Instead of clearly defined development projects, urban design should entail more continuous processes without predetermined end results. Ecosystem thinking offers guidelines for changing the focus.
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Ilkka Törmä, Elisa Lähde
The development of the new Råängen district in Lund has begun with the construction of a public square, known as the Hage, in the middle of the fields. The project was d esigned byBrendeland & Kristoffersen Architects from Norway. Photograph: Peter Westrup.
Landscape urbanism, resilience (a loan from the field of ecology), and regenerative design (originally from the field of permaculture) – at the turn of the millennium, these and many other concepts from the sphere of landscape and ecology took the general discourse on urban design by storm as a natural continuum for various organic metaphors. They combined a farsighted design approach and staunch faith in natural processes.
Critics comment that landscape urbanism has already ossified into its own elitist style, much like the New York High Line. However, one of the original meanings of the landscape concepts has been the wider application of ecological, systemic thinking in urban design. When ecology or ecosystems are discussed in the context of organizations or psychology, they refer to multidimensional, partly self-organizing networks of interactions and dependencies, as well as the actions that leverage them.
This kind of ecosystemic approach provides a fruitful perspective for urban design as well. After all, climate change and dwindling economic and material resources do require us to constantly find new ways to adapt to unpredictable conditions. Therefore, cities should be planned not as projects, but as continuous processes with open-ended outcomes – a concept that these metaphors help to convey.
A good example of the ecological metaphors that have landed in Finland is the urban fallow. It was coined by Swiss Professors Franz Oswald and Peter Baccini in their book Netzstadt: Designing the Urban (2003), but the idea has since been developed further in many contexts. An urban fallow refers to a place that remains in waiting, such as a run-down, underused or overgrown site in a city. The idea of a site lying fallow takes the notion of wasteland and turns it into an image of fertile soil: urban fallows could actually allow the growth of something different that boosts the vitality of the surrounding urban fabric.
The Sompasaari–Nihti–Suvilahti area in Helsinki, with its temporary uses, could be considered to be one recent manifestation of urban fallowing. Back in around 2010, after the harbour functions had been relocated from Sörnäinen and planning for the area was still underway, the City of Helsinki commissioned a temporary use project that allocated new routes to the former industrial harbour, curated pieces of environmental art and fences with graffiti, and created opportunities for NGOs and urban activists to arrange activities in the area. The Kalasatama Temporary plan was drawn up by Johanna Hyrkäs, Tuomas Siitonen and Hella Hernberg.
The temporary possibilities also yielded unexpected results that refused to remain temporary. One of these was the Sompasauna, a spontaneously created public sauna project and international success story that was sparked by a single abandoned sauna stove; according to Sompasauna’s own estimates, the sauna is visited by as many as 100,000–200,000 bathers each year. Then, on a site that was originally leased to the Finnish Skateboard Association on a temporary basis, a skatepark was built as a volunteer effort, and it has refused to move aside to make way for new development.
Urban culture is often at its strongest when it is created by the people themselves, as was the case in the examples described above. This type of urban culture also requires little to no public funding, making it exactly the type of vitality that our cities are now hoping for. In order for such urban culture to take shape and thrive, we must be willing to look beyond the temporary nature of an urban fallow. We need to ensure that our planning practices leave room for big and small opportunities alike – for those that mature slowly as well as the ones that spring up abruptly, even unexpectedly – and we must recognize them and allow them to continue if need be.
The city as a designed process
A well-known and representative example of new landscape design that understands natural processes, while also being resource-smart, is the 2015 restoration of the Aire river in Geneva that freed the riverbed from the former rectilinear, man-made canal, turning it into a more organic channel shaped by natural forces. The flow was redirected from the canal into a grid of grooves scoured into the ground. Over time, the initial artificial diamond pattern has evolved into a waterway that lives and continues to change with the fluctuating current and the related natural processes.
A similar open-ended design process can be seen in the plans for the future Råängen neighbourhood in Lund, Sweden. Råängen is a stretch of farmland owned by the Lund Cathedral that is to be incorporated in the plans for a wider new urban development. In this type of scenario, the landowner would typically have sold their land to the developers. The 950-year-old Cathedral decided otherwise. They have the perspective needed to be able to look hundreds of years into the future. The Cathedral is selling off plots of land gradually as the area is being constructed, and the proceeds will go towards the upkeep of the medieval cathedral building.
“We want to avoid drawing too precise descriptions of the future of Råängen because that would mean nailing down the plans immediately”, says landscape architect Jake Ford of White Arkitekter who is heading the project team. “Instead, we invite people to discuss what Råängen might become.”
AI images created by architect Tor Lindstrand serve as a tool for exploring the potential futures of Råängen. Image: Tor Lindstrand.
For a start, a public garden square known as the Hage was built on a field; here, vegetation is allowed to grow and take shape gradually while the square serves as a venue for discussions and events. The next phases in the development will be constructed around the Hage. The idea is that each new building will be a response to the experiences gained while building the previous ones. The first residential buildings have been designed by Flores & Prats from Barcelona. The architects that have been selected to design the following five buildings have been instructed by the Råängen project team to come together and discuss the ways in which the whole can be made larger than the sum of its parts. An unusual element of the process is that the architects will also be tasked with finding a developer for their designs in order to make sure that their ideas make it to the final implementation.
Undeveloped plots will remain between the new multistorey residential buildings in Råängen. At first, they will continue to be used as farmland to facilitate an overlap between old and new functions. The unbuilt gaps can also serve as urban fallows, leaving room for adjustments in the overall plans. When all of the remaining sites are also eventually developed sometime in the future, the end result will look different than if all of the neighbouring buildings had been erected one after the other. The aim is to achieve a genuinely diverse and chronologically layered cityscape. Jake Ford admits that reconciling the chosen approach, which will inevitably delay the finalization of the end result, with other urban planning practices is not without friction, as the city is eager to draw up plans for the infrastructure, for example, in good time ahead of the progress in the new neighbourhood.
The first two residential buildings that line the Hage are designed by Flores & Prats (shown in white in the scale model). Photograh: White Arkitekter.
As an example of a long-term design perspective that goes beyond urban fallowing, we feel that Råängen represents the ways in which the design of an urban development process, in alignment with the idea of an ecosystem, can differ from designing an urban development project. Typically, a project refers to a meticulously scheduled undertaking with a clearly defined beginning and end. We do need projects. They constitute a highly efficient means to implement urban development. Even though urban design and planning is inevitably complex, is implemented in multiple phases and always follows a specific process, we could do with a more conscious understanding, utilisation and planning of the inherently unfinished nature of a process itself.
As a matter of fact, processes with their many legs and checkpoints are precisely what could offer a path forward, to concrete action, in situations in which the drying up of resources causes ambitious urban designs to be reduced to symbolic visions and any actual development is becoming more and more dependent on the property market and its specifications, as stated by Professor of Urban Design Ali Madanipour in 2010. Finnish cities and municipalities are also becoming increasingly active in commissioning strategic visions and development plans. These can serve as a robust and rooted element in the type of process design that we are referring to, but they also carry the risk recognised by Madanipour of being downgraded to mere marketing chatter.
The difference between project- and process-oriented design could be demonstrated by the following contrasts:
Project
Designing a city
Linear
To be completed, with known end result
Risk avoidance
Analytical, understanding parts
Shared methods
Centralised ownership
Cost and proceeds of construction
Process
Creating a city
Cyclic
Initiated, open-ended
Learning from mistakes
Systemic, understanding connections
Understanding of diverse methods
Widely divided ownership
Lifecycle costs and proceeds
A desire for order and avoidance of risks
After the urban fallow in Kalasatama, Helsinki and other cities have begun to apply process-oriented design through the means of so-called placemaking or tactical urbanism in the design of streets, parks, squares and even buildings – particularly in situations in which the aim is to transform an already existing site. An example of such an approach is the placemaking process commissioned by the City of Helsinki from Päivi Raivio and Daniel Bumann for the Ylä-Malmi Square, starting in 2021. The process entails informing various stakeholders about the upcoming renewal of the square, making swift and subtle improvements in the usability of the square, as well as collecting local views about the site by conducting experiments of possible new activities and functions. The purpose is to utilize the collected information in the more thorough planning. The place design for the square, then, is part of a more comprehensive urban renewal in the Malmi district.
Despite the increasing application of participatory and interactive design practices, the project mentality is deeply rooted in our urban design policy. Päivi Raivio stated in Outlines in 2022 that Finns tend to be afraid of taking risks – everything needs to be predictable and pre-planned. This leaves no room for process thinking; experimentation, feedback and iteration. We need to pay more attention to process-oriented qualities, which is to say to the ways in which the “state of fermentation” within a city is put to use. In the words of sociologist Richard Sennett in Designing Disorder from 2020: “What’s stayed constant [from the 1960s] is capital’s desire to make a city into a product, which can be understood and sold as a package rather than a process”.
Our practices have been moulded towards the analytical and the linear for centuries, and unlearning them will not happen in the blink of an eye. Here, an apt analogy is found in the current objective of moving away from a linear towards a circular economy, which is linked to the same phenomenon of ecosystem thinking as is process-oriented design. Entire industries, with all of their accumulated knowledge and skills, value chains and models of revenue generation, need to change before circular design can move on from pilots to established practices. Similarly, urban design and the related sectors should be adjusted on multiple levels from the base values to design practices. Only then can a city’s residential and commuter connections, buildings, public areas and services be developed in an iterative fashion and designed as a wider process akin to, for instance, Råängen in Sweden.
A time for re-evaluation
The metaphors related to landscape and ecology can help us view and design the city as a systemic whole that is more than the sum of its parts. Then, the focus is on the features of urban development that manifest in the form of various synergies, as well as the social, technological and economic feedback loops that steer the development in the long term. With the climate and other conditions becoming more and more unpredictable, the internal and external pressure for change affecting our cities is also becoming more intense. Linear project-oriented design methods should be taken apart and turned into more flexible process-oriented practices.
However, one can never draw direct parallels between ecological and social or economic processes. This is not the first time that the field of urban design has sought influences from science, and the results have not always been favourable. Theories on the battle of the species once inspired a type of laissez-faire capitalism that idealised the survival of the fittest, which has also found its sounding board in urban policy across the world.
When cities begin to introduce process-oriented features into their planning practices, they should be aware of the insidious ways in which the influence of the fittest can still infiltrate the scene, if transparency and the representation of diverse groups of people are not given enough attention. Even an open process that involves a wide group of stakeholders can maintain social inequality because the more fortunate members of society are usually the ones with the best resources to get involved.
Process-oriented urban development does not preclude capital gains. The Telliskivi area next to the Old Town in Tallinn is a good example of this. Instead of redoing and renting out all of the properties in one fell swoop, the company managing the Telliskivi Creative City complex has been gradually renovating decrepit Soviet industrial buildings since 2007, with low-yield culture-sector tenants raising interest in the new development. The Fotografiska museum of photography that opened its doors in 2019, with its Michelin-Star restaurant, is a perfect token of the increasing property values in the area. Still, significantly reduced rents continue to be offered to new small businesses and non-commercial operators, even though there is a waiting list of well-paying would-be tenants.
In a 2018 interview for the Finnish Aamulehti newspaper, the director of the Telliskivi Creative City, Jaanus Jussi, stated that the Telliskivi success story cannot be copied as such elsewhere and that a city should not be allowed to go too far towards finishing the designs for similar areas, as the best ideas come about naturally. This is yet another good argument in favour of process-oriented design over neatly pre-packaged projects. We are of the mind that the process perspective could also play a part in the wider societal mapping of alternatives for the prevailing neoliberal mechanisms, as well as for the current one-sided idea of humanity and the hierarchical relationship to nature. The examples we have presented in this article provide clues as to the potential first applications of this approach in urban design.
Ilkka Törmä on is the editor-in-chief of Outlines and an urban designer.
