Honk! The future for transport in Helsinki? (Have a stupid weekend)

As we get together here in Helsinki to swap ideas about what a more equitable transportation system might look like in a city, what if we take a moment this weekend day to travel back a bit in time and examine some of the more flagrant concepts floated by visionaries and accepted by many in the past? We here at World Streets always have problems with these “cities of the future” visions, not so much because they are almost always consistently wacky in some totally weird unreal-world way, but because they tend to project things so far into the distant, almost always thoroughly magical future, that they get us off the hook for doing anything about it TODAY. So sit back and relax, dear citizens and voters, and realize that you don’t have to do anything other than to passively await the future, and let the benevolent forces of the economy and technology solve the problem for you.

The Stakeholder Dialogues – First guidelines

The Stakeholder Dialogues or conversations are a central pillar of the March 2021 collaborative enquiry: Examining the prospects for Equity-Based Transportation Practice in Helsinki.  This open dialogue  is hosted by the Helsinki Department of City Planning and Transportation in collaboration with a wide range of local stakeholder groups.

Einstein on your mind

III. The Female Quotient. Women shaping the future of transport in cities: Who, how, where?

29 July interim progress report:
This off-the-cuff collaborative brainstorm is proving a pure learning experience. We started out with a single long-held idea: i.e., the importance of getting all aspects of the sustainable transport planning and policy establishment on to a gender-level footing. And against that understanding we set out on Tuesday  to see if we could, with a little help from our friends, come up with a convincing list identifying a certain number of outstanding women leaders working in our field who, though their excellent preparation, their strong convictions and their courageous pioneering actions, are literally redrawing the new mobility map (and the mental maps) of our cities. And all that at a level of excellence that captures the attention of others in other places, and inspires them to study, emulate and perhaps even to surpass the original project, approach and policies.