Client: Forum Virium Helsinki, via Miltton
Location: Ylä-Malmi, Helsinki, Finland
Year: 2022
Sector: Placemaking · Evaluation Methodology · Living Labs
Cities run placemaking experiments constantly but rarely measure whether they work — this project built a reusable toolkit for choosing the right metrics, then tested it on a real square in Helsinki.
Living-lab and placemaking experiments are cheap to run and hard to evaluate well — practitioners are often left guessing which of dozens of possible metrics actually matter for a given intervention. Forum Virium wanted a general-purpose framework for making that choice, validated against a real case.
Commissioned via tender, delivered as a subcontract under agency Miltton, with support from the Nordic Smart City Network, Nordic Innovation, and Helsinki Innovation Districts. Piloted on Ylä-Malmi square, where the city had installed modular street furniture with wildflower planters (tended by a local kindergarten) between April and August 2022.
Built a library of roughly 100 candidate urban metrics grounded in academic literature, narrowed to 48 relevant ones and then 20 fully documented “toolkit cards,” organised across three dimensions — Space, Activity, Culture — each assessed through physical, digital, and hybrid data sources. Fifteen of the twenty metrics were actually tested at Ylä-Malmi, combining space-syntax network analysis, camera-based footfall and dwell-time sensing, Foursquare visit data, and digital ethnography of geotagged Instagram photos.
Delivered as an 80-page toolkit with full methodology cards, plus a public talk presenting the approach.
- Ylä-Malmi square ranked as the 5th most-visited place within a 5-minute walk, roughly on par with the area’s supermarkets — a genuine local landmark, just not a city-scale destination.
- 82% of geotagged Instagram photos near the square were taken indoors — a strong signal the outdoor space itself isn’t seen as attractive enough to photograph.
- Only 9% of analysed photos showed people socialising in the square, and just 1 in 100 showed any spontaneous, unplanned use — low measured vitality despite the square’s large, open, flat surface.
- The furniture and wildflower intervention had limited measurable impact — it didn’t shift the square’s digital image or draw in the most active 25–34 age demographic, most likely because its visual scale was too small relative to the size of the square.
- Nearby public transit stops draw major foot traffic that mostly bypasses the square itself — flagged as a clear, currently unrealised opportunity for future interventions.
Gave Forum Virium a reusable, evidence-based method for choosing evaluation metrics on future placemaking experiments — with the Ylä-Malmi case doubling as a concrete, honest test of both the toolkit and the specific intervention it evaluated.