Case Study: City of Helsinki achieves a citywide digital twin and enhanced citizen engagement with Bentley

City of Helsinki Expands Digitalization with Citywide Digital Twin

The City of Helsinki set out to become the world’s most functional city by digitalizing planning, construction, and maintenance and by creating a citywide digital twin that integrates existing 3D models, internal process data, and public services while engaging residents through open data. To achieve this, the City of Helsinki turned to Bentley, using Bentley applications such as MicroStation, ContextCapture, OpenCities Map, OpenCities Planner, ProjectWise, and LumenRT to replace manual practices and establish an open digital city platform.

Bentley implemented a connected data environment and reality‑mesh plus semantic information models across the roughly 500‑square‑kilometer city area, with Helsinki 3D+ and Forum Virium Helsinki using MicroStation/ContextCapture/OpenCities Map and OpenCities Planner to build and maintain the twin (including a 0.27‑square‑mile SmartKalasatama pilot). The Bentley solution improved visualization and collaboration, streamlined permitting and decision‑making, enabled solar, flood, and noise analyses, broadened citizen participation via mobile/web access, and produced widely reused open datasets (now among the city’s most downloaded and even streamed into Minecraft), supporting Helsinki’s smart‑city and carbon‑neutral goals.

City of Helsinki

Enni Airaksinen

3D Specialist, Helsinki 3D