WPSC 2026 Helsinki, Day 3 (Afternoon) — Mobile Workshop MW13: An International Peer Review of Helsinki-Uusimaa's 'Regional Plan for the Green Transition (VISION)'
At the Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council in Länsi-Pasila, planners from around the world stress-tested the VISION regional plan draft against four cross-cutting themes — and the 'Impact Assessment Flower' made the tool's power visible at a glance.
Following the morning keynote session at the University of Helsinki, the afternoon of Wednesday, July 1 was devoted to one of the congress's Mobile Workshops: MW13, "Regional Planning for the Green Transition." Participants gathered at 13:45 by the central statue on Senate Square (Senaatintori) and departed promptly at 14:00 for the headquarters of the Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council (Uudenmaan liitto) in Länsi-Pasila, west Helsinki.
This was no ordinary site visit or lecture. The Regional Council is drafting a new regional plan, "VISION — a Thematic Regional Land Use Plan for an Innovative Green Transition," and the workshop convened urban planning experts from around the world to conduct an impact assessment and peer review through the lens of four cross-cutting themes, surfacing blind spots and recommendations for the plan. Five background documents — the plan text, map notations, legend, and cross-cutting impact assessments — had been circulated in advance in AI-translated English.
In the meeting room, a Regional Council staff member opened with a presentation before participants from across the globe sat down together to review the draft. "What to do for the workshop?" — the presenter's framing question opened the session.
Seated around a large table, the international experts spread out their background materials and traded questions. The presentation moved in sequence through the Uusimaa region and Finland's planning system, the VISION regional plan, and the regional plan's approach to climate, biodiversity, resilience, and sustainable growth.
Uusimaa as the Stage, and the VISION Plan
Uusimaa is the greater capital region of southern Finland, encompassing Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, and more. It has a population of roughly 1.8 million (31% of Finland's total), generates 39% of Finland's GDP, and accounts for about one-third of the country's jobs. Twenty-six member municipalities form a single statutory regional authority.
The VISION plan (Finnish: VISIO) is a phased plan that complements and partially supersedes existing plans — a strategic, directive regional plan at a scale of 1:250,000, being prepared over 2024–2027 with a target horizon of 2050. The draft was open for public comment from March 11 to May 8, 2026, ahead of expected approval in 2027. Its core principle is "Growing inwards, not outwards" — densification built on existing urban fabric and infrastructure rather than outward sprawl, strong centers, a network of public transit, walking, and cycling services, and strengthened ecological networks, water resources, and renewable energy. The plan aims for climate neutrality by 2030 and carbon negativity thereafter (an 80% reduction in emissions from 2005 levels).
The urban-rural divide within the region is stark: Helsinki (population roughly 685,000) and the smallest municipality, Pukkila (roughly 1,750 people), sit within the same regional authority. The map below, a 2018 land use status map, captures in a single frame both the dense urban fabric centered on Helsinki and the vast forests and farmland beyond it.
Six Themes
The VISION plan organizes the national and regional issues a regional plan must address into six themes.
① Energy — solar power (based on 50 ha / 1 MWp units), nuclear (Loviisa plus small modular reactors, SMRs), geothermal and waste heat (mandatory waste-heat recovery for data centers), transmission grids at 400/110 kV, EstLink 3, and a hydrogen network
② Nature and carbon sequestration — 3,337 ha of protected areas, green connectivity (300 m within cities / 500–1,000 m outside), key biodiversity areas (LUO), ecological compensation and the mitigation hierarchy, forest carbon sinks covering 521,000 ha
③ Industrial production, circular economy, and soil management — roughly 25 industrial clusters designated under a single development principle (Joddböle for clean hydrogen and green steel, Sköldvik for refining and the circular economy, etc.), deep-water ports positioned as prime sites for hydrogen and clean industry
④ Water management and resources — regional water supply areas and policy (security-critical water supply sites omitted from public maps), groundwater regulations
⑤ Logistics and long-distance passenger transport — airport rail link, Eastern Railway, the Tallinn undersea tunnel, the ports of Vuosaari and Inkoo, and TEN-T transit hubs
⑥ National defense (new) — reflecting the changed security environment, with minimal map disclosure, firing ranges, noise/protection zones, and dual-use transport networks
These six themes together support three overarching goals: responding to climate change and biodiversity loss / sustainable and innovative competitiveness / functionality, resilience, and safety.
Four Cross-Cutting Themes and the 'Impact Assessment Flower'
The methodological centerpiece of the VISION plan is its four cross-cutting themes, which bind the six thematic areas into a single sustainable green-transition framework and act as an "auditor" that evaluates and refines planning solutions: ① climate change mitigation and adaptation, ② security, resilience, and supply stability, ③ justice and social acceptability, and ④ innovative green transition. Each workshop group selects one of these four to review.
The highlight was the "Impact Assessment Flower." The inner ring shows how each of the six themes carries out a cross-cutting theme, while the outer petals encode the intensity of impact for each individual plan designation by color — no impact / negligible / enabling / strong / contradictory / negative. Placing the climate change "mitigation" flower next to the "adaptation" flower makes it immediately visible that adaptation is weaker than mitigation — and the tool's real power is making even contradictions visible, such as how rail reduces emissions while new roads and construction increase both emissions and damage to carbon sinks.
The justice and acceptability perspective is organized into its own flower. It raises questions of distributive, procedural, recognition, and contextual justice, and of how the structure of "socio-political–market–community" relationships shapes a plan's acceptability — questions such as "who represents nature and future generations?" and "how are vulnerable groups identified and compensated?"
A Regional Plan Distilled onto One Map — the VISION Plan Map (Kaavakartta)
All of these themes and designations ultimately converge onto a single plan map. Below is the draft VISION plan map (Kaavakartta) that was open for public comment, weaving centers, transport corridors, ecological networks, and industrial clusters across the entire Uusimaa region along the Baltic Sea coast into one composition of color and symbol.
Our Group's Recommendations, and Notes to Carry Back to Seoul
The group I joined, on innovative green transition, converged on three recommendations: ① explicitly designating flexible zones to ease infrastructure path dependency; ② steering emerging locational demands such as data centers and hydrogen toward strategies linking waste heat to district heating; and ③ turning access to international talent and innovation ecosystems into an innovation KPI. We also flagged a caution: because innovation is inherently "enabling" in character, it is prone to optimism bias, so feasibility conditions, risks, and monitoring indicators must always be assessed alongside it.
Much of Uusimaa's VISION plan translates directly into how we might read our own Seoul Capital Area Readjustment Plan.
The "grow inwards" principle — a logic that justifies compaction and regeneration of already-built-up areas. "Efficient reuse of land already developed" transplants directly into a capital-region plan.
The cross-cutting impact assessment matrix — rather than listing sectors, it audits across four cutting themes. This is a way to strengthen the integration and communicability (the impact assessment flower) of our own capital region plan.
Institutionalizing justice and acceptability — distributive and recognition justice, per-municipality assessment, compensation, and co-production. This offers a lesson for Seoul, where locational conflicts run sharp, on embedding early open dialogue and consideration for vulnerable groups as institutional practice.
Integrating security and supply stability into land use — treating critical water supply, data centers, and energy networks as a resilience axis. This is a timely reference for Korea, where semiconductor, data center, and power grid security are rising concerns.
Division of roles between regional and local government — the criticism that "the region sets the frame, municipalities make the decisions" reflects a lack of coordination that overlaps precisely with our own challenge of balancing local autonomy with regional coordinating power.
Field photos: Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council, July 1, 2026 · Presentation materials and plan maps: WPSC 2026 MW13 presentation materials / Draft VISION plan map, Helsinki-Uusimaa Regional Council, 2026