Resilience is about bringing people together

Published on: August 7, 2023

What is a resilient neighbourhood?

“Resilience for me is foresight, flexibility and connections, and collaboration. It is mainly how people connect to each other,” says Jani Päivänen, expert in land use and sociocultural environment at Sweco in Finland.

Päivänen specialises in facilitating multidisciplinary cooperation with experts and stakeholders, with a focus on research and development of walkable urban environments, sustainable mobility, and sociocultural sustainability. For more than 20 years, he has been involved in urban and community planning, transport projects and social impact assessment. Today he is a senior expert and team leader at Sweco.

Are we prepared for the coming crises, such as floods, fires, or viruses? They can devastate not only physical infrastructures but social life, and basic trust too. As city planners, we could do a lot to adapt meeting places to serve social life in everyday life, but also during extraordinary events, he argues.

Why are social perspectives important in risk and resilience assessments?

Päivänen is clear about what resilience means to him in his work at Sweco.

“From my perspective, resilience in view of global and local crises, and urban challenges boils down to communication: Are cities open to discussion and conflict resolution. I’m thinking about the ongoing great changes in energy solutions. Many social issues need to be tackled if we are going to construct ever larger solar, wind, and hydrogen facilities closer to where people live. Flood prevention may necessitate land uses that are not the most profitable for owners. And still, more must be done with less, so each step should be resource-efficient and non-wasteful.”

This winter he has been busy working eagerly on walkable and liveable spaces in the centre of Helsinki. A project called Summer Streets aims to make the streets as equitable, sociable, and liveable as possible. Päivänen and his team have interviewed a lot of residents and companies for this project.

We must find ways to protect people and vegetation from extreme weather conditions. But we also want to make street life more vibrant and provide new life to our city streets since people are shopping more online. Anyway, increasing consumption is not the way forward. Art, music, casual conversations and watching children play are both sustainable and very traditional city attractions. They are indeed essential for wanting to go there in the first place.

Digital tools enable effective stakeholder dialogue

In the Summer Streets project, Sweco experimented using the artificial intelligence tool Urbanist AI (Artificial Intelligence) to improve the interaction between planners and residents.

“We found it makes ideation easier and helps non-designers in particular to express themselves, in ways that designers can apply. Therefore, it is one promising way to bring more fun and reward to participation.”

“That said, when experimenting with new tools it’s becoming more important to focus on facilitation so that everyone’s ideas come through.”

A Summer Street version of a Helsinki square as imagined by the Citizen Board, with the help of Urbanist AI. Copyright: Urbanist AI.

A Winter Street version of a Helsinki square as imagined by the Citizen Board, with the help of Urbanist AI. Copyright: Urbanist AI.

Doing more with less resources

Another project that Päivänen and his team at Sweco recently finishedis the sustainable mobility strategy for Western Lapland in the north of Finland. This project, too, focuses on resilience in the sense of bringing people together.

“It is about making sustainable transportation out of the small resources that the large but sparsely populated municipalities have. So, they need to work together. In Lapland people remain very dependent on private car use. But if they had slightly better bus connections between the main villages and their destinations, they could be so much stronger together. You do not need to add a great fleet of busses. It is more an issue of usability and information to get you to try out the sustainable option.”

“A resilient city that is as simple as possible and as aware of its own vital conditions as possible. Every city should be aware of its dependencies concerning critical infrastructures and aim for simple solutions that endure in times of crisis.”