Apps, VR and utopian neighbourhoods: Why Helsinki is Europe’s smartest city

It's easy to see why the Finnish capital has been named a European Smart Tourism Capital, says Karyn Noble

While the rest of the world burns, Helsinki is blissfully saunaing towards carbon neutrality (iStock)

“What would be better than owning a car? If I could go anywhere, anytime on a whim. Finns will do approximately five car trips a year to their summer house; the rest of the time the SUV sits outside the house. When you build one app like this that puts everything together in one place, it makes people want to get rid of their cars. If a pizza comes to you in 15 minutes, why couldn’t a car?”

I’m in a restaurant in Helsinki called Yes Yes Yes, listening to Sampo Hietanen, the CEO and founder of Finnish start-up MaaS Global, who invented the Whim transportation app, one of a new breed of smart apps in the city.

Helsinki (along with France’s Lyon) is one of the first cities to be selected from 38 contenders as a European Smart Tourism Capital, part of a new EU-wide annual competition. In order for a city to be considered, it needs to demonstrate outstanding achievements in four categories: accessibility, sustainability, digitalisation and cultural heritage and creativity.

I’m already marvelling at their creativity in this restaurant for managing to make turnips exciting (served with garum mayo and Jerusalem artichoke vinaigrette). It’s my first time in Finland, having visited all the Nordic countries previously, and I’m trying to put my finger on what makes Helsinki different. While the Finns are very proud of having one of the world’s first smart capitals, it seems to be less of a let’s-blow-our-own-trumpet-about-new-technology attitude and more of a natural recognition of how life is made easier through listening to people’s needs.

This, combined with a natural offbeat quirkiness, leads to some fabulous results. My favourite personal example of this can be seen in the giant SkyWheel on the waterfront, which one would assume is like any other capital city’s ferris wheel. But why is one of the gondolas brown? Oh, that’d be the SkySauna. Elsewhere, happy pictures of women can be found all over the Market Square: they’re the “Marthas”. Essentially grandmothers for everybody, they’re available to give free advice on matters spanning home economics to Finnish family and society.

Why is there a random brown pod on the SkyWheel? It’s a sauna, obviously (iStock)

Being a traveller in Helsinki is also overwhelmingly easy, with everything within walking distance or a few reliable tram stops away. But they’re determined to make it even easier with the Whim app (nicknamed “the Netflix of transport”), which offers a subscription service to all transport (bike rental, taxi, car hire, trains, trams). I’d already been impressed by the app’s ability earlier that morning to assume that I wanted to cheat my way around Helsinki’s public transport. Initially I couldn’t finish installing the app because, on arrival in Finland, I’d manually adjusted the settings on my phone to ensure the clock display was on Helsinki time. The Whim app needs your phone’s time settings to “automatically update”, presumably because most people who use it here are locals, not those with a UK network. This ensures that when I buy a ticket that’s valid for 80 minutes, I don’t get to tinker around with the time to make it last all day on my phone.

Helsinki is being shaped by new technology, like transport app Whim (Karyn Noble)

When I decided to take a screenshot of my ticket in case I lost access to wifi, the Whim app wouldn’t let me do that either. The ticket needs to be “active”, with its little swirl rotating. Fortunately, free wifi access is pretty solid across Helsinki’s public transport network, which is another boon. Helsinki: 2, Me: 0 (even though I wasn’t deliberately trying to outsmart their app). Having just one device that covers absolutely all transport options seems like something incredibly tricky to organise, yet somehow the Finns have managed it.

Kalasatama, a Smart City pilot project, is home to 3,000 residents (Karyn Noble)

Things trip up a bit on the summer island of Lonna, where I was introduced to the Virtual Helsinki headset, built using 3D modelling by the City of Helsinki in partnership with VR studio Zoan. I’d like to think that the headset being glitchy was related to the circumstances (I’d recommend the Lonna craft beer), but the technology didn’t seem to want to play that day. The idea is to present a complete digital experience of Helsinki for visitors, with realistic water and wooden surfaces captured in high resolution to sense the city in a new way, complete with changing seasons. I can attest to a traditional sauna and dip in the Baltic at Lonna being your next best realistic water and wooden surface experience, however.

Becoming an EU Smart Tourism city involves not just meeting existing criteria but having clear plans in place to continue to develop initiatives. Helsinki is aiming to be carbon neutral by 2030, and my head spins a bit when I visit the new neighbourhood of Kalasatama where this utopian future is being built. Wandering about this kind of manufactured, very neat, artfully designed suburb (the film The Truman Show crossed my mind), felt a little surreal. Currently home to 3,000 residents (25,000 projected by 2035), this Smart City pilot project, has an “urban lab”, designing ways for its people to not just live sustainably but to gain an extra hour of free time a day by doing away with the frustrating aspects of life, such as queueing, commuting and grocery shopping. One tangible example of this pleasantness at work is that no one will ever be woken up by a rubbish collection truck: everyone in this community has access to an underground air-tube system that sucks everything away at 70kmph to a central processing facility. Residents still need to sort the rubbish into five various streams and take it to the above-ground portal on each block where it’s recycled or converted to biogas, but there’s a definite virtuous efficiency aspect to the whole scenario.

Experience Helsinki via VR (Karyn Noble)

Returning to the airport using the Whim app involves an easy tram ride to the Central Station, where I once again admire the world’s most beautiful Burger King in its Art Nouveau building, followed by a sparkling clean train, full of ridiculously happy children dancing their way to a field excursion. Much as a rebellious part of me wants to roughen up the pristine, somewhat manufactured atmosphere of the do-good Kalasatama neighbourhood, there’s also a grudging respect for everything they’re trying to achieve. While the rest of the world burns, Helsinki may be blissfully saunaing in its carbon neutrality by 2030.

Travel essentials

Getting there

Finnair flies direct from London Heathrow to Helsinki from £99 return.

Staying there

Marski by Scandi has recently had a refurbishment and is renowned for its cocktail bar. From €218, room only.

If you have your heart set on a sauna in your room, then Lapland Hotels Boulevard is for you. From €259, room only.