ABSTRACT
This chapter explains Helsinki Metropolitan Area (HMA) is used to illustrate the roles of strategic planning in the effort to make the HMA a world-leading knowledge city. Helsinki Metropolitan Area is a relatively complex and versatile metropolitan region, which has a fragmented innovation system. Strategy development is a means to foster collaboration but it is also a means of communication, that is, sending messages from one group of actors to another. Strategy development for knowledge cities is an effort to adapt to major global developments, as well as to seek futures, simultaneously. In knowledge city development, strategic planning is sometimes seen as direct guidance for various actors, but also the intended strategy, the plan itself, is seen as an arena of struggle, with different interests competing to determine its content, to determine the outcome of emergence. In local innovation strategy the question is about the interplay between intention and emergence.
