Plans to erect 100,000-square-metre shopping mall near Oulu meet with scepticism

Retailers envisaging huge new shopping complexes around Finland

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Businessman Toivo Sukari is planning to erect a new Ideapark shopping mall in the town of Kiiminki, close to the northern city of Oulu. A 30-hectare plot of land nine kilometres from the Oulu city centre has been reserved for the undertaking.
      A preliminary agreement to realize the project was signed by the Kiiminki municipal council on Monday. A bill of sale of the site and an investment decision to provide the necessary municipal engineering were also endorsed by the council.
     
The Kiiminki Ideapark is scheduled for opening in 2010. The shopping mall will consist of 100,000 square metres of commercial space, including 200 shops, 30 restaurants and cafés, and just over a kilometre of shopping streets. Once completed the Ideapark is believed to provide work for around a thousand individuals.
      The undertaking is to be realized by Sukari’s Masku Kiinteistöt company, which opened the first Ideapark in the southern town of Lempäälä in the autumn of 2006.
      Toivo Sukari is also currently involved in another proposed Ideapark shopping complex in Vihti, just outside the Greater Helsinki area. This venture was much in the news earlier in the year, when the developer's name surfaced in connection with campaign financing questions surrounding a number of prospective MPs, as Sukari sought political support for his plans.
     
Even before the Kiiminki Ideapark project, some 600,000 square metres of new commercial space has been planned for the Oulu region. The present figure is 400,000 square metres. Researcher Patrik Skogster, who is working on his doctoral dissertation on the subject of commercial planning, suspects that the area’s client base is inadequate to accommodate all the planned shopping centre additions.
      In the neighbouring community of Kempele there is already a 27,000-square-metre shopping mall called Zeppelin, soon to be joined by the even larger 92,000-square-metre Zatelliitti.
      “Even Zeppelin is hardly a gold mine, so it would take a lot of concentrating of the Oulu residents’ purchasing power outside the city limits to justify these new developments”, Skogster says.
     
The City of Oulu planning chief Matti Karhula also criticises Sukari’s plans. According to Karhula, the entire Oulu region’s need for additional commercial space in the next few years is only about 200,000 square metres.
      “Sukari’s project is not in line with the schemes and objectives defined in the master plan by the Oulu area municipalities.”
      According to Karhula, there has been no mention of the Ideapark in any previous contexts, and it has not been included in the general joint master plan.
      “The important question is how this kind of oversized project will affect the Oulu city centre development projects, the purpose of which is to locate commercial services in a way that would minimise the effects on climate change.”
     
The criticism does not worry Sukari. He says the Kiiminki Ideapark has been planned quietly for the very reason of avoiding unnecessary general planning entanglements.
      “This is a council and municipal government decision, and the investment decision has been made. Here the local plan is strong.”
      According to Sukari, there is a clear demand for the Ideapark.
      “In the entire area up here on both sides of the Arctic Circle there are about one million potential customers and in the immediate region around 250,000. There is a clear market slot for something like this.”


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Members of Parliament revising campaign finance reports (16.5.2008)
  Shopping malls are steering euros away from the centre of Helsinki (23.9.2005)

Links:
  Ideapark Lempäälä

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