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Tampere University Urban Lab

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.

The Urban Lab courses follow the three phases of Challenge based learning: Engage, Investigate, and Act. First, the students were given an opportunity to engage with the area by listening to expert talks and interacting with the stakeholders.  Then, the students worked in multidisciplinary groups to solve a challenge by investigating the area. The challenges dealt with topics such as strengthening the sense of community, accessibility of public spaces, inclusion and wellbeing of different age groups, pedestrians’ traffic safety and accessibility, transformation of car centric design, and development of parks and lake areas. The results were presented as posters (Urban Lab 1) and policy briefs (Urban Lab 2).

Throughout the course, the students cooperated with the stakeholders of the area: City of Tampere (particularly Kaukajärvi-Annala Neighbourhood Programme), Kaukajärvi Parish, Kaukajärvi residents’ association, and Wild Zone NGO.

As part of the final phase of challenge based learning, act, the students disseminated their results in an event organized for stakeholders and academia in May 2024 at Kaukajärvi library. A selection of the posters are presented below (click a poster to increase the size).

The text was written by Salla Jokela and Anna-Kaisa Viitanen who are lecturers of the Urban Labs.

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