Pocket Parks

BY DANIEL BUMANN

Kalasatama, Helsinki

Kalasatama is a brand-new district in Helsinki where Parkly created a pocket park, which successfully tackled the challenges like the lack of greenery in streetscapes and a lack of community in a newly built area.

Welcoming public places are important for the overall development of cities.

I’d like to share some insights we have learned with three pocket park projects that Parkly has executed with the City of Helsinki.

Kalasatama

The word Kalasatama would be translated as “fish harbor” in English. It used to be a harbor not too many years ago. And now, it has been turned into an area predominantly for housing. They’re building thousands of newly built flats; the whole area is completely new.

There are challenges associated with it, such as the lack of green space, the lack of identification, lack of community, and lack of services. The City of Helsinki asked us to test a small pocket park to see how this would help the residents build a sense of community. So, we have been planting edible plants and herbs that residents can pick and cook with. We have also attached sensors, which can measure, for instance, the number of people using these places daily. This helps the city understand the real needs of such an area.

The feedback was predominantly good. People have been using the area way more. The safety feel has been rising. There was also feedback that people feel more active and that they get to learn the community much better. It is especially hard for new-build areas to create a sense of community and identity for a place. This newly built pocket park has been used a lot, especially by children and families. It has also led to people encountering each other more, which is a very important thing for the resilience of an area.

Vuosaari

This is a very diverse part of the city. But as is common in the suburbs, there has been a lack of architectural vision, resulting in many abandoned spaces, wasteland, and nondefined environments. There is a cultural center that was built roughly 10 years ago with a beautiful big space in front that had absolutely no function whatsoever. We were asked by the City of Helsinki, together with the stakeholder Vuotalo, which is the cultural center, to turn this place around and to activate this area to bring more life onto the street, raise the safety feel, and also add new functions that are of use for the people of that district.

Public seating is often underestimated as simply a bench, a place to sit down and rest. But it is much more than this. It creates places to meet and greet, exchange with each other, have encounters, and rest and look at the city from a different perspective. You don’t need to rush. You take a breath and sit down. And this is what it is all about.

One thing is to see our ultimate vicinity as a huge potential to create a nice environment where we can work, live, meet people,

Daniel Bumann

Co-Founder, Parkly

Helsinki, Finland

Daniel Bumann is co-founder of RaivioBumann, a public art, placemaking and urban design studio. There, he co-founded Parkly to fast-track the transformation of public places and accelerate sustainable urban change. Bumann believes that happy places and happy people go hand in hand.

© PARKLY

and exchange. We have also, on request, installed a book-exchange cupboard, which to everyone’s surprise, is vividly in use. People bring their books, pick up others. It’s another way of getting in touch with each other.

The learnings from this testing phase are being used for a future architectural competition that will take place, and it will possibly help to build the environment that the people really need.

Kauppatori

This area in the center of Helsinki is a prime location, and the city has had no better function for it than a parking lot. So, one summer, we took the cars away and started to refurbish the area. It was only after a couple of minutes that the place was filled with people enjoying themselves, and no further service was needed. It was beautiful to see how people adopted a new place. It also gave them a new perspective on an area they have passed by but never had the chance to embrace. It also helped the local businesses get more foot traffic and more potential clients.

With these cases, I hope you see how easy it is to turn places around, to change people’s narrative, and shift perspective away from an underused space into something that can potentially change an area. It’s always fantastic to see how little it actually takes to change the narrative, to make people understand more about their own environment and raise the sense of communal spirits.

To summarize these three pilot projects, we learned that people want to rediscover their environment from a new perspective. People want to feel safe. People want to get together. All they need is places.