Case Studies > Helsinki - Malmi airport

The Malmi airport area at the north-east corner of Helsinki, Finland is a zone, where national and local aviation history and peoples longing for heritage meet 21^st century needs for new urban housing. The airport stayed for a long time on a distant district without any further interest for “urban development”.  

Built in the mid-1930s in the functionalist architectural style, Malmi airport is one of the best‐preserved operational pre‐World War II international airports in the world. The history of Malmi airport has been linked to many “heroic moments” of national history during the Second World War and the Olympic Games in 1952. New, modern international Helsinki International Airport became operational in 1952. After that, the Malmi airport was assigned to serve the needs of light commercial traffic and inland aviation.

The Finnish government decided in 2014 to close the airport. The General Plan of the City of Helsinki 2016 placed apartments for 25 000 people on the airport area. When knowledge of the loss of airport spread, a huge people’s movement started to organize itself in Helsinki and nationally. In less than two months, 50,000 people from across Finland endorsed a legislative initiative to preserve the airport, listed among the seven Most Endangered Heritage Sites in Europe. The fight to preserve the aviation activities at the airport is still going on at the 2020s.