The main purpose of the Healthy Outdoor Premises for Everyone (HOPE) project is to empower and mobilize the citizens in their own districts. The project focuses on three different districts with varying air quality challenges.

The Helsinki air quality monitoring network provides accurate measurements from the locations of fixed monitoring stations in the region but the network consists currently of eleven monitoring locations spread over a wide and diverse area of the four municipalities. Change that we want to achieve is that the citizens will find air quality issues easily relatable and understandable. Ultimately, with better understanding of the air quality issues in their own environment, the citizen will be able to make better and healthier choices in their daily lives. The solution creates a feedback loop between high-resolution hyper-local air quality monitoring and actions of individuals and communities through co-design and participatory budgeting. With better understanding of air quality issues and with the help of personalized air quality data, organisers empower residents to be active owners of their local air quality.

The HOPE project focuses on three districts in Helsinki with varying air quality challenges. Jätkäsaari is major residential waterfront district under development which will be home to some 30,000 citizens by 2030, but its current over-10,000 inhabitants are affected by dust from ongoing local construction works and related logistics as well as traffic congestion and vehicle emissions. Vallila is a dense older inner-city district with urban street canyons with over 30,000 vehicles passing through daily, causing emissions and a heavy street dust problem especially during the early spring season. Suburban Pakila area is affected by local domestic wood burning smoke, as well as the two main highways with about 100,000 vehicles passing through the area every day.

The first major milestone of the HOPE project is planning and building three new state of the art local monitoring networks in Jätkäsaari, Vallila and Pakila areas. In addition to building the monitoring networks the crowdsourced citizen air quality measurement campaigns have began. Up to 100 citizens at a time will carry a mobile sensor device which will produce hyper-local real time air quality data to be processed as a part of the regional air quality information, maps and forecasts. State of the art technologies developed in the project such as AI algorithms, machine learning and edge-computing are used in calibrating the sensors and crunching the data.

The project will organize six crowdsourced air quality measuring campaigns with proprietary HOPE mobile sensors designed by University of Helsinki’s Megasense research group over the three year span between 2019-2021. The portable sensors connect to a user’s smart phone via Bluetooth and transfer the data to the University of Helsinki’s Internet of Things (IoT) data platform.

In 2020 and 2021 the project will mobilize the citizens in the three districts through co-design, participatory budgeting and local air quality interventions. The citizens will have a HOPE mobile and web applications based on the idea of personal Co2 footprint calculator where they can find out about the effect of their daily choices on the local air quality, actively report their actions and collect credits for the voting process. A gamification element is also introduced as the citizens can also challenges their friends and neighbors etc. to compete for the credits. In the participatory budget voting the citizens choose local air quality improving interventions to be implemented in their districts.

In addition to these activities an innovation competition with the theme of utilizing the air quality data produced by the project will be organized for companies in the spring 2020.