning fuel isn’t the future. Plans to expand biomass energy generation have been scaled back and will now stop at just one biomass plant. Koskinen says it is “not a sustainable solution”, a view that many researchers agree with. Instead, electrification of heating is the answer, she says. That might be small heat pumps, electrical boilers or pioneering options such as a mooted seawater heat pump.
City planners shouldn’t wait to have all the answers on climate change, says Koskinen. “Sometimes, we just have to decide something. Because we cannot wait.”
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Article amended on 12 April 2022
We corrected Helsinki’s target for becoming carbon-neutral.
