Students' posters provide new insights into the development of Hiedanranta

10.6.2022

SUD students presenting their final work in Urban Lab I.

Transdisciplinary teaching in two Urban Lab courses is one of the unique elements of the Bachelor's degree programme in Sustainable Urban Development (SUD) at Tampere University. In spring 2022, cooperation and communication between students and external stakeholders took place in the future city district of Hiedanranta in Tampere. The course culminated in a poster exhibition during the Finnish Urban Studies Conference 2022 with theme 'Sustainable Cities.'

The posters showcase SUD students’ work in Urban Lab 1: Living with the City. In this course, the students conducted group projects, focusing on potential solutions to the challenges of sustainable urban develoment in the district of Hiedanranta, which is an old industrial area being developed as a testbed for innovative projects related to smart and sustainable housing, energy, transportation, and business. Working in Hiedanranta offered the students opportunities to engage with actors outside of the university. These included skateboarders from the Pirkanmaan Kaarikoirat ry (Ramp Dogs) and students from the skateboarding programme of the Sampo Upper Secondary School, who are currently contributing to building a new indoor skatepark in an old plastic factory known as ‘Muovitehdas.’ The posters shown below were presented by SUD students during the Hiedanranta pre-excursion of the Finnish Urban Studies Conference 2022. Click a poster to view a PDF.

In the coming months, we will be posting blogs written by the SUD students, where they reflect on their experiences working together – and with people outside of the university – to develop their ideas for the Urban Lab.

Takapiha Poster — ‘Takapiha’ poster by Ellen Heinaro, Shamsur Raza Chowdhury & Fanni Vesa

HIDI House Poster — ‘HIDI House’ poster by Diana Kobzhassarova, Aurora Luukkanen & Atticus Russwurm

Sustainable Culture Factory poster — ‘Sustainable Culture Factory’ poster by Luize Liepa & Aku Puskala

Muovitehdas website Poster — ‘Muovitehdas website’ poster by Kaj-Erik Dahlberg, Linh Nguyen & Juho Peltola

Keep reading

5.9.2023

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.

25.8.2023

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.

21.8.2023

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.