Browsing by Subject "yhdyskuntarakenne"

In my thesis I look at how persons living without an own car experience their daily mobility and what kind of strategies and practices concerning daily mobility are their households using to manage their daily lives. In focus is also a question of the significance of the place of residence to mobility, which I investigate through the concepts of urban structure and car dependence. I chose the city of Porvoo as my study area, because as a small city it does not have the public transportation services at the level of the largest Finnish cities, but on the other hand its dense city center may support carless daily mobility. I use the concept of accessibility strategies, which means the ways in which individuals can maintain access to the variably time and space bound activities of their everyday lives and overcome or adapt to their time-geographic constraints. Knowing the practices of carless households is important for the targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of transportation in Finland. It is still important to remember the nature of carlessness as varying from being voluntary to being involuntary. Urban structure sets the conditions which may favor some travel behavior and prohibit other kinds. These conditions include distances between activity locations, or the relative ease of using different travel modes. Urban structure may enable alternatives in travel mode choices or prohibit them and support mostly private car use. Discussions may also consider car dependence, which has been defined as the dependence on private cars of areas, urban structure, transport systems, as well as individuals and daily trips. As a method for data collection in this qualitative thesis I used thematic interviews. Interviews may help to understand the practices and subjective experiences of a group of people in a certain place, and meanings they attach to an activity of a geographical nature. I interviewed seven persons living in Porvoo, representing their carless households, of which some lived in the city center and others outside of it. I analyzed the interview transcriptions using coding, thematic analysis and typification. Almost all of the interviewees utilized a strategy in which they had taken proximity to daily destinations and activities into consideration when moving to their current place of residence, which enables short distances by walking or cycling. I studied the use of information and communications technologies to substitute physical mobility by looking at remote work practices: high levels of remote work were done, and more than before, when the remote work possibilities were expanded due to COVID-19 pandemic. All of the households had received support for mobility from their social relations, but the significance of this strategy to everyday life varied considerably, from a weekly need of getting car rides to a rare occasion of borrowing a car. Central daily mobility practices were walking and cycling, trip chaining, and choosing activities from a close proximity to home. The daily mobility experiences of households living in Porvoo city center, or its immediate surroundings were characterized as being problem-free. City center’s short distances and bus connections to Helsinki were seen as advantages to mobility. The most pronounced challenges to daily mobility appeared within those living outside of the city center, due to experiences of a decline in the service level of local public transportation. Local buses did not offer satisfying levels of accessibility to those who would have needed them for their daily trips. The finding of the problem-free nature of daily mobility of the ones living in or next to city center is in line with a finding from literature, which sees downtown areas of middle-sized Finnish cities as representing a car independent urban structure.

Tämän tutkielman aiheena on Helsingin historia toisen maailmansodan jälkeen. Tarkastelussa ovat muun muassa Helsingin kaupungin suunnittelun historia ja kehityskulut jälkiteollisessa yhteiskunnassa. Helsingin kaupunki eli murroskautta, jossa yksityisautoilu oli yleistymässä. Myöskin vapaa-ajan kulttuuri ja viihdekulttuuri olivat yleistymässä. Kaupunkilaiset vaativat yhä enemmän vapaa-ajan toimintoja ja virkistysalueita. Puistojen ja virkistysalueiden merkitys kasvoi entisestään. Puistoilla ja virkistysalueilla oli nyt funktionaalinen merkitys, eivätkä ne palvelleet enää pelkästään esteettisiä arvoja. Helsinki oli muuttumassa yhdyskuntarakenteellisesti. Työpaikat ja asuinpaikat eivät enää välttämättä olleet erillisillä alueilla. Tämä vähensi liikenteen haittoja. Tarkastelun kohteena olevat kaupunginosat, kuten Ruoholahti, kehittyivät yhdyskuntarakenteen monipuolisuutta ajatellen. Kamppi oli sekin kehittymässä yhä enemmän asukasystävällisemmäksi vaikkakin alueella toimi paljon konttoreita. Ruoholahdessa kehitys, jossa työpaikat ja asunnot suunnitellaan samalle alueelle, sai konkreettisia muotoja. Julkinen mielipide näytti olevan liikenteen yleistymistä vastaan. Varsinkin yksityisautoilun lisääntyminen nähtiin haitallisena asukkaiden silmissä. Maisemallisuutta ja ympäristön viihtyvyyttä painotettiin asukkaiden lausunnoissa. Näihin asukkaiden tarpeisiin kaupunki pyrki vastaamaan omilla ohjeillaan, jotka koskivat asutusta, elinkeinoja ja teollisuutta. Samalla julkinen mielipide kritisoi kaupunkia siitä, ettei julkista mielipidettä kuultu kaupungin suunnittelussa esimerkiksi Kampin- ja Töölönlahden suunnittelussa. Tutkielmassa käytetään Helsingin kaupungin arkiston materiaalia, kuten Lars Hedmanin kokoelmaa ja Ruoholahti–Hietalahden asukasyhdistyksen materiaalia. Tutkielman tavoitteena on kartoittaa Helsingin kaupungin historiaa sotien jälkeisellä ajalla. Eräitä argumentteja tukeakseen, tutkielma käsittää myös otteita varhaisemmilta ajoilta. Tutkielman johtopäätökset: Julkinen mielipide suosi puistojen ja kevyenliikenteen kehittämistä Helsingin alueella. Helsingin kaupunki pyrki vastaamaan näihin tavoitteisiin. Myös niin kutsuttuja piilokonttoreita vastaan julkaistiin mielipiteitä. Helsingin kaupunki pyrki vähentämään näitä alueellaan. Yksityisautoilu oli nousussa, tätä vastaan esitettiin useita kannanottoja. Ympäristön viihtyisyyteen pyrittiin vaikuttamaan esimerkiksi asukasyhdistysten taholta. Kaupunki kehitti omia ohjesääntöjään asumisesta ja autojen käytöstä.

The formation of urban structure is a complicated process and its outcome, that cannot be easily forecast, is not necessarily optimal. This creates a need to understand the process and gives a reason to control it by urban planning. As the circumstances are in constant change, the plans have to anticipate the time to come – partly far into the future. Research is needed to support planning to understand the factors that affect the urban structure better. Accessibility, that seems to be one of the key factors in the processes of land use change, seems to provide a suitable tool for planning and research: when suitably defined, it can connect the properties of transport and land use systems as well as the economic, social and environmental goals. The availability of services is closely connected to the quality of living environment, so studying the accessibility of them can produce new notable information for the needs of urban planning. The aim of this study was to explain how changes in urban structure cause changes in the accessibility of services by walking, mass transit and car in the long term, and study how these changes could affect the use of the services both from the perspectives of the users' possibilities and the potential the services produce. The public library network in Helsinki region was studied as an example. Studying the accessibility of public libraries is useful as such, as they provide many types of positive impacts, but public libraries are also a convenient example in studying the accessibility of services as they are a service actively used in everyday life and information about the use is available. Distances in the accessibility measures were measured as travel time. Accessibility was measured both in travel times to the nearest library and in potentials of making a library trip calculated by library trip forecasting models based on the real behaviour of their users. Comparison was made between the years 2014 and 2050, during which the population and the transport system are expected to change as in the created scenarios, which are based on the new Helsinki City Plan. In addition, the possible effects to the accessibility of the public libraries by possible cost cuts in the service network were inspected by simulating the effects of the cuts. Based on the results the public libraries in the study area seem to be relatively well accessible by all the inspected transport modes. The changes in the transport systems seem to have minor effects on the accessibility when measured in travel time to the nearest library, but when the effects are measured in the potentials of making a library trip, they seem to be a bit more significant – by mass transit, accessibility would improve and by car, it would deteriorate. The forecast change in the population would increase the number of people accessing the nearest library in half an hour, but the proportion of this group to the total population in the area would be smaller than before. The attraction of libraries affect to the potentials they produce, but the impacts are concentrated on the surrounding areas of the libraries and on the traffic routes, where the accessibility is relatively good to begin with. Even though excluding some of the smallest libraries from the service network would have relatively small effects on the accessibility in the aggregate, the effects on individual level and for sustainable accessibility could be significant. Based on the study results more significant than the changes in the transport system or in the attraction of the services seem to be how near population and services are located each other: the prerequisites for multimodal accessibility cannot necessarily be guaranteed if the distances are long. Based on the study results, to prevent the deterioration of the preconditions of the goals of Finnish regional planning and the qualifications for sustainable accessibility due to the forecast population change – in other words to keep the current standard of service – some changes in the service network would be needed. However, as there was only one type of service inspected in this study and as there is uncertainty if the scenarios will happen in the future, the conclusions that can be drawn from the results are restricted. Still, studying the accessibility of a single service is useful as such as the needs for different type of services are different, and if it will give some hints of the future accessibility of services in general at the same time, even though just in a few scenarios, it can be easier to be prepared for the future.