Image
Sitowise and construction company YIT have created a plan of the Tomorrow’s Helsinki where traffic has been moved away from Helsinki city centre. This will free up space to develop a lively, attractive and internationally interesting pedestrian city centre in Helsinki. On Friday, August 31, the companies handed in their proposal in the idea competition organised by the City of Helsinki.
In the Tomorrow’s Helsinki, the city centre belongs to everyone. In the proposal by YIT and Sitowise, the current unconnected pedestrian areas are used to create a coherent network of pedestrian streets that will be chained together, creating interesting city blocks. The pedestrian city centre will be complemented by widened sidewalks and streets designed mostly for pedestrians, and the city centre will be linked to the seashore and other surrounding areas with pedestrian and bicycle lanes.
The urban centre of the future will feature plenty of locations for events and communal urban culture, and the centre will be easily accessible. An accessible and cosy city centre will also contribute to the development of trade and business as well as increasing the number of jobs in the city centre.
“Our new alignment enables creating an attractive pedestrian city centre and frees up all the previous reservations made in the master plans also outside of the city centre,” says Jannis Mikkola, Business Area Director, Infrastructure at Sitowise.
In Sitowise and YIT’s innovation, the underground collector road was realigned so that it will run on the southern side of the city centre, completely inside the rock. This way, the road will move all thoroughfare away from the city centre, but also resolve the traffic jams in ports, utilise the current tunnel network and be seamlessly connected to underground parking. Travel times to city centre will become shorter, and less car traffic will also translate into faster public transport. At the same time, the air quality and traffic safety in the city centre will be improved.
The Tomorrow’s Helsinki proposal was submitted in the idea competition organised by the City of Helsinki. The city invited 10 design companies to come up with ways of improving the cosiness, comfort and functionality of the city centre using a combination of a pedestrian city centre and an underground collector road.
“The idea competition responds to the need to find the city’s shared will. Together with the city, we could turn the expanded pedestrian city centre of Helsinki into a project that will be interesting also on a global scale,” summarises Juha Virtanen, Property Development Director at YIT.
You can get to know the proposal in more detail at http://www.huomisenhelsinki.fi