HERVANTA - VISIONS OF SUSTAINABLE TECHNOPOLIS

Juhani Tirkkonen, Virpi Karjalainen & Ilari Karppi

Department of Regional Studies and Environmental Policy, 33014 University of Tampere, Finland
juhani.tirkkonen@uta.fi

Continuing urbanisation and growth of spatially extensive communities, or urban metabolism, may represent a major threat to ecological sustainability, mainly in the form of biodiversity losses. Thus, a major planning paradigm today emphasises planning that focuses on areas already effected by urban settlements and infrastructure needed for housing, traffic, energy and the like.

Effective, densely built areas with existing jobs, services and community structures for large numbers of inhabitants can now be regarded as new points of departures as the planners seek to find finding solutions while new the settlement structures need to be widened in order to keep the growth manageable.

The main objective of the project is to develop the possibilities to take better care of ecological and social sustainbility in urban planning in the framework of Technopolis. Hervanta were used as a case. Hervanta is a suburb of Tampere, with 25 000 inhabitants and 8 300 workplaces. It forms a typical technopolis with four elements: inhabitation, education, research and traditional industry.

In the start of our current project  mainly financed by the National Technology Agency of Finland  three different vision of the future in Hervanta were done by the research group’s architects and community planning specialists from Tampere University of Technology. The first vision were based on quality development of Hervanta “Hervanta-Interface”. The second vision were based on circular road “Kehäkatu” and third on widening urban area “Hi-tech Rusko”.

These three visions were used as a base to interviews of 30 experts. They were asked about planning in general, the future of Hervanta in general and future based on the three visions. In addition they were asked about using visions as a help of plan method.

The feedback from the interviews was used to evaluate the future of the Hervanta, especially in the social and ecological view. As a result there were found three general views to the change of community structure. First is to “compact inward”. Second is to widening to the surrounding areas. Third is to extend to whole new areas.

Based on these new visions were done and the interviews were analyzed in new framework.