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organisation

Urban Lab is a testing ground for urban innovations. We work on new solutions to improve and diversify the urban life. As the name tells, the Lab is all about experimenting. Our projects involve scientific, social and artistic methods.

Urban Lab is the focal point for studying cities, urban issues and phenomena.

Created in 2006 under the name of Urban Positive, the Lab has passed its trial period. We have laid down the principles of action and determined our main work areas: popularising urban studies, promoting citizen participation in urban planning, and enhancing sustainable city development. Each of these involves location-specific activities.

I Popularising Urban Studies

One of our missions is to promote studying cities in a wider context and to enforce urban studies as a discipline in Estonia. We unite researchers from various disciplines, gather and spread urban studies knowledge and raise target groups’ awareness of urban geography to achieve our goal. So far we have written articles and conducted some interdisciplinary research projects, taken part in conferences and given lectures to high school students.

The Urban Lab Community gathers practitioners, activists and researchers interested in urban issues and in improving the urban life. Our Urban Community runs different seminars, public events, club meetings and interactive communication.

II Promoting citizen participation in urban planning

As a proactive civic organisation, Urban Lab sees the active participation of citizens as a vital precondition for sustainable development of the (urban) society. Therefore our aim is to raise urban dwellers’ and district communities’ awareness of their rights; of how to better articulate their needs and thus participate in shaping their living environment. On the other hand our aim is to ensure that different stakeholders and sectors would be equally represented in the planning process.

So far we have mainly expressed our thoughts in the media, plus we have intervened into the process of some detailed plans where the public opinion has been underrepresented (e.g. the case of Tallinn Hippodrome and the case of Haabneeme centre).

III Enhancing sustainable city development

The fact that the production and consumption of resources is accumulating into urban areas sets cities in the middle of the sustainability debate. Cities as the centres of innovations and political and economic power have a major role in responding to these challenges. Urban Lab campaigns for an integral city where all the different layers of the society follow the idea of sustainability (bicycle traffic, urban gardening, etc).

So far we have contributed to this debate by conducting an urban gardening research that tried to find out the possibilities and outcomes of rooftop gardening in Estonia. We will continue this work by promoting community gardens among district organisations, congregations and creative industries.

Location-specific solutions

All our priority areas are inter-vowen with location-specific solutions of practical value. These activities deal with the problems of a chosen location. Impulses for intervention are of artistic or planning nature. To achieve this we use both our competence and creativity.

Examples: turning the Viru Street pedestrian tunnel into an art gallery.

NGO Linnalabor / Urban Laboratory (2009) 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License

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