What are the issues surrounding marginalization and visions for sustainability transformation in an urban growth context in Finland’s concretely and symbolically most attractive city? This is what the project Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) set out to explore in November 2024 at the project’s third and final citizen workshop in Tampere. Participants were invited through local community centers, local sustainability-related associations, and organizations offering support services.
The workshop in Tampere attracted 14 registered participants, of whom 11 arrived. The heavy snowstorm that day and the aggressive flu season that marked the beginning of the winter brought the challenges of hearing citizens to the fore. On the one hand, opportunities to participate are unequal, depending on people’s resources to move from one place to another in challenging weather conditions. On the other hand, health status affects opportunities to participate: if being heard depends on a single opportunity, many voices may remain unheard.
The workshop topic was the prerequisites for a good life for the diverse Tampere residents at present and in the future. In line with the implementation of previous workshops, the participants jointly developed visions for the ideal future of Tampere for themselves and their everyday communities and reflected on the structural, social, and cultural needs for change central to realizing these visions. Researchers assisted in constructing the visions mainly by listening and supporting so that all participants were heard.
Initial sentiments from the workshop and the participants’ messages were shared the day after in an open seminar aimed at citizens and professionals working on sustainability issues. In that seminar, talks were also heard from invited experts: Anna-Maria Isola, leading researcher at THL; Salla Jokela, university lecturer at the Tampere University; and Jenni Erjansola, researcher at the City of Helsinki. In addition, recent master’s graduates from the Tampere University, Saga Valtonen and Roosa Solkinen, shared their findings from their master’s theses on sustainability transformation. This fruitful dialogue is also reflected in the following insights compiled from the workshop discussions to support the promotion of a just sustainability transformation.
Communality as the foundation of well-being
In principle, the participants considered Tampere a good place to live in its current state. The size of the city was perceived as suitable: there is room for diversity, but when it comes to mobility, the city is compact – ”The buses run”, one participant summed up accessibility. Based on the group discussions, however, the realization of social sustainability also depends on an individual’s background. While one person sees that origin does not determine a person’s ’Tampereanness’, another experiences that appearance alone can lead to encountering racist violence, since one cannot know whether a person who looks foreign is of Finnish or Tamperean origin – which directly contradicts the view presented first.
The significance of communality and solidarity, along with the accessibility of different forms of community, were emphasized in the visions for the future and the perceived needs for change. In the ideal future, Tampere was seen as a communal city where everyone can feel a sense of belonging, feel safe to be themselves, and express themselves as they are.
The price of pursuing growth is increasing inequality.
Communality and participation were seen as key factors of well-being that should also be considered in urban planning through construction and infrastructure that support the formation of communities, as well as by preventing the segregation of city districts. The latter was also mentioned by Salla Jokela in her seminar presentation. However, based on Jokela’s observations, unregulated property rights and rent are often preferred, especially in waterfront construction, at the expense of less advantaged city residents. This contradiction results from the fact that ’sustainable growth’, i.e., the pursuit of economic sustainability, commonly trumps other aspects of sustainability in urban planning, especially in decisions concerning the planning of land areas with high economic and utility value. The price of pursuing growth is increasing inequality.
In the workshops, selfishness, prejudice, and a lack of manners were perceived as having recently increased and eroded communality. People were thought to increasingly live in their bubbles without face-to-face encounters and genuine presence with each other. The reason for this was seen not only in the increased use of social media and smartphones, but also in current politics, depicted as promoting ’us vs. them’ attitudes. The divisions were not regarded as limited to ethnicity, for instance, but also to the socio-economic status of citizens: some are doing well while others have it worse than before. Public authorities were called upon to take responsibility for ensuring citizen well-being and inclusion and halting the growth of inequality.
In her seminar presentation, Anna-Maria Isola also approached the deepening of inequality. When people who need special support have to ’compete’ against each other for the constantly shrinking resources, these groups end up distancing themselves from each other and decision-making. Several small group discussions emphasized that meeting different people can, together with increasing diverse participation, reduce loneliness, discrimination, and prejudice between different population groups. The importance of meeting and interacting with residents was highlighted in the seminar presentations as well. Roosa Solkinen discussed how different generations perceive each other’s sustainability concepts and how people can be surprised to find similarities when faced with each other’s different points of view.
Participation as a prerequisite for agency
Several workshop discussions demanded encouragement of residents to help one another and take care of common matters, for example, by increasing residents’ responsibility and volunteering to manage and use the areas intended for them. Tampere was envisioned as a city where anyone can be an active citizen, even if it was not economically productive.
Concrete ways to increase communality were also suggested, such as enabling and promoting different forms of shared living and supporting residents’ independent local activities: for example, the city providing premises for these activities. Easily accessible and evenly distributed leisure, sports, cultural activities, and community spaces were repeatedly mentioned as important factors that increase communality, participation, and well-being. According to Anna-Maria Isola, the same factors have emerged in research. One workshop participant expressed sadness over the reality that easily accessible culture is the first to be cut, despite its importance for residents’ well-being.
Anna-Maija Isola, Chief researcher of THL, at the project’s seminar in Tampere.
According to research by THL (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare), work is a significant source of agency and participation for Finns, which is why unemployment and disability tend to multiply the risk of low participation. For this reason, it would be important to ensure that everyone has the opportunity for active participation in society, regardless of employment or work ability. In the workshop, universal basic income was also proposed to improve the activity of residents in different circumstances.
According to Jenni Erjansola, research on local democracy indicates that it is important for participation in Helsinki that simple and informal opportunities for resident participation are available. Furthermore, the participation process should allow for different voices while accepting that the outcome may not always satisfy everyone. Based on Anna-Maria Isola’s research, community agency and the visibility of city residents can arise from small and surprising, spontaneous and informal actions: for example, residents decorating their windows with silk paper or leaving unauthorized paintings visible on public exercise stairs.
Deterioration of security and accessibility to services in Tampere is a concern
The growth of the city raised concerns during the citizen workshop. In particular, crime, substance abuse, and mental health issues were considered to have increased recently, especially in the city center. At the same time, the perception was that preventive services for these problems had declined. In the visions for the future, it was hoped that Tampere would become a safe city where issues are openly discussed, root causes of poor health and crime are addressed, and services are truly accessible to all residents with different needs and abilities.
Regarding security, several comments called not only for a functioning safety net and effective prevention of problems that predispose to violence, but also for more visible security-related services in the city. In the current situation, the perception was that problems were not necessarily addressed even when they materialized, such as in the forms of vandalism and disruptive behavior. Several comments pointed out that public services had distanced themselves from those who need them. Public services were criticized for only formally consulting citizens about developing and implementing services.
In her seminar presentation, Anna-Maria Isola noted that citizens’ connections to sources of power also increase their experience of social inclusion. Similarly, long-term difficulties combined with structural exclusion intensify marginalization, which can cause security threats, such as increased substance abuse and violent behavior that the workshop participants had observed.
Environmental consideration and the ease of sustainable choices in city residents’ daily lives
Environmental issues received less attention in the Tampere workshop than in the previous workshops of Lieksa and Kemijärvi. On the one hand, this can be explained by the fact that issues related to the use of nature are not as strongly present in the everyday lives of Tampere residents as in the municipalities and villages of North Karelia and Lapland. Moreover, the researchers did not bring up these issues as headline topics during the workshop. Another explanatory factor may be the significance of urban life for the participants. Social inequality, variation in access to services, and the diversity of residents seem to affect people interested in sustainability issues differently in Tampere than in places not built on such close coexistence. These themes were also strongly present in national politics during the workshop.
Nature and environmental issues were not, in any case, trivial matters for the participants of the Tampere workshop. This became evident from a participant’s astonished comment at the end of the workshop: ”We didn’t talk about nature at all, how did that happen? We’ll have to add that later.”
In some groups, ecological sustainability and local nature in Tampere were discussed. Tampere of the future was envisioned as a city of ecological urban planning where everyone has equal opportunities to make sustainable, easy choices in their everyday lives. Climate and environmental issues were to be taken seriously in residents’ daily lives and urban planning. To promote this, it was hoped that environmental awareness among residents would be improved through education, public authorities would have to take ecological impacts into account in urban planning and public procurement, public transport would be made simpler and more accessible, and companies would be held accountable.
Appreciation and easy accessibility of local nature and related outdoor activities were also emphasized. Based on Salla Jokela’s seminar presentation, the accessibility of local nature is connected to the development of inequality. Planning increases inequality among city residents in that when beaches are planned and built, it is concurrently decided who has the right to the local nature and landscape.
In her research on the participation of Helsinki residents, Jenni Erjansola has found that residents are particularly inclined to participate in developing their physical local environment. The opportunity for low-threshold participation increases residents’ agency and reduces segregation between city districts and population groups. Erjansola’s research indicates that participation in citizen budgeting increases city residents’ interest in influencing their residential area and the city’s decision-making. Anna-Maria Isola’s seminar presentation also showed that when people feel they belong to their environment, their involvement in environmental issues is greater. Participation and taking responsibility for promoting the common good contribute to one’s well-being.
Isola, however, reminded that when climate action by citizens is pursued at a structural level, such as in the form of energy renovations of residential buildings and purchasing electric cars, this requires significant financial resources. Therefore, not everyone concerned about the environment can participate in these actions. This may increase the feeling of exclusion among citizens who lack the financial means to act on environmental problems.
Experiences of exclusion and inability to influence can, in turn, contribute to polarization and victim mentality associated with the climate debate.
A similar observation surfaced in Saga Valtonen’s seminar presentation: climate action directed at the structural level can also produce inequality between rural and urban areas and provoke feelings of injustice and exclusion among rural residents regarding climate issues. This is because the proposed climate action often lies outside the everyday realities of rural residents. Experiences of exclusion and inability to influence can, in turn, contribute to polarization and victim mentality associated with the climate debate. For this reason, it would be important for sustainable everyday choices to be easy and economically feasible for all citizens.
The resident perspectives and seminar presentations from Tampere highlighted the enormous importance of participation and sense of belonging, not only as a basis for general well-being, but also as a prerequisite for solving difficult, shared problems. If ordinary residents have a genuine opportunity to influence and collaborate on the improvement of even seemingly insignificant matters in their everyday environment – and this practice becomes established and spread – this can lead to a just and effective change in society toward sustainability.
EMMI SALMIVUORI, KIRSI PAULIINA KALLIO & ANNA MUSTONEN
Photos: Tiia-Mari Tervaharju
In quotation marks are workshop outputs or notes of the working group members who participated in the workshop. The workshop was not recorded or filmed.
The following people also contributed to producing this text: Päivi Armila (University of Eastern Finland), Simo Häyrynen (University of Eastern Finland), Timo Kuusiola (Creatura), Maarit Laihonen (University of Eastern Finland), Tiia-Mari Tervaharju (University of Eastern Finland), and Vilhelmiina Vainikka (Tampere University).
The article has been translated into English using an artificial intelligence translation program. The translation has been reviewed by an editor at Versus.
Emmi Salmivuori
Emmi Salmivuori is a doctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland’s Department of Geographical and Historical Studies and works with the funding of the Kone Foundation. Emmi is also the project coordinator for the project Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) project.
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio is Professor of Environmental Pedagogy at the Tampere University. Approaching the environment as a pedagogical issue, she strives to open new perspectives on the world as a space for shared life. Kirsi Pauliina is the editor-in-chief of the journal Fennia and a member of the working group of the project Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) project.
Anna Mustonen
Anna Mustonen is a doctoral researcher in environmental politics at the University of Eastern Finland’s Department of Geographical and Historical Studies. Anna is also a project manager of the Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) project.
The workshop in Tampere attracted 14 registered participants, of whom 11 arrived. The heavy snowstorm that day and the aggressive flu season that marked the beginning of the winter brought the challenges of hearing citizens to the fore. On the one hand, opportunities to participate are unequal, depending on people’s resources to move from one place to another in challenging weather conditions. On the other hand, health status affects opportunities to participate: if being heard depends on a single opportunity, many voices may remain unheard.
The workshop topic was the prerequisites for a good life for the diverse Tampere residents at present and in the future. In line with the implementation of previous workshops, the participants jointly developed visions for the ideal future of Tampere for themselves and their everyday communities and reflected on the structural, social, and cultural needs for change central to realizing these visions. Researchers assisted in constructing the visions mainly by listening and supporting so that all participants were heard.
Initial sentiments from the workshop and the participants’ messages were shared the day after in an open seminar aimed at citizens and professionals working on sustainability issues. In that seminar, talks were also heard from invited experts: Anna-Maria Isola, leading researcher at THL; Salla Jokela, university lecturer at the Tampere University; and Jenni Erjansola, researcher at the City of Helsinki. In addition, recent master’s graduates from the Tampere University, Saga Valtonen and Roosa Solkinen, shared their findings from their master’s theses on sustainability transformation. This fruitful dialogue is also reflected in the following insights compiled from the workshop discussions to support the promotion of a just sustainability transformation.
Communality as the foundation of well-being
In principle, the participants considered Tampere a good place to live in its current state. The size of the city was perceived as suitable: there is room for diversity, but when it comes to mobility, the city is compact – ”The buses run”, one participant summed up accessibility. Based on the group discussions, however, the realization of social sustainability also depends on an individual’s background. While one person sees that origin does not determine a person’s ’Tampereanness’, another experiences that appearance alone can lead to encountering racist violence, since one cannot know whether a person who looks foreign is of Finnish or Tamperean origin – which directly contradicts the view presented first.
The significance of communality and solidarity, along with the accessibility of different forms of community, were emphasized in the visions for the future and the perceived needs for change. In the ideal future, Tampere was seen as a communal city where everyone can feel a sense of belonging, feel safe to be themselves, and express themselves as they are.
Communality and participation were seen as key factors of well-being that should also be considered in urban planning through construction and infrastructure that support the formation of communities, as well as by preventing the segregation of city districts. The latter was also mentioned by Salla Jokela in her seminar presentation. However, based on Jokela’s observations, unregulated property rights and rent are often preferred, especially in waterfront construction, at the expense of less advantaged city residents. This contradiction results from the fact that ’sustainable growth’, i.e., the pursuit of economic sustainability, commonly trumps other aspects of sustainability in urban planning, especially in decisions concerning the planning of land areas with high economic and utility value. The price of pursuing growth is increasing inequality.
In the workshops, selfishness, prejudice, and a lack of manners were perceived as having recently increased and eroded communality. People were thought to increasingly live in their bubbles without face-to-face encounters and genuine presence with each other. The reason for this was seen not only in the increased use of social media and smartphones, but also in current politics, depicted as promoting ’us vs. them’ attitudes. The divisions were not regarded as limited to ethnicity, for instance, but also to the socio-economic status of citizens: some are doing well while others have it worse than before. Public authorities were called upon to take responsibility for ensuring citizen well-being and inclusion and halting the growth of inequality.
In her seminar presentation, Anna-Maria Isola also approached the deepening of inequality. When people who need special support have to ’compete’ against each other for the constantly shrinking resources, these groups end up distancing themselves from each other and decision-making. Several small group discussions emphasized that meeting different people can, together with increasing diverse participation, reduce loneliness, discrimination, and prejudice between different population groups. The importance of meeting and interacting with residents was highlighted in the seminar presentations as well. Roosa Solkinen discussed how different generations perceive each other’s sustainability concepts and how people can be surprised to find similarities when faced with each other’s different points of view.
Participation as a prerequisite for agency
Several workshop discussions demanded encouragement of residents to help one another and take care of common matters, for example, by increasing residents’ responsibility and volunteering to manage and use the areas intended for them. Tampere was envisioned as a city where anyone can be an active citizen, even if it was not economically productive.
Concrete ways to increase communality were also suggested, such as enabling and promoting different forms of shared living and supporting residents’ independent local activities: for example, the city providing premises for these activities. Easily accessible and evenly distributed leisure, sports, cultural activities, and community spaces were repeatedly mentioned as important factors that increase communality, participation, and well-being. According to Anna-Maria Isola, the same factors have emerged in research. One workshop participant expressed sadness over the reality that easily accessible culture is the first to be cut, despite its importance for residents’ well-being.
According to research by THL (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare), work is a significant source of agency and participation for Finns, which is why unemployment and disability tend to multiply the risk of low participation. For this reason, it would be important to ensure that everyone has the opportunity for active participation in society, regardless of employment or work ability. In the workshop, universal basic income was also proposed to improve the activity of residents in different circumstances.
According to Jenni Erjansola, research on local democracy indicates that it is important for participation in Helsinki that simple and informal opportunities for resident participation are available. Furthermore, the participation process should allow for different voices while accepting that the outcome may not always satisfy everyone. Based on Anna-Maria Isola’s research, community agency and the visibility of city residents can arise from small and surprising, spontaneous and informal actions: for example, residents decorating their windows with silk paper or leaving unauthorized paintings visible on public exercise stairs.
Deterioration of security and accessibility to services in Tampere is a concern
The growth of the city raised concerns during the citizen workshop. In particular, crime, substance abuse, and mental health issues were considered to have increased recently, especially in the city center. At the same time, the perception was that preventive services for these problems had declined. In the visions for the future, it was hoped that Tampere would become a safe city where issues are openly discussed, root causes of poor health and crime are addressed, and services are truly accessible to all residents with different needs and abilities.
Regarding security, several comments called not only for a functioning safety net and effective prevention of problems that predispose to violence, but also for more visible security-related services in the city. In the current situation, the perception was that problems were not necessarily addressed even when they materialized, such as in the forms of vandalism and disruptive behavior. Several comments pointed out that public services had distanced themselves from those who need them. Public services were criticized for only formally consulting citizens about developing and implementing services.
In her seminar presentation, Anna-Maria Isola noted that citizens’ connections to sources of power also increase their experience of social inclusion. Similarly, long-term difficulties combined with structural exclusion intensify marginalization, which can cause security threats, such as increased substance abuse and violent behavior that the workshop participants had observed.
Environmental consideration and the ease of sustainable choices in city residents’ daily lives
Environmental issues received less attention in the Tampere workshop than in the previous workshops of Lieksa and Kemijärvi. On the one hand, this can be explained by the fact that issues related to the use of nature are not as strongly present in the everyday lives of Tampere residents as in the municipalities and villages of North Karelia and Lapland. Moreover, the researchers did not bring up these issues as headline topics during the workshop. Another explanatory factor may be the significance of urban life for the participants. Social inequality, variation in access to services, and the diversity of residents seem to affect people interested in sustainability issues differently in Tampere than in places not built on such close coexistence. These themes were also strongly present in national politics during the workshop.
Nature and environmental issues were not, in any case, trivial matters for the participants of the Tampere workshop. This became evident from a participant’s astonished comment at the end of the workshop: ”We didn’t talk about nature at all, how did that happen? We’ll have to add that later.”
In some groups, ecological sustainability and local nature in Tampere were discussed. Tampere of the future was envisioned as a city of ecological urban planning where everyone has equal opportunities to make sustainable, easy choices in their everyday lives. Climate and environmental issues were to be taken seriously in residents’ daily lives and urban planning. To promote this, it was hoped that environmental awareness among residents would be improved through education, public authorities would have to take ecological impacts into account in urban planning and public procurement, public transport would be made simpler and more accessible, and companies would be held accountable.
Appreciation and easy accessibility of local nature and related outdoor activities were also emphasized. Based on Salla Jokela’s seminar presentation, the accessibility of local nature is connected to the development of inequality. Planning increases inequality among city residents in that when beaches are planned and built, it is concurrently decided who has the right to the local nature and landscape.
In her research on the participation of Helsinki residents, Jenni Erjansola has found that residents are particularly inclined to participate in developing their physical local environment. The opportunity for low-threshold participation increases residents’ agency and reduces segregation between city districts and population groups. Erjansola’s research indicates that participation in citizen budgeting increases city residents’ interest in influencing their residential area and the city’s decision-making. Anna-Maria Isola’s seminar presentation also showed that when people feel they belong to their environment, their involvement in environmental issues is greater. Participation and taking responsibility for promoting the common good contribute to one’s well-being.
Isola, however, reminded that when climate action by citizens is pursued at a structural level, such as in the form of energy renovations of residential buildings and purchasing electric cars, this requires significant financial resources. Therefore, not everyone concerned about the environment can participate in these actions. This may increase the feeling of exclusion among citizens who lack the financial means to act on environmental problems.
A similar observation surfaced in Saga Valtonen’s seminar presentation: climate action directed at the structural level can also produce inequality between rural and urban areas and provoke feelings of injustice and exclusion among rural residents regarding climate issues. This is because the proposed climate action often lies outside the everyday realities of rural residents. Experiences of exclusion and inability to influence can, in turn, contribute to polarization and victim mentality associated with the climate debate. For this reason, it would be important for sustainable everyday choices to be easy and economically feasible for all citizens.
The resident perspectives and seminar presentations from Tampere highlighted the enormous importance of participation and sense of belonging, not only as a basis for general well-being, but also as a prerequisite for solving difficult, shared problems. If ordinary residents have a genuine opportunity to influence and collaborate on the improvement of even seemingly insignificant matters in their everyday environment – and this practice becomes established and spread – this can lead to a just and effective change in society toward sustainability.
EMMI SALMIVUORI, KIRSI PAULIINA KALLIO & ANNA MUSTONEN
Photos: Tiia-Mari Tervaharju
The following people also contributed to producing this text: Päivi Armila (University of Eastern Finland), Simo Häyrynen (University of Eastern Finland), Timo Kuusiola (Creatura), Maarit Laihonen (University of Eastern Finland), Tiia-Mari Tervaharju (University of Eastern Finland), and Vilhelmiina Vainikka (Tampere University).
Emmi Salmivuori
Emmi Salmivuori is a doctoral researcher at the University of Eastern Finland’s Department of Geographical and Historical Studies and works with the funding of the Kone Foundation. Emmi is also the project coordinator for the project Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) project.
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio
Kirsi Pauliina Kallio is Professor of Environmental Pedagogy at the Tampere University. Approaching the environment as a pedagogical issue, she strives to open new perspectives on the world as a space for shared life. Kirsi Pauliina is the editor-in-chief of the journal Fennia and a member of the working group of the project Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) project.
Anna Mustonen
Anna Mustonen is a doctoral researcher in environmental politics at the University of Eastern Finland’s Department of Geographical and Historical Studies. Anna is also a project manager of the Kestävyysmurroksen marginaalit (’Sustainability transformation from the margins’) project.
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