When Lapinlahti is under threat, we show up en masse!
“The Venetsia House and the sauna can be separated from the project and sold if needed, which would cut the project’s costs by about 2 million euros.”
Crisis home and group activities
In the Toivon Lähde living room, anyone facing a life crisis can meet another person without taking a queue number. Guided group activities help people find friends and bring routine into everyday life.
Free events and exhibitions
Concerts, art exhibitions, lectures, nature activities, sports, public events. They ease loneliness among Helsinki residents, build participation and support the integration of people who have moved to Finland.
Cafés and bakery
The cafés and the bakery are the everyday living room of the area, with nothing you have to buy. Kahvila Lähde gives many people with partial work ability a route into working life.
Therapy practices, studios and event spaces
Hundreds of artists, researchers and small business owners work in the buildings. The spaces are also rented out for family celebrations and workplace wellbeing days.
Free museum
A shared Finnish heritage site, the main building completed by C. L. Engel in 1841, is there for anyone to experience. The museum tells the story of the hospital.
Sauna
The sauna in the service building is the oldest public sauna still in use in Helsinki. The city may sell it.
Why again?
How extensive the renovation of the Lapinlahti buildings has to be depends on what kind of activity the area will hold in future. Helsinki’s elected decision-makers have spent years trying to agree on the future use of the area, with no result.
The city has asked residents for their views in three surveys and workshops between 2019 and 2023. Residents have also had their say through a citizens’ initiative and several petitions. The message is clear: Lapinlahti has to stay a centre for mental wellbeing that is open to all.
City officials, though, have proposed privatising the area time after time.
What we propose
The Lapinlahti 360 concept we offered the city in 2024 can still be carried out. The aim of the plan is to secure Lapinlahti as a space open to all residents and to strengthen the heritage values of the area.
- Mental health work bound up with the history of the area, together with civic, cultural and small business activity open to residents, stays at the core.
- The buildings are renovated thoroughly but sparingly, avoiding over-renovation and leaving visible the rough edges left by different eras.
- Renovating in stages lets the activity carry on without a break.
We propose that the city renovate the buildings and then transfer them to a property company it owns. The new company could start looking after and developing Lapinlahti with a clean slate, without the heavy financial burden of a hundred years of renovation debt. That would secure the financial capacity and durability of the future property company. Something along these lines was done back when Kaapelitehdas was set up.
