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Tampere University Urban Lab

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How to promote sustainability in a 1970s' suburb?

Every spring, the students of Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) at Tampere University have an opportunity to bring theory into practice in two phenomenon-based courses: Urban Lab 1: Living in the city and Urban Lab 2: Planning policy and Infrastructure. In spring 2024, Kaukajärvi-Annala, a garden suburb from the 1970s in western Tampere, acted as an urban lab. The SUD students developed new and fresh ideas on how to promote sustainability in the area.

Increasing recreational park use among marginalized populations: Development plan #KauksuAnnala

The main focus of our Urban Lab 2 course has been the development of the Annala-Kaukajärvi neighborhood in Tampere. I am aware that combining these two areas might spark heated discourse among the population, as residents typically associate their identity with one neighborhood at a time rather than both simultaneously. However, since the city of Tampere is developing both areas concurrently, it makes sense to discuss them as a combined area. This theme was also prominent during our field trip "Cities in Flux", which was accompanied by students from similar programs at Utrecht University (BSc) Global Sustainability Sciences and Dublin City University (BA) Climate & Environmental Sustainability. Our hackathon pitch focused on developing the Isolammi park as a connecting factor between the neighborhoods Annala and Kaukajärvi, as well as its potential for constructing neighborhood attractions.

Winter in Tampere: A Finnish mindset for urban planning

In January, we had a week-long field trip in Ylöjärvi and Tampere with our Irish and Dutch peers. During that week, we started to realize how different winter is for us compared to them, also from an urban planning perspective. Urban planning for winter on these latitudes needs more than just throwing gravel on the sidewalks. During the field trip, us students were assigned to identify challenges in Tampere area and propose solutions to them. The week finalized in a hackathon, an intensive event of collaborative problem-solving, which resulted in every group presenting their challenges and solutions in a pitch. The pitches truly inspired us to think about the unique challenges the Finnish winter presents to the field of urban planning.

Collaborating with stakeholders

Urban Lab is a project-based course included to the Sustainable Urban Development program at Tampere University. In this course, we concentrated on engaging with Tulli area in Tampere city center and its development. In the first part of the course multiple stakeholders gave us presentations on their perspectives to the Tulli area. Later, we kept in contact with the stakeholders, as we had a chance to ask questions and interview some of them as part of our data collection for our project work. Having experts from different fields as part of our course was certainly one of its most fruitful elements. However, it was a challenge for us students to try and combine all the perspectives that the stakeholders presented, especially as they were not always aligned with one another. In this blog post, I want to reflect on what I learnt about interacting with stakeholders and dealing with their different perspectives and include some tips for my future self in similar collaborations.

Embracing Change: Discovering New Angles in Project Work

Why should we change our way of doing things, when the current has been witnessed to work? As humans, we often find solace in our comfort zones, and we feel hesitant to expand beyond what we know. Especially in project work, where there’s a lot of work that must be done along the way, trying a new method, or working style can feel like an unnecessary addition to the load. At least I have thought this. However, during Urban Lab 2, a project-based course of the Sustainable Urban Development -program at Tampere University, we were handed multiple opportunities to expand our methods, and I feel like I ended up getting much more growth not only in my way of working a project, but also how I think about new challenges. Let me share some bits of the journey of reevaluating working styles and embracing new ways of presenting work.

What about green space?

The word “urban development” could create the picture of a city full of high buildings and traffic on roads. Many can think that is the same as concrete jungles. Even though individuals with some background knowledge of Sustainable Urban Development understand that it does not always mean this, people who hear about urban development for the first time in their lives could have different opinions on the meaning of the urban city.

Imagining the future of urban lighting

Urban Lab 2: Planning Policy and Infrastructure, is a challenge-based course that is part of the Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) program at Tampere University. For the implementation of the course, the Tulli district acted as the living lab; a dismissed urban area next to the central railway station in Tampere. The course excited me in the battle against light pollution while our group project aimed to identify policy objectives for addressing urban light and noise pollution using our collective expertise in social science and technology. Unfortunately, we had no members from administrative science stream of SUD, but that didn’t hold us back

Students envisioned a more sustainable Tulli

Challenge based learning and transdisciplinary teaching in two Urban Lab courses are core elements in the Bachelor's degree programme in Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) at Tampere University. In spring 2023, the Tulli area in the heart of Tampere acted as an urban lab, offering a great opportunity for the students to solve real life challenges in close cooperation with the stakeholders of the area. Students’ visions were communicated to the public in a poster exhibition in the Tullintori Shopping center.