Studio project 2019 Autumn semester
Location: Viikinranta, Helsinki
Urban Design
Urban means congestion, congestion of people and functions that creates city life. In my 2019 Autumn semester studio work I studied revitalization of a suburb in Helsinki. The goal of the project was to take the studio's theme of mixing living and industry and take it further. The goal of the project was to concentrate all human activity to cities. Taking functions such as agriculture and turning it into urban farming or mining and resource extraction and turning it into urban mining and circular economy.
The benefit of bringing production back to cities is that it reduces the human foot print on nature. It also creates a healthier relationship between us and the goods we consume, when we see where food and our clothes come from. Production creates functions in cities that could not otherwise exist. A suburb such as Viikinranta cannot necessarily sustain an eco-food store. But if the there was a cucumber farm maybe they could have a cucumber shop as well. When the income comes from production rather than retail diverse functions are possible whether they have the critical mass of customers in the neighborhood. Diverse functions create city life which in time begins to fuel itself. Things happen because things happen. This is how resilient neighborhoods are born.
published in: Eleven architecture and interior architecture projects by students at Aalto University, Dezeen 26.6.2020
