Learn more about one of our Scandinavian city partners – the city of Turku!
The City of Turku is the oldest city in Finland, officially founded in 1229. Nowadays Turku is home city to over 180 000 inhabitants. Almost 10% of the inhabitants has another mother language than Finnish or Swedish which are the official languages.
Turku is located at the west coast of Finland. One of the world’s most beautiful archipelagos has over 40 000 islands. The sea is also important for maritime industry, which has a long history in Turku - over 40% of maritime industry services in Finland is located in southwest Finland. Half of Finland’s pharmaceutical industry, including diagnostics related research and product development, is based in the Turku region. Turku has also a lot of high-quality research of biotechnology and food industry.
Turku is an important city of education and disposes of two universities and two universities of applied sciences with altogether over 30 000 students. In the vocational schools there are over 12 000 students.
The city has a strong commitment to resource efficiency and is currently preparing a road map to be a resource efficient city – with the target to be carbon neutral by the year 2040. Over 90% of buildings in the area is connected to the district heating grid, and the target is to have 50% share of renewables in heat production by 2020. The city of Turku itself uses electricity based 100% on renewables. All big public buildings have been energy audited and Turku is a national example of ESCO-projects in renovating buildings and facilities like swimming bath and indoor sports arena. Additionally, as part of a ESCO-project parts of the street lighting is changed to LED.
PLEEC project and the Sustainable Energy Action Plan will give a good boost towards this target!
Turku is involved in different processes and commitments on national and international level: Thus, the city has signed a voluntary energy efficiency agreement with the government (first time already almost two decades ago) and it has been financing the local energy agency, nowadays called Valonia, since 1999. Furthermore, it is a host city to the Sustainable Cities Commission of the Union of Baltic Cities and made a commitment to the Covenant of Mayors.
Turku is proud to be one of the PLEEC cities - to become one of the smartest city in Europe!
