by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-founder, SoolNua Consulting

The blinds were down but the room was already bright, the intense early sunlight leaking in around the tidy gap between the blinds and the window frame.

“Rats”, I exclaimed, reaching for my phone and expecting to discover I’d over-slept and missed the early morning run due to depart from the lobby at 7am.

But it was only 6am, daylight arriving earlier and faster in Finland than in the more western countries in Europe.

The sun was climbing steadily as we departed for our run (at 7am precisely – punctuality is a thing in Finland) but there was a raw, biting cold, a reminder that Helsinki was still in transition from winter to spring, as evidenced too by the plentiful blooming daffodils, and the tress not yet in leaf.

Jukka (Punamäki)  and Juha (Riehunkangas), both working in tourism for the City of Helsinki, were our guides for what ended up being a 7km meander around the bays and inlets that give Helsinki its maritime character, and bring cities-on-the-water like Auckland, Sydney, Vancouver and nearby Stockholm to mind. Inspiring vistas of the archipelago alternated with stunning art deco streetscapes, all lit up by a glorious late April sun. We were greeted outside Ekberg, a Helsinski institution since the 1850s, with trays of energising berry juice – a lovely treat organised by our hosts.

Plenary sessions and some breakouts for City DNA’s International Conference took place at the award winning Clarion Hotel located in the Jätkäsaari neighbourhood of the city but we also had an afternoon hosted in some of the city’s iconic “design” buildings, all clustered together in a kind of cultural and civic campus, close to the Finnish parliament in the downtown area of the city.

Design is one of Helsinki’s core brand pillars, and our afternoon in the supposedly unpronounceable Töölönlahti district underlined why. Within sight of each other sit Oodi Central Library, the Helsinki Music Centre, Finlandia Hall and the Parliament Building, almost a century of bold architectural statements that together express something fundamental about the city’s DNA.

Finlandia Hall, designed by starchitect Alvar Aalto and completed in 1971 with its congress wing following in 1973–75, is all about fluidity, flow and flexibility. At a time when most buildings were created for a single, fixed purpose, Aalto conceived a space that could continually adapt, making it remarkably ahead of its time and perfectly attuned to how we live and move five decades after it was built. The recent renovation leaves it energised, sparkling and resplendent.

Where Finlandia Hall is sculptural and expressive, the Musiikkitalo or Music Centre – completed in 2011 and designed by LPR Architects – is calm, crafted transparency: low‑slung, glassy and inviting rather than monumental. Inside, warm wood, excellent acoustics and intuitive circulation create a seamless flow between public foyers, performance halls and informal gathering spaces, one of which we re-purposed for a engaging Viva City presentation all about Helsinki introduced by senex, clad-in-black, once-a-roadie-always-a-roadie, David Peacock – definitely my brother from another mother!

Oodi aka Helsinki Central Library is the city’s newest civic edifice (designed by ALA Architects and completed in 2018) and is genuinely one of the most exciting buildings / concepts I’ve ever visited. Here’s how the building introduces itself:

“Here you can make music, organise events and play chess. Go to the movies and use a laser cutter. Meet a robot and paint northern lights on a fairytale wall. Of course you can also read here – under a tree, in the corner of a sofa in a story room or even on a balcony”.

Oodi articulates its core values cogently and clearly – “Everyone has the right to be at Oodi. Hanging out at Oodi without a reason is welcomed and even recommended”. But these values are actually there, in plain sight, in the design, lay-out and flow of the library. The balcony – mentioned above – is at precisely the same level as the parliament building, a powerful symbolic statement about civic leadership, citizenship, responsibility and accountability. Nordic-style democracy at its magnificent best.

The library extends over three floors – floor one is for meeting, floor two for creating and floor three for reading. When we visited, it was packed with all manner of citizen, young and not-so-young, some curled up with a book, others stretched out on a sofa with head phones on, some chatting informally on over-sized steps, others working diligently in private booth spaces. There was a large table set out with sewing machines where you could mend a zip or take up a hem; there was a wall display of guitars, acoustic and electric, and private studios that you could book to practice and play; there were rows and rows of people plays chess and board games … it was exhilarating to see how a civic building may be accessed and used by all in a totally natural, frictionless way.

CityDNA conferences channel many things—insight, debate, data, disagreement—but what lingered most, as we moved between those astonishing spaces in Helsinki, was something more elemental. A sense that cities, for all their infrastructure and investment plans, ultimately rise or fall on relationships. On the invisible threads that bind citizen to place, visitor to host, and stakeholder to stakeholder.

That thread was named, more than once, from the stage and in the corridors: trust.

As CityDNA President, Barbara Jamison-Woods, observed during the conference, trust is not a given, nor is it a slogan to be applied when convenient. It is earned slowly, sometimes lost quickly, and rebuilt only through consistency, transparency and intent. In a world where destinations are under increasing scrutiny—from their own communities as much as from the markets they serve—trust becomes not just a virtue but a strategy.

And perhaps that is what Helsinki, in its understated, quietly confident way, revealed to us. In the openness of Oodi, in the human scale of its public realm, in the seamless blending of civic purpose and daily life, there is an implicit contract at work. The city trusts its citizens, and in return, the citizens trust the city.

For those of us working in and around the business of destinations, that feels less like a takeaway and more like a calling. Build beautifully, plan intelligently, market creatively—but above all, act in ways that earn and sustain trust.

Everything else, as Helsinki gently reminded us in that early morning light, flows from there.