Finland

What the record shows

Helsinki holds the highest share of documented successes of any national record in this atlas, and the most instructive entry in it is the one that failed. That is not a paradox. Most failures in this corpus are failures of an instrument — a sensor that stopped reporting, a system nobody switched on. Helsinki's is a failure of the business around an instrument that demonstrably worked, which is a rarer thing to have written down.

Whim was widely credited as the world's first commercial mobility-as-a-service app: one monthly subscription covering public transport, taxis, bike-share and car rental, launched in Helsinki in 2016. An independent evaluation of its first operating year, across 70,000 registered Helsinki users, found subscribers making 73 per cent of their trips by public transport against 48 per cent for the average Helsinki resident, and combining transit with bike-share more often too. That is the behaviour change the whole mobility-as-a-service argument rests on, measured by somebody other than the vendor. The company discontinued the app and filed for bankruptcy in March 2024, and the acquirer has not relaunched it. Whatever killed Whim, it was not that the idea did not work.

What did last in Helsinki is heat and data. The Katri Vala plant has run heat pumps in a rock cavern beneath a public park since 2006, extracting heat and cooling from purified wastewater leaving the city's treatment works — 160 MW of heating and 100 MW of cooling after a 2023 expansion, recovering more than 1,000 GWh of heat a year, enough to cover most of central Helsinki's district heating demand through the summer. Its successor is being bored now: about 26 km of tunnel from Salmisaari, a seawater intake and a discharge bore, roughly €400 million (about $465 million), due in service around 2029 to replace the capacity Helsinki gave up when it closed its coal plants. Neither is a sensing project. Both are the kind of infrastructure that makes a city's climate arithmetic work.

The data entries have an unusual afterlife. Helsinki Region Infoshare was launched in spring 2011 by four municipalities together — an early European municipal open-data portal covering a whole metropolitan area rather than one city's holdings. The transport authority opened its journey-planner interface to developers in 2009 and 2010, and that culture produced Digitransit in 2017: an open-source journey-planning platform now run by Estonia and others as well. A Finnish decision to open an API became public infrastructure in another country, which is a return almost nothing else in this atlas can claim. Helsinki 3D+ is the same instinct applied to a city model — a semantic building model and a reality mesh released as free open data in 2016, whose climate atlas computes solar potential across roughly 80,000 buildings. Set that beside Virtual Singapore, the twin every other city cites and the one its own government wound down: Helsinki's is smaller, open, and still calculating things.

Suvilahti answers a question this atlas has been asking on other pages. Helsinki's utility built the country's largest solar plant of its day on an old gasworks site and let residents rent individual panels for a monthly fee, crediting each panel's output against the renter's bill. It sold out within days. The problem it solves is the one Cape Town's solar buy-back runs into from the other direction — a feed-in tariff pays only people who already own a roof and can finance an array, and a national study found South African rooftop solar concentrated overwhelmingly in wealthy suburbs. Renting a panel on somebody else's roof is the pairing that scheme is missing. Vienna's citizens' power plants reach the same place by a third route, selling shares rather than renting panels.

Two entries are honest about being finite. Smart Kalasatama ran an agile-piloting programme from 2013 to 2021 in which startups tested services on real city blocks — 25 pilots in the district, dozens more replicated in other Finnish cities, with about a third of residents taking part — and then concluded rather than becoming a permanent office. The Sohjoa shuttles ran twice, most substantially on a real transport-authority route in Vuosaari through the summer of 2019, carrying 3,932 passengers with a safety operator aboard, and stopped. Compare Stockholm's driverless bus, which went further — five years on a scheduled line — and ended at about 200 rides a week. A pilot that answers its question and closes is not the same kind of outcome as a service that empties out.

The one thing Helsinki lost was the layer that reported on everything else. Ilmastovahti launched in October 2019 to let anyone track the city's climate actions toward carbon neutrality; the city's own review found that only a handful of the original 147 actions materially cut emissions, which is exactly the kind of finding a public tracker exists to surface. The dashboard is no longer online — its domain simply stopped resolving. The emissions reporting continued elsewhere; the public window onto it did not. Set against Oslo's climate budget, which publishes its own shortfall year after year and is still standing, the contrast is not about candour but about custody. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that Helsinki is very good at building things worth keeping and has twice discovered that keeping them is a separate decision.

Sources beyond the atlas

Facts above that do not come from a linked entry rest on these:

• European Central Bank — US dollar/euro reference exchange rate: 1.1605 on 19 August 2026, the rate used for the approximate dollar figure above. Euro amounts in this record span different years; a single reference rate shows magnitude, not the value at the time of spending.