Smart Principles for Knowledge-based Urban Development: Case Finnish railway station areas

In this article, we make an effort to understand the ongoing station area development in wider context and, based on this, outline some general principles for developing and planning smart cities. Our starting point is to identify the continuum of immaterial and material urban development that links together economic and innovation policies as well as urban planning. In Finland, 1980-90s was a period of traditional technology centers and science parks with their distinctive urban embodiments. After this, 1990-2000s, was a heyday of urban fallows, development of run down industrial and dock premises for creative economy. Now, in 2010s, the latest phase seems to be focusing on the railway station areas, which have been loaded with economic and innovative objectives included in smart urban strategies, accompanied by more open forms of innovation policies of the cities.

Cities go through continuous transformation processes, manifested diversely in different times. Various railway station areas in Europe have been regenerated during the last decades, not least due to the development of the high-speed train network and densification of city centers. Later on, the same phenomenon has now reached Finland, where cities search simultaneously for strategies to develop their railway station areas. Smart potentials of these areas have been widely recognized, but they can not be realized by applying conventional strategies. For providing these objectives better chances to come true, we need to create planning methods that take into account the immaterial and material dimensions, as well as planned and emergent interventions of urban development. This requires that we are able to conceive the smart city in wider terms than the prevailing frame of digital technology and related services can offer.

Based on this argumentation, we bring together the diverse themes of smart city discourses and physical urban planning by introducing smart planning principles divided in three categories: 1) smart profiling, 2) smart design, and 3) smart innovation. In addition to these, we need a shift from production-driven to demand-driven urban space. The medium for optimizing the match between the users and providers of space is digital technology. Thus, true smart city means a fundamental change in the production process of urban space that have strong linkages to economic and innovation policies of cities.