Helsinki As an Open and Intercultural City Final Report
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Helsinki as an Open and Intercultural City Final Report A report by to the City of Helsinki March 2010 Helsinki as an Open and Intercultural City Contents 1. AIMS OF THE REPORT ..............................................................................3 OUR APPROACH ................................................................................................. 3 OUR CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................ 4 OUR RECOMMENDATIONS ...................................................................................... 5 2. IMPRESSIONS OF HELSINKI ....................................................................8 ROOTS ........................................................................................................... 8 TOLERANCE ...................................................................................................... 9 EQUALITY ...................................................................................................... 10 ORDER AND DISORDER ...................................................................................... 10 DRAWING POWER AND LIVEABILITY ........................................................................ 11 OPENNESS TO COMPETITION ................................................................................ 12 SOCIABILITY AND FRIENDSHIP .............................................................................. 13 3. THE OPEN, CREATIVE AND INNOVATIVE CITY........................................15 WAVES OF CHANGE AND THEIR CONSEQUENCES .......................................................... 15 OPENNESS AND DESIGN THINKING ......................................................................... 16 WICKED PROBLEMS ........................................................................................... 18 THE ORGANIZATIONAL SETTING FOR OPENNESS AND COSMOPOLITANISM ............................. 19 4. TALENT ATTRACTION AND RETENTION ..................................................20 THE CITY OR THE JOB ........................................................................................ 21 THE HELSINKI RESPONSE .................................................................................... 22 NEW INDICATORS FOR SUCCESS ............................................................................ 24 5. THE DIVERSE AND INTERACTIVE CITY...................................................25 MIGRATION AND CITIES ..................................................................................... 25 THE DIVERSITY ADVANTAGE FOR CITIES .................................................................. 25 CHALLENGES .................................................................................................. 27 PRECONDITIONS AND INGREDIENTS OF THE INTERCULTURAL CITY ..................................... 28 QUESTIONS UNDERLYING AN INTERCULTURAL STRATEGY ................................................ 29 6. TOWARDS AN INTERCULTURAL CITY STRATEGY FOR HELSINKI ............31 2 1. Aims of the Report COMEDIA has been engaged by the City Council to conduct a major study on how the city of Helsinki can be seen to be an open and cosmopolitan city and by so doing to further build its global reputation. Helsinki recognizes that ‘openness’ will increasingly be the primary quality that can help guarantee its future success economically, culturally and socially and recommendations for its future policies and development follow. One conclusion can be stated immediately. We welcome the both the wisdom and the courageousness of Helsinki in opening itself out to an examination of its openness. Few other cities have yet come to grips with these issues. The fact that Helsinki is asking itself a question about its openness shows how open it is. A key assumption is reflected throughout, it is: The creative and innovative capacity is the crucial attribute a city needs to help future proof itself and to provide adaptive resilience. It relies on a high degree of openness. The central question addressed therefore follows: How can Helsinki become a city for which increased openness as well as growing cultural diversity is both a driver of international competitiveness and a source of well-being and prosperity for all its citizens? ‘Openness’ is illustrated in many ways: How the city welcomes in foreigners, how it addresses cultural diversity, how it attracts skills and talent, how open its business climate is, how the city manages its affairs, the extent to which different sectors and institutions collaborate, the degree to which the city works in an interdisciplinary way and how the city in all its facets encourages the development of a creative ecology. ‘Openness’ manifests itself too in how the physical fabric is put together: How permeable, connected and accessible are the buildings and built structure as well as the city as a whole, how does the city signal its openness through its sign and symbol system and how it projects itself internally and to the world. Our Approach The research began in March 2009 and the conclusions were presented to a conference on 22 nd April 2010. This report is based on a variety of sources: • Interviews with about 50 people in a wide variety of roles within the city • A survey of the Finnish English-language media • Three feedback seminars involving roughly 90 people in total • An analysis of Helsinki’s own research and policy making • A review of 30 examples from outside Finland • Reflecting on COMEDIA’s previous work embodied in three major texts: The Creative City, The Art of City-Making and The Intercultural City. 3 • Drawing on COMEDIA’s work with the Council of Europe and the European Commission which has adopted ‘the intercultural city’ notion as the inspiration for a transnational programme 1. • Previous experience over the last 15 years in working with the city of Helsinki. The report makes a series of recommendations covering three main areas: • How the ‘openness’ agenda can be connected to the World Capital of Design 2012 • How ‘openness’ can be fostered more intensively in the workings of the city as a whole • How the increasing cultural diversity of the city can become an asset This report has a certain style. Whilst it recommends it also asks questions, it seeks to open minds, to stimulate thinking and to encourage debate. We have approached this in four ways: • To assess the city’s overall level of openness and resulting creative and innovative capacity • To establish a link between the city’s diversity of talent, its creative milieu and its innovative capacity; • To review the attractiveness and openness of Helsinki to foreigners and resident ethnic minorities; • To establish the basis for an Intercultural City Strategy for Helsinki; Our Conclusions The main conclusions of our research are: • Four debates are currently occurring in parallel in Helsinki with little overlap, yet they are inextricably connected and need to come together. ‘Helsinki: An open and cosmopolitan city’ seeks to do this. o The first discusses the level of openness of institutions and actors in the city and their collaborative capacity. It asks whether strict sectoral or departmental working can deliver the innovation Helsinki aspires to. o The second is concerned with talent and skills, linked to the competitiveness and innovation agenda. It asks how Helsinki can make itself more internationally attractive to the investment, ideas and people that will enable it to compete economically and technologically. o The third debate is concerned with migration and cultural diversity. It asks how Helsinki can integrate record number of foreign migrants and takes place in an international climate of opinion which is becoming increasingly cautious and even negative. 1 Intercultural Cities, see www.coe.int/interculturalcities 4 o The fourth involves the city’s spatial, physical and social settings and their influence on its liveability and attractiveness. It asks how Helsinki can become a creative milieu where the interaction and mixing of different people and ideas can become more frequent and rewarding. • Helsinki is in some respects very open, but in other respects somewhat closed. It is relatively easy to connect with people and organizations and the distance between the citizen and authorities can be short. Helsinki’s innovative companies such as Nokia or the new raft of smaller companies emerging are adapting to the new organizational paradigms based on open innovation and co-creation. However, notable exceptions aside, the internal structures of many organizations, especially within the public sector, find it difficult to operate in a collaborative and interdisciplinary way. Departmental thinking still dominates. This will cause future problems, reduce the capacity to achieve joint insights and so reduce effectiveness. • Helsinki has a admirable record in education recognized in a variety of international assessments and studies. It may, however, be important to assess the extent to which the educational system sufficiently encourages creative and independent thinking. • Helsinki is moving closer to the experience of other major European cities in terms of its openness to migration and cultural diversity but there is a growing distance between it and much of the rest of Finland. As social and political attitudes harden towards diversity in Finland, and the economy becomes more difficult, it may be necessary for the city of Helsinki to pursue a different policy agenda which reflects its own reality.