Elävä Pori – Pori Live -innovative collaborative inquiry as a resource for sustainable development of urban space

Our joint project “Pori Live” with University of Turku, Degree Program in Cultural Production and Landscape Studies aims at creating an innovation platform for urban development founded on collaborative inquiry. We focus on innovations that do not need massive investments, but that are based on knowledge stemming from the experience of different urban stakeholders. To collect this experiential knowledge and make it visible and sharable the project has performed a series of experimental artistic and cultural workshops and events, also experimenting with uses of urban space. Artistic interventions have been, not traditional community art, but art within the community. Interventions have been a method of disturbing everyday practices, taking a stand in space, open to reactions by the community. Thus artistic interventions create new knowledge about the lived urban environment.

We shall present the examples of “Office”, a former commercial space in the city center, now both a gesamtkunstwerk in itself and a site for interventions, events, workshops; the experimental course The Art of Suburb that brought together Resident Association activists and doctoral students to study the “art” of living in the suburb of Sampola, Pori; and Ideas City exhibition that combined an art exhibition and a set of workshops open for public. The “innovation platform” we see as a collection of all these practices and knowledge gathered in the project in the form of exemplary instances, stories, lists and links to be applied and used by activists or interested citizens and other stakeholders.