Smart Kalasatama

The City Council decided in 2013 to make one of the new area construction sites, Kalasatama, a model district of Smart City development. Today Smart Kalasatama, a brownfield district in Helsinki is a vivid Smart City experimental innovation platform.

The former harbour and industrial area (175 hectares of waterfront) is owned by the city. Kalasatama district will offer a home for approximately 25,000 residents and jobs for 10,000 people by 2035. Currently, there are 3,000 people living in the area. Smart Kalasatama is developed flexibly and through piloting.The vision of Kalasatama is that smart services save one hour of citizen’s time each day.

One of the core ambitions of Smart Kalasatama is to provide an urban lab and a vibrant testbed of smart and sustainable new solutions and services. The goal is a smart and sustainable district, that is achieved through experimentation and co-creation. For example the Agile piloting programme addresses small startups and SME’s offering them valuable possibilities to connect their services to the city infrastructure, and thus pilot and co-create their services in real-life context. During the past two years, the model of agile piloting has been widely adopted in all departments of the City of Helsinki and in a number of other major cities in Finland. Over 60 agile pilots have run in Finnish cities following the model created in Kalasatama.

Sharing economy is active in Kalasatama. People share cars and parking spaces with the help of digital applications. Smart locks in new buildings enable the citizens to use many spaces in Kalasatama for different activities. First estates are already connected to smart grid, and all the rest of the area to be built will benefit of the grid. The smart grid enables real time smart metering, electric vehicles network and new storage solutions for electricity. A solar power plant already exists in the neighbourhood and the whole district is connected to the energy efficient district heating and cooling grid in the area. Kalasatama is a pioneer for Helsinki’s climate targets, and showing the road to a more sustainable urban everyday life.