Turku Open Platform (TOP)

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.