Client: City of Turku, via the Turku Urban Research Programme and Academy of Finland’s URMI project
Location: Turku, Finland
Year: 2018
Sector: Software Product · Urban Data · Accessibility · Space Syntax
A downloadable desktop app that lets city staff explore Turku’s “metaMorphology” — how space, activity, and social/economic value interact — evolved from SPIN Unit’s earlier Turku research into a reusable analytical tool.
After a 2015 pilot study showed social media data could inform Turku’s planning decisions, the city wanted something more durable than a one-off report — a tool its own staff could keep using.
Built directly on A Sense of Place (2015), with several of the same team members (Sampo Ruoppila, Panu Lehtovuori), TOP was funded through the Turku Urban Research Programme and the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council URMI project at Tampere University of Technology. It was formally delivered to the city on 6 November 2018.
TOP structures the city around three dimensions — Space (accessibility, via space syntax and Multiple Centrality Assessment), Activities (amenity diversity, scored with a Shannon-Wiener index on Foursquare venue data across ten Gehl-derived categories), and Values (Instagram popularity, Oikotie real-estate prices, Airbnb data). The tool shipped as a native Mac/Windows app, in English and Finnish, with two modes: Rank (compare areas) and Filter (overlay and weight layers for expert workshops).
Delivered as a working application plus a bilingual methodology manual, presented at a stakeholder workshop with around 20 named participants from the City of Turku, Turku Science Park, Åbo Akademi, and local businesses, structured around four themes: the university’s role, tourism and FDI, real estate and place-making, and the future of work.
- Explicitly designed as a reusable, replicable framework — SPIN Unit’s stated ambition was a “family” of TOPs sharing data and development ideas across Finnish cities and beyond.
- Validated Foursquare as a representative data source: a 0.9 correlation between Foursquare venue counts and population across Finnish municipalities justified using it city-wide.
- Digitises Jan Gehl’s manual “Necessary vs. Optional activities” observation method (1971) at full-city scale using crowdsourced venue data — directly addressing the spatial and temporal limits of Gehl’s original on-site method.
- Benchmarked Turku’s activity mix against Helsinki and Tampere for comparative context.
- Honestly framed by the team as still a pilot as of autumn 2018, with a clear roadmap (real-time tracking, more interactivity, cross-city comparison) rather than presented as a finished product.
Turned a one-off research study into a standing analytical tool the City of Turku could use directly, and established a repeatable methodology SPIN Unit could in principle apply to other cities.