Walking is fun. When there is something to look at (or listen to), it is even funnier. Urban tree walks are popular – see e.g. TreeTalk – and in Helsinki there are over 50K planted trees to stand by and admire. Besides, there are roughly 12K park roads to stroll around. In most cases, these two come together. More inclined to man-made stuff like buildings? The register of buildings protected in the plan of the city of Helsinki has nearly 5K rows.
Where to go? One option is first to choose a district.
No matter what you are up to these days, you better have a mobile app for planning, navigation, and information. Thanks to the fairly new shinyMobile library, former desktop-only R Shiny web applications can now easily be modified to mobile-friendly ones. In this app, by district, I added several layers of Helsinki-related data points to a standard OpenStreetMap base map: park roads (in brown), planted trees (opaque green), protected buildings (orange), and City Bike stations (biggish yellow circles). Hint: click a bike station. After a second or two, it shows the number of available bikes.
The default district of the app is Kluuvi, the commercial centre of Helsinki. Fun fact: geographically, this area is a gloe lake (kluuvi), the final stage in the process where a bay in the sea turns into a freshwater lake due to post-glacial rebound. Select another district from the hamburger icon top left.
For some reason, the granularity of Helsinki park roads is amazingly high. To demonstrate this, there is a separate tab for just park roads, with a histogram 🙂
Two years back, my nearest planted tree was an Allegheny service berry. Since last fall, when the first bicycle boulevard of Helsinki took shape, there are new trees that grow ever nearer (I guess). But, they are not in the urban tree database yet, so I don’t know their species, nor their coordinates.
Almost all of the protected buildings in Helsinki are just that, separate buildings (rakennus). However, there are some intriguing exceptions. One of them is a protected facade. There is only one of those in the database – and it is part of our house!
The R code of the mobile app is here. There is also a desktop version with the respective code.