The First Year of UrbCitizenPower: Pori’s Perspective

Learning creativity and dreaming in Pori, Finland

Goal of the project in Pori is to make the city center more attractive for organising events, especially on the grassroots level. We are looking for new ways to engage citizens, the city administration, cultural actors, businesses and property owners for a more prosperous and lively city center.

In UrbCitizenPower, we pay extra attention to our creative process and the way we want the local network to work together. We also believe in a learning-by-doing approach, where practical experimentation is the part forward.

So far we have had three local stakeholder meetings. Theme of our first proper meeting in December 2024 was ”The Goal”. Project manager Harri Sippola gave background info about the project goals, funding and partners to participants and emphasised ”policy instrument” as the goal. After this we aimed to establish a common understanding of the current issues and potentials of our city center.

The second meeting in January 2025 was about ”The Dream”, where particants in a workshop setting created favourable scenarios for the city center, not yet worrying too much about financial or other realities. The purpose of this exercise was to lift our imagination away from routines to be able to think of ”something more”. The group produced great concrete ideas and imagined futures. These were documented for further use. In this meeting we also set a ”Mission in Portugal”, where we together prepared to the Urban Living Lab in Braga in February. In addition to Sippola, two other stakeholders took the trip to Portugal. They were Una Harnett, a cultural producer and Harri Vilkuna, a local festival promoter.

Our third meeting in February 2025 was about the ”The Requirements”, where we discussed what concrete things would be required to make ”The Dream” possible. This meant a certain attitude between different stakeholders, communication strategy and the need for concrete experiments to go forward. We also reported the Braga trip to others with pictures and reflections.

In this meeting we discovered our upcoming experiment: ”The City Center Fair” that combines existing businesses, cultural & commercial spaces, currently used indoor and outdoor spaces with experiments and ”new things” in vacant spaces. After this we established a working group to start working on the concept in more detail.

All in all, the process in Pori has gotten a great start and we’d like to thank all our project partners for inspiration and colaboration!