Viikki

An ecological housing area of Viikki in Helsinki

Name	An Ecological Housing Area of Viikki
Place	Helsinki
Country	Finland
Topic	Residential Environments, Urban Ecology
Author(s)	Virpi Vertainen
Completion	The year of completion 2004
Client	'
Project costs	'
<googlemap version="0.9" lat="60.191377" lon="24.99939" type="satellite" zoom="10" width="300" height="250"> 60.22638, 25.01949 Viikki, Helsinki </googlemap>

Rationale: Why is this case study interesting?

Viikki is a district in the inner city area of Helsinki, near an extensive area of open farmland and wetland nature reserve of Vanhakaupunginlahti. It is situated 8 km to the Northeast of the centre of Helsinki. Viikki is a neighborhood of about 7 000 inhabitants. The population is still rising and the construction of apartment blocks for housing will continue until the year 2010. Public spaces will be completed by the year 2012.Viikki also hosts for example four faculties of the University of Helsinki. The Viikki Science Park is a centre for research, study and entrepreneurship focused on biology and biotechnology. In the middle of the Viikki district there are housing blocks, which are known as ecological housing area. The Eco-Viikki is home to some 1,800 residents. The building of the housing area of The Eco-Viikki began in the spring of 1998 and was completed in 2004.

Ecological housing area's establishment was linked with several programmes of ecologically sustainable development and experimental building among others. The main objective was to implement design and construction according to ecological building trends and gain experience for future projects. There was design competitions held to get ideas for the Master plan and to some of the ecological building blocks. During the planning and construction of Eco-Viikki exceptionally strict ecological criteria were set by the City of Helsinki as conditions for the housing construction companies.

The eco neighbourhood blocks are the result of long-term work aimed at putting ecological principles into practice. The master plan is based on a finger-like structure with alternating buildings and green open spaces. Ecological objectives have also been realised through projects related to municipal engineering and green spaces.

The Eco-Viikki project can serve as a useful example for ecologically sustainable construction projects in the future. The eco area is also a display window of Finnish know-how. There has a lot of monitoring made to evaluate the results of the ecological housing area project: the impacts of the project has been assessed through questionnaires and evaluations to see how well environmental objectives have been achieved. Also biodiversity of the area has been examined as well as the use of storm water.

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