Tag: Finland
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Density without Delight: Vermonniitty’s Lessons for Urban Planners
Vermonniitty’s design highlights a pressing need: reinventing our approach to suburban design for a better future.
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Collaborative learning and an updated toolbox: two ideas for cities to make a U-turn on car-centric planning
Helsinki’s car tunnel plans show how taking action is the hard part in sustainable mobility policy. Turning transportation departments into learning organizations can help untie the knot.
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The Rise of the Parklet
COVID-19 is helping parklets mushroom in Helsinki and other Finnish cities, ushering a quiet revolution in street space distribution.
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From Life-Filled Imagery to Dead Plazas – Why Cities Need a Place-Driven Future
Does anyone else pay attention to this: many times the renderings of new urban development projects include a plaza or similar open space, sitting somewhere in front or between the proposed new buildings. Scaling purposes aside, the glitzy visualizations paint pictures of future plazas teeming with life. People are lounging around, meeting each other and…
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Global warming is slowly changing life in Finnish cities
Fighting climate change is unavoidable to save the planet. But for everyday life, the future has already arrived in urban Finland. To soften global warming’s impact on social sustainability, cities need to get active about adapting and keeping traditions going. Finland’s chilly temperatures this summer have inspired many to talk about global warming. They’ve called…
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The Quest for Terrific Courtyards in Creating High-Class Density
Kallio, my neighborhood in central Helsinki is a fantastic and lively place to live in. Most services are within a couple of blocks, there are plenty of bars and restaurants to choose from, you can hang out in a number of characteristic parks, and the connections to elsewhere in Helsinki are superb. There’s little to…
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Could Your City Benefit from DIY Urban Planning? Yes, the Experience from Pro Helsinki 2.0 Suggests
It’s been a bit more than a year since I and my urbanist comrades accomplished one of the most exciting things ever – well, at least as far as urban planning goes. Following about 10 months of work during evenings, weekends, and holidays, in October 2014 we finally published Pro Helsinki 2.0, the alternative master…
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Retrofitting Suburbia – A New Life for Vantaa’s Myyrmäki
Goodbye underperforming asphalt. Bringing urban feel to the suburbs is now officially on the horizon in the Helsinki area. In September a community-based do-it-yourself initiative called Myyrmäki-liike (Myyrmäki Movement) invited me to talk about contemporary urban development trends. They had staged an event to generate discussion around a set of nine proposals to transformation the…
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Could Europe’s Refugee Influx Trigger a Shift Towards Leaner Urban Policies?
The sudden need to make room for asylum-seekers may gather momentum for inventing new ways to solve housing shortages in Finland’s growth centers. Urbanization is a highly transformative force in Finland. Our seven biggest urban centers are projected to grow by one million new residents by 2050 thanks to rural-to-urban migration, the geography of natural…
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Tactical Urbanism Can Help Cities Meet Changing Livability Demands
This spring, Finland’s second city Tampere has been the scene of an interesting urban planning spectacle. Or probably ‘drama’ is a better word to describe the turmoil around the city’s ambition to move on to the second phase of its experiment for temporarily transforming Tampere’s main street, Hämeenkatu, into a transit-only zone. The first phase…