Place Standard Tool

What is the Place Standard Tool and where does it come from?

Best practices are shared within international cooperation on promoting health and welfare. The Place Standard Tool, presented in the Healthy Cities Network teams, is a research-based tool developed for resident cooperation, inclusion and dialogue with the participants. The starting point of the holistic tool is the perspective of health and welfare.

The tool was originally developed in Scotland as a collaboration between urban planning and public health and has since been tested elsewhere in Europe and the Nordic countries. The Finnish version was compiled and translated from the original by the Helsinki Urban Environment Division in 2024. The Finnish version of the Place Standard Tool was launched at the cooperation seminar Common Health – Planetary Welfare in September 2024.

Tailor-made versions of the tool have also been developed recently for various purposes, such as for children and young people as well as the Climate Lens, which focuses specifically on climate issues.

How is the tool used and what is its purpose?

The tool consists of 14 themes that are evaluated one by one or as a group, manually around tables or by using a web application by marking in a pie chart. The themes cover both physical and functional features in the immediate environment, but also those related to community, being active in the area and the resident experience (e.g. play grounds, traffic, local entrepreneurship, sense of security). The aim is to point our their possible shortcomings and development needs as well as their strengths.

Everyone is given one of the tool’s themes to examine in pairs or individually in connection with a site visit and to be considered on the basis of knowledge of the area. This makes it easy to compare the resulting graphic diamond charts and use them to have conversations around different themes. It is possible to see quickly where the most improvement could be made and what is considered to be the best. Finally, we will consider how these could be promoted together.

Additional information:
Development manager Maria Jaakkola
Urban Environment Division, Urban Space and Landscape Planning
firstname.lastname@hel.fi