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Helsinki's smart-city record reads less like a single flagship platform and more like two parallel habits kept up for two decades: opening data and infrastructure by default (a public transit API since 2010, a four-city open-data portal since 2011, a free downloadable 3D model of the whole city since 2016), and quietly decarbonising district heat by recovering it from wherever it already exists — purified wastewater since 2006, seawater from 2029. In between, Kalasatama's startup-piloting district and the Whim mobility app made Helsinki an early global reference for smart-city experimentation, one pilot that graduated and one that didn't survive its business model.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Helsinki, the earliest dating to 2006: 7 with a documented success, 1 documented failure, 1 scaled back, 1 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is independent (4 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Helsinki is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Helsinki's smart-city story starts underground, not with a headline pilot. Since 2006, Helen's Katri Vala heat pump plant has recovered heat and cooling from purified wastewater leaving the city's main treatment plant, now covering most of central Helsinki's summer district heating. A parallel, equally unglamorous habit took hold in data: HSL quietly opened its journey-planner interface to developers from 2009–10, a move that grew into the open-source Digitransit platform now also run by Estonia, several German cities and Oklahoma City, while the four-municipality Helsinki Region Infoshare portal began publishing city data as a public default in 2011, years before "open data" became a category cities competed on.
The mid-2010s were Helsinki's most visibly experimental years. From 2013, the harbour-front Smart Kalasatama district let startups pilot digital and mobility services on real city blocks under a simple promise — give residents "one more hour a day" — running 25 pilots before formally concluding in 2021 and seeding a model later carried to other Finnish cities. Alongside it, Helen's Suvilahti solar plant (2015) let apartment dwellers without a roof of their own rent a panel and credit its output to their bill, selling out within days, while the city's Helsinki 3D+ open city model (2016) became a free, downloadable base layer later used to map rooftop solar potential across 80,000 buildings.
Mobility was where Helsinki placed its boldest bets — and where the record is honestly mixed. Two rounds of driverless minibus trials (a 2016 demo in Hernesaari, then the EU-funded Sohjoa Baltic pilot on a real HSL route in 2019) proved the technology worked under supervision but never became a permanent service, closing out as time-limited demonstrations. Whim, launched by MaaS Global in 2016/17, went further: a single subscription bundling transit, taxis, bike-share and car rental that made Helsinki the reference case for "mobility as a service" worldwide — until the company could not make the model profitable and filed for bankruptcy in March 2024, a sobering data point for an idea the city is still credited with inventing.
The most recent chapter returns to the heavy infrastructure the city started with. Helen's Salmisaari seawater heat recovery tunnel, a €400 million project boring roughly 26km of tunnels from the same district that once hosted Helsinki's last coal plant, is due to enter service around 2029 — replacing the coal capacity that closed for good in April 2025, and extending the wastewater-heat-pump logic Katri Vala pioneered nearly two decades earlier to a second, larger heat source.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2006 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Helsinki's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Most of what comes next is completion rather than new experimentation: the Salmisaari tunnel's implementation phase runs through the rest of the decade, targeting service around 2029, and Digitransit's footprint keeps expanding to cities well beyond Helsinki that adopt the same open-source routing engine HSL built for itself. One researched candidate stays open for a future pass — Ilmastovahti, Helsinki's public climate-action tracking dashboard, has strong documented origins (2019) but its live status in 2026 could not be confirmed in this run after the underlying code repository was archived in October 2025, so it remains pending rather than published.
Where Helsinki appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Helsinki — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Helsinki threads below, not counted out of them.
Two capitals across one gulf that build the same things together and separately: shuttles that never lost their safety operator, open-data portals a few years apart, and a shared vegetation layer added to both city twins.
An unlikely but exact pair: both recover heat that would otherwise be thrown away, both publish an open three-dimensional model of themselves, and both built an API ecosystem that other people's services now run on.
Two European capitals that let residents buy into their own solar, then diverged on mobility: the Helsinki startup that invented the MaaS subscription went bankrupt, while Vienna's municipally run app is still going.
Every editorial link from Helsinki's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Helsinki, Finland.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/helsinki/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.