WPSC 2026 Helsinki, Day 3 — Inside the University of Helsinki Keynote Session "Peripheral Visions"

A field report from the third day of the 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026) in Helsinki, where keynotes on Chinese urbanization, the future of planning, and the new geopolitics of planning unfolded at the University of Helsinki's Main Building.

Day 3 of the 6th World Planning Schools Congress (WPSC 2026) arrived on Wednesday, July 1, in Helsinki. That morning's keynote session was held not at Aalto University's Otaniemi campus but at the Main Building of the University of Helsinki, facing Senate Square (Senaatintori) in the city center. True to the congress's overarching theme, "Peripheral Visions: Rethinking Planning," the morning unfolded three sweeping perspectives in turn: Chinese urbanization, the future and its transitions, and the new geopolitics of planning.

The walk from my lodging to the venue was itself a miniature of Helsinki's urban planning. Standing in Senate Square, the neoclassical cityscape designed by Carl Ludvig Engel comes into view all at once — Helsinki Cathedral (Tuomiokirkko), the university's Main Building, and the government palace all ringing a single square.

The Route to the Venue — Through the Underground Bedrock City

Helsinki's public transit makes ambitious use of space carved directly out of the granite bedrock beneath the city center. The underground platforms at Central Station (Rautatientori) are finished with tile art on the walls, embodying a distinctly Nordic sensibility in which functional infrastructure doubles as public design.

What struck me most was a pedestrian tunnel that leaves the bedrock exposed. A wide walkway runs between rough, unfinished granite walls, with digital signage mounted on the rock guiding attendees toward that day's WPSC sessions and speakers — naturally directing the flow of foot traffic toward the congress venue. This approach, which treats the city's geology not as something to conceal but as a source of spatial identity, carries real implications for how Seoul designs its own underground spaces.

The University of Helsinki Main Building: "PERIPHERAL VISIONS"

In front of the Main Building facing Senate Square stood a banner bearing the congress's overarching theme, "PERIPHERAL VISIONS." A 200-year-old neoclassical building had become, for a day, the discussion hall of the world's urban planning academy on the congress's third day.

A photo in front of the banner. The Main Building was erected by Carl Ludvig Engel alongside the Cathedral and the government palace when he laid out the neoclassical ensemble around Senate Square, forming one pillar of Helsinki's iconic cityscape.

Today's stage — the University of Helsinki Main Building Great Hall

The keynote session was held in the Main Building's Great Hall. True to Engel's neoclassical design, tall Corinthian columns line the walls above warm-toned wood paneling below, with an ornate wooden podium bearing gilded motifs at center stage and a grand piano set beside it. This is the University of Helsinki's ceremonial space, used for occasions such as degree conferrals, and it served as the common backdrop for all three keynote talks that day. Fitting for a congress that drew some 1,500 registrants from 62 countries, every seat — and even the stairs — was filled before the session opened.

Three Keynotes — History, Futures, and Geopolitics

① Chinese Urbanization and the Evolution of Planning — LIU Jian (Tsinghua University)
Professor Liu Jian of Tsinghua University's School of Architecture opened with a keynote titled "Coordinating for Consensus on High-Quality Development: Planning in China," tracing three millennia of Chinese planning tradition through to the present day. He began with the principles of the traditional era, in which the spatial organization of the capital (Beijing) followed the natural topography of mountains and rivers along with ritual propriety (li) and feng shui to symbolize and centralize power, and building codes reflected social hierarchy. He then traced the transplantation of modern planning institutions through the treaty ports and concessions of the mid-19th century (Shanghai, the former German concession in Qingdao), the Soviet-assisted industrialization of the 1950s with its 156 key industrial projects and work-unit (danwei)-centered urban fabric, the hyper-rapid urbanization since Reform and Opening that absorbed over ten million rural-to-urban migrants annually, new districts and development zones (the relocation of Beijing's sub-center to Tongzhou, Xiong'an New Area, the European-style towns of Shanghai's "One City, Nine Towns"), and the rise of megacity clusters such as Jing-Jin-Ji and the Yangtze and Pearl River Delta regions. He continued through the 2019 integrated reform of territorial spatial planning, ecological civilization and ecological protection red lines (the "1.8 billion mu cultivated land red line," conservation of mountains, water, forests, farmland, lakes, and grasslands), urban regeneration that has revived landfills and steelworks into parks (Tangshan, Shenzhen), participatory community planner systems and 15-minute living area standards for residential life, and finally the shift "from growth to quality development" amid aging and climate change, along with the challenges of shrinking cities in the Northeast. What stood out was his emphasis on planning's public role in defining and solving problems, alongside the challenges of central–local relations, regional coordination, and social segregation.

② Digital and Sustainable Transitions, and the Long View of Planning — chaired by Aleksi Neuvonen (Demos Helsinki)
The second session was a panel on digital and sustainable transition, titled "Redefining the Future of Planning: Digital Advances." Chair Aleksi Neuvonen framed planning as "a practice of translating imaginaries of the future into present action," and laid out the tensions embedded in this age of transition: that we speak of green growth even though there is no global evidence of decoupling growth from ecological burden; that we raise the banner of justice even though justice too easily remains a slogan rather than an effect; and that AI promises hyper-productivity while simultaneously threatening loss of control and upheaval in employment. He compressed this unease into two concepts — James Bridle's "New Dark Age" (the more layers of technology accumulate, the less predictable the future becomes) and "cruel optimism" (the breakthrough of transition is always said to be "two steps ahead," yet the future keeps receding) — and argued that avoiding the trap of "futurelessness" requires a positive vision. As solutions, he proposed backcasting and scenario methods to define a "family of desirable futures" and trace paths back to the present, along with protopia, experimentation, and prefigurative politics.

The discussion among the three panelists that followed — Enza Lissandrello (Aalborg University), Amanda Machin (University of Agder), and Marjan Marjanović (University of Lausanne) — was especially rich. One panelist invoked John Urry's "mobile society" to argue that the future is "accelerating toward us," and, drawing on research into air quality and children's mobility, proposed a "care ethics" as a planning principle, arguing that what matters is not the volume of data but the values we assign to it. Another panelist argued that AI is less a machine ruling the world than something that "increasingly makes us behave like AI ourselves" (codifies us), framing planning's fundamental question as "can we preserve genuine human experience?" A panelist trained in political sociology observed that shifts in imagination happen only very slowly, through what Charles Taylor called the "long march" — democracy lived through the body, together. The chair's sharpest question, a twist on Camus, was "Is it worth planning?" — and one panelist's answer lingered long after: "Planning is inherently human. Because looking ahead to the future and reflecting on the world is part of human nature, we cannot stop planning."

③ The New Geopolitics of Planning — Globalization 2.0 (Mustafa Kemal Bayırbağ, METU)
The third keynote, "The New Geocortex of Planning — Globalization 2.0, Emergency Diagnostics and Transformational Planning," shook up the session's tone the most. The speaker described his own talk as a kind of "group therapy" for collective reflection, and redefined planning as both a psychological and cognitive need to reduce uncertainty and, at its core, a spatial and political activity. His central diagnosis was that the problems and targets of intervention no longer stay within fixed administrative jurisdictions but have become "moving targets" — moving people, information, services, and problems — rendering planning that relies on fixed jurisdictions powerless. As a result, the nation-state does not disappear but is reorganized into a vast "governance matrix" — which he likened to "interconnected super-brains whose bodies remain in place but whose souls can no longer be contained within those bodies." What actually runs this matrix are informal networks and "network administrators," and the closer one sits to the center of that network, the more other governments come to depend on them — giving rise to strongman politics and one-man rule. Leaving the conclusion deliberately open — "Should we recentralize? I don't know" — he warned that because networks do not democratize themselves, we must be organized well enough to enter and reshape them, and left the audience with the homework of rethinking the very concepts of space, visualization, and mobility.

Notes for Seoul

The three keynotes differed in texture but pointed in one direction: do not separate efficiency (technology and data) from democracy (equity and deliberation). Professor Liu's historical sweep showed that planning evolves together with specific political and economic conditions; the futures panel argued that justice, not technology, must lead transition; and the geopolitics keynote called for flexible governance that transcends fixed jurisdictions.

These messages translate directly onto Seoul's digital transformation of its urban planning information system, the equity of accessibility in its N-minute living areas, and its data- and AI-based planning support systems. They also connect precisely with my own research (optimal relocation balancing efficiency and equity), making this third-day keynote session a moment to confirm the international coordinates of our own work.

In the afternoon, the congress's mobile workshop MW13, "Regional Planning for Green Transition," and the UrbanISE VR workshop followed. Field visit notes will be compiled in a separate post.