Insight
City 2.0 – Towards a Social Silicon Valley was our urban manifesto, an entry to the Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 ideas competition. It won second prize.
Our team – Roope Mokka, Hans Park, Tuomas Toivonen and myself – chose not to present yet another spatial masterplan for the metropolitan region. Instead, we proposed a new kind of governance structure for Greater Helsinki. One built on social innovation: Long-term foresight as the core function of the mayor’s office, neighbourhood-level emissions reduction targets, risk capital funds for citizen-led innovations, and special experimentation zones with looser regulation but stricter, time-bound goals on social and environmental impact.
As an awarded team we were invited into the follow-up process. The backcasting methods and ideas first outlined in City 2.0 were taken forward and developed further. We helped design a visioning and futuring process that engaged spatial planners, policymakers and citizens – asking them to imagine what it means to create a metropolitan region that is not only functional, but unique, cool, and attractive.
Greater Helsinki is my home. The city I have lived in all my life. To have had the chance to contribute to its radical reimagining remains something I am proud of: Developing a bold vision, collaborating with internationally recognised planners and researchers, and working directly with the city’s leading policymakers of the time.
Process
The Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 was an international ideas competition launched in 2007 by the fourteen municipalities of the Helsinki region. Its ambition was unusual: To create a shared vision for sustainable land use, housing, and transportation in a metropolitan area that had no formal structure or common planning authority.
For Demos Helsinki, it was one of the very first projects we ever undertook. Together with young architects Hans Park and Tuomas Toivonen, we submitted an entry titled City 2.0 – Towards a Social Silicon Valley. Our proposal did not present a grand spatial masterplan. Instead, it introduced new governance structures and social innovations for the region. Our entry won the second prize.
That success led to a follow-up assignment: Harvesting and synthesising the ideas from the awarded proposals and continuing the vision process. In this work we joined forces with WSP Finland and a research team from the Helsinki University of Technology (later Aalto University), led by Panu Lehtovuori and Peter Ache who would later become my PhD supervisors.
The follow-up was as ambitious as the competition itself. Over 250 future ideas were evaluated through backcasting workshops with local and international planners, politicians and citizens. Participants were asked to consider how desirable future practices and spatial structures could help address societal challenges – most notably, the transition to a low-carbon society – and to map them onto timelines as potential transition trajectories.
The process was never intended to produce a single shared vision for the 14 municipalities. Rather, it opened up a new dialogue and built networks around the issues the region would need to confront in the decades ahead. It expanded the field of what a metropolitan vision could mean.
Later, I turned these experiences into research. Together with Peter Ache, I co-authored the article Metropolitan Vision Making – Using Backcasting as a Strategic Learning Process to Shape Metropolitan Futures (Futures, 2017). Years later, the same ideas became a cornerstone of my PhD dissertation, Re-focusing on the Future (2022), where they provided key arguments that carried me to that academic milestone.
Outcomes
City 2.0 – Towards a Social Silicon Valley. The manifesto still reads as a striking statement on the future of cities and their governance.
The vision process that followed brought together planning professionals from across the municipalities of the Helsinki region. Together they discussed, debated, and co-created themes that stretched well beyond the usual scope of urban planning into exceptionally long horizons of the future. In retrospect, this work has seeded several new forms of collaboration: Processes that set long-term targets for housing and transport, and mechanisms that improve coordination between municipalities.
The lessons of City 2.0 also found their way into research. In the peer-reviewed article Metropolitan Vision Making – Using Backcasting as a Strategic Learning Process to Shape Metropolitan Futures (Futures, 2017), I explored how collective imagining and scenario exercises can give urban planning influence over topics and developments that were once thought to lie beyond its reach.
Partners
NOW office: Hans Park, Martti Kalliala, Ville Haimala, Tuomas Toivonen
Aalto University: Peter Ache, Panu Lehtovuori, Mikko Mälkki, Pasi Mäenpää
WSP Finland: Ilona Mansikka, Mari Siikonen, Jani Päivänen, Juha Eskolin
City of Helsinki: Hannu Penttilä, Tanja Sippola-Alho, Miliza Ryöti, Mikko Aho, Anne Jarva, Tarja Laine
Reflection
The Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 set out to create a vision for a territory that had no formal governance structures of its own. In retrospect, it can be seen as an attempt to bring “unmanageable” metropolitan regions within reach – by imagining alternative futures that stretched further ahead than planning usually dares to go.
Over recent decades, metropolitan regions have become central to the story of urbanisation, challenging the traditional methods and institutions of planning. At the same time, new pressures – carbon neutrality, already-built spatial structures, shifting social realities – have demanded approaches that reach beyond conventional planning practices.
The radical idea at the heart of City 2.0 – Towards a Social Silicon Valley was that 21st-century cities will increasingly be defined by people and their communities, through their voices and their collaboration. It deliberately departed from the Nordic tradition of strong public-sector steering and party-led representative democracy. Instead, it echoed the spirit of “Web 2.0” – the then-revolutionary notion that people could produce their own digital content and reshape the structures around them. Much of that ethos has since faded, some of it for good reasons. But in its moment, it carried a sense of democratisation and expanded human agency that we sought to translate into urban governance.
For me, the process contained a personal turning point: The transformative power of backcasting scenarios revealed itself clearly for the first time. Constructing a forty-year timeline was an education in itself. It revealed how long major transitions take, and how decisions made in the present are linked directly to the possibilities of the 2030s and 2040s. That exercise crystallised how scenario thinking is not just a “nice-to-know” exercise but a practical tool, tightly linked to the hard realities of planning.
The Greater Helsinki Vision 2050 became a paradigmatic case of how backcasting can institutionalise a transformative vision. It allowed participants – planners, policymakers, citizens – to think in longer horizons, to challenge their assumptions, and to reframe problems in ways that created genuine strategic learning.
For me, it was a revelation. It showed how long-term thinking and alternative futures can free us from the constraints of the present. And ever since, backcasting has remained one of my key tools for imagining and shaping change.
Greater Helsinki Vision 2050
