News

Unique visitor centre that will exhibit both business innovation and city developments will be opened to the public in the City of Turku on 8 December 2017. 

Baltic Urban Lab will organise its 3^rd and last Workshop in cooperation with the annual Nordregio Forum that takes place in Oslo, 29-30^th November, 2017. Our workshop topic will be “Sustainable brownfield regeneration in Nordic and Baltic cities – Transforming contaminated land into urban districts and living areas.”

City of Tallinn has been discussing and testing temporary uses for their Baltic Urban Lab Pilot Site, located in the UNESCO protected area called Skoone Bastion. As temporary uses tend to vary widely in their purpose and duration - their viability depends on the local market and regulatory conditions in addition to the work of entrepreneurial project initiators and their supporters. Common temporary projects include community gardens and other green spaces, special events such as festivals or concert series, and stores or restaurants.The experimentation and reversibility afforded by temporary use practices can encourage a multilayered approach to land use and increase the likelihood that a vacant space will eventually find permanent use.

On October 11, the Baltic Urban Lab project partners met in University of Latvia's Natural Sciences Campus located in the Pilot Site to explore the area and to discuss student planning competition that had been lauched earlier in October as a part of Joint Pilot Review Day for the City of Riga.  Representatives from Tallinn, Turku and Norrköping joined the local urban planners and the students involved in the planning competition to discuss the Pilot Site area, its potential and challenges and to offer some concrete feedback and suggestions to Riga for further implementation.