The Guard’s Band Festival is part of Helsinki Week 2012. Photo: Eeva Sumiloff

Helsinki’s annual birthday celebration, Helsinki Day on 12 June, has an especially large programme this year and commemorates Helsinki’s bicentennial as the capital of Finland. The day is the culmination of the annual Helsinki Week festival, which incorporates seven festivals and spans 2.5 weeks this year. The offerings include blues and other music, samba, fashion and the Ostrobothnia province presenting itself at Senate Square.

Helsinki Day honours the city’s 200^th anniversary as capital

Helsinki Day’s programme comprises more than 100 happenings throughout the city and extends to Kallio for the first time in the day’s history from 1959 to the present. There will be guided tours, and the city’s parks, streets and stages will be filled with music. Street corners will be transformed into stages for theatre and dance performances. Saunas will be heated up around the Töölö Bay.

The Helsinki Day celebration starts with the traditional morning coffee at the City Hall. The day’s celebration continues in the City Hall and concludes in a dance in the evening.

To celebrate the Helsinki bicentennial, an artist group has composed a special song that will be performed together with the public throughout the city.

All Helsinki Day events are free of charge. Free tickets to events with restricted admission can be picked up from Virka Info in the City Hall.

Helsinki Samba Carnival. Photo: City of Helsinki
 

Seven festivals to make up Helsinki Week

The Guard’s Band Festival is a three-day event from 31 May – 2 June presenting military music at the historical Suomenlinna Maritime Fortress. The programme includes a church concert, a picnic concert, impressive figurative marches, chamber music, a theatrical performance and a grand finale.

The annual Finnish Province Days at Senate Square feature South Ostrobothnia from 7–9 June, presenting regional foods, handicrafts and culture, spiced by live entertainment.

The Bassline Festival is a three-day event from 8–10 June that presents the latest urban music, youth culture and Finnish design. The festival programme includes a skateboarding event at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, three evening events at Mbar, and a free concert in the Sinebrychoff Park.

Pihlajamäki goes Blues on 9 June celebrates the Pihlajamäki suburb’s 50^th anniversary this year with an impressive line-up of blues, rock and soul music. This is an alcohol- and drug-free event. Admission is also free. 

The Helsinki Bike Show on 9 June brings together the best motorbikes and bike builders for a relaxed Saturday afternoon in the Tokoinranta Park. Motorbikes of all styles compete for the title of the most beautiful bike in Finland.

Les Lumières is the Cultural Festival of the Enlightenment that brings together musicians, composers, actors, dancers, historians and researchers at Suomenlinna from 11–17 June, taking us back to Finland’s fun and international roots of the 18th century. Each event is in the form of a short scripted play that combines music and text.

The Helsinki Samba Carnival brings Rio-style colourful samba dancing to the centre of Helsinki over two days from 15–16 June. The carnival culminates in a parade through the city centre starting at 15:00 on 16 June with over a thousand dancers and performers attending.

More about Helsinki Week and programme

A Helsinki tram publicizing the use of hydropower as the energy source of all trams and the metro in the city. Photo: HKL

The Helsinki trams and metro have switched to Finnish hydropower as their electricity source in an effort to increase the use and awareness of renewable, low-emission energy sources in public transport. As a result, a ride on a tram or the metro in Helsinki has a near-zero carbon footprint, as it produces no carbon dioxide emissions through electricity sources. Rail transport, already an eco-efficient form of transport, is now increasingly environmentally friendly in Helsinki.

The tram and metro services in Helsinki are operated by Helsinki City Transport HKL, and the public transport services in the Helsinki region are produced by Helsinki Region Transport HSL. Both have a significant potential impact on the environment and climate through their energy choices. They can steer rail transport onto a more responsible path and help reduce overall energy use in rail transport. HKL’s switch to hydropower is the latest move by the region’s public transport in responsibility.

HKL purchases the electricity needed to operate the tram and metro services from the Helsinki energy company Helsingin Energia as certified hydropower. Helsingin Energia has hydropower capacity in the Kymijoki and Kemijoki hydropower plants in Finland owned and operated by subsidiaries and associated companies.

HKL and HSL seek to raise awareness of the environmental impact and benefits of public transport by rail with a new website, which offers diverse information on the environmental choices of rail transport. A tram surfaced with water images circulating in the city on regular traffic also reminds the general public of transport choices now available in the city that do not contribute to climate change.

More about travel in the city by hydropower

Canadian circus group Cirque Éloize will debut their new performance. Photo: Cirque Éloize / Helsinki Festival

The annual multicultural Helsinki Festival will bring to the Helsinki of late summer 2012 many world premieres and exceptionally large productions. The biggest programme on Finland’s annual cultural calendar, the festival spans 2.5 weeks filled with circus, theatre, classical and world music, jazz, visual arts and happenings.

“We are delighted and proud to present a programme filled with spectacles and cultural achievements,” says Festival Director Erik Söderblom. “There are international stars and visitors from remote lands, burning issues and eternal themes, and city happenings and intimate artistic moments – just as there should be in a festival.”

Unique performances

Contemporary circus has a strong presence in the Helsinki Festival 2012 programme. Canadian Cirque Éloize, one of the world’s biggest contemporary circus groups, will debut their new work in Helsinki, and other debuts will be presented by Korean and Finnish circus artists.

The festival’s theatre programme presents Circo Ambulante by Russian director Andrei Moguchi, an allegory of Russia’s new democracy movement. In focus is Finnish director Kristian Smeds with a number of stage plays.

The dance programme features both international and world-famous Finnish names. Tero Saarinen Company of Finland will give a double performance including Saarinen’s solo performance Vox Balaenae never before seen in Finland.

Classical music stars and world music

Helsinki Festival 2012 features one of the largest performances in the festival history: this is Tristan & Isolde, a visualized version of Richard Wagner’s beloved opera, produced by Esa-Pekka Salonen, Peter Sellars and Bill Viola and performed by a first-class international ensemble.

Other classical music components are made up of chamber music, Baroque music and opera. Jazz and electronic music will take over Helsinki Music Hall’s smaller venues in a surprise programme.

The festival’s exquisite world music venue, the Huvila Festival Tent, will offer performances on every night of the festival, by both established international icons and emerging stars.

Huvila Festival Tent. Photo: Sasa Tkalcan / Helsinki Festival

The public recruited to make art

The festival programme includes many interactive artworks and projects where the public can join in the production.

The Night of the Arts, where art and happenings take over the city in unusual settings late into the night, will culminate in a massive Dominos event. Here thousands of volunteers will build a kilometres-long board game on the streets of Helsinki. The Night of the Arts takes place on Thursday, 23 August. The entire programme will be published in early August.

The Lapinlahti former hospital complex invites everybody to teach anything in a peer-instruction festival.

The Children’s Festival invites all second-graders of Helsinki to a joyful musical adventure in Helsinki Music Centre.

Visual arts to support World Design Capital and Helsinki Bicentennial

Helsinki Festival 2012 joins the programmes of World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 and Helsinki’s bicentennial as capital with a design-flavoured visual arts programme. Spiders will take over Kunsthalle Helsinki in an exhibition by Argentinian Tomas Saraceno. Fashion and visual arts will meet in the Boutique exhibition at the Amos Anderson art museum.

Six supporting festivals

Helsinki Festival is enriched by six smaller festivals, which form part of the overall programme. 

The Stage festival, organized now for the 6^th time, is a Helsinki theatre event with domestic and international inputs. The Poetry Moon literary festival extends across the city over one week. Viapori Jazz takes place on the Suomenlinna islands. Art Goes Kapakka brings art to restaurants and clubs. Cirko Pikkolo offers circus for children. The biennial Media Facades is a platform for experimental art and design.

Helsinki Festival 2012 takes place from 17 August through 2 September. Tickets are sold by Lippupalvelu.

More about Helsinki Festival and the full programme

Helsinki features the highest public transport usage of Finland’s six largest cities. Photo: Pertti Nisonen / City of Helsinki

The environmental indicators of the six largest cities in Finland reveal marked differences in climate impact, impact of traffic on the environment and environmental protection. The results are based on data gathered in Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa, Tampere, Turku and Oulu during 2006-2010.

The biggest differences between these cities are in greenhouse gas emissions and electricity consumption. For example, the dependence of Oulu on energy-intensive industries is clearly manifest in the city’s emissions and power needs.

On the other hand, Oulu excels over the other cities in bicycling and has continued to expand its network of cycling routes.

Public transport, air quality, wastewater, waste volumes and protected areas

Helsinki features the highest and increasing public transport usage. Car intensity has, however, grown in Helsinki as well as in all other cities, where cycling and public transport usage are not reflected in car intensity.

Air quality has improved in Helsinki and Espoo, but Helsinki features the worst overall air quality because of large traffic volumes.

Wastewater loads on the environment has decreased in Turku owing to a new regional wastewater treatment plant commissioned in 2009. In terms of nitrogen loads on the Baltic Sea, the Helsinki region’s Viikinmäki treatment plant achieves the best results.

The volumes of waste placed in disposal sites have decreased in all six cities. Turku features the biggest cuts in waste owing to a waste incineration plant. The Helsinki region produces the highest volumes of waste.

The shares of nature conservation areas of total land areas vary, with Espoo featuring the highest share.

Positive environmental attitudes

The staff of the largest six cities in addition to Jyväskylä were surveyed about their environmental attitudes and awareness in late 2011.

No major differences could be detected between the cities. In general, the staff of all cities are concerned about changes in the environment and consider the cities’ environmental activities to be important. The respondents feel that their own behaviour is more environmentally friendly, which is especially evident in more sparing use of electricity, recycling and choices for more ecological products. However, staff attitudes to personal movement is less environmentally conscious, and private care usage exceeds public transport usage and cycling in many of the cities.  

The information is reported by the City of Helsinki Environment Centre.

Helsinki environmental statistics