FEMMA Planning is an urban planning company led by two urban geographers Milla Kallio and Efe Ogbeide. At the heart of their work is commitment to understanding different urban realities and experiences. FEMMA Planning transforms place-based and residential data into guidelines that architects, urban planners or decision-makers can use in their work.
FEMMA Planning spent one month in the East Helsinki-based cultural centre Museum of Impossible Forms in the spring of 2021. The center is located at an old shopping mall in a neighbourhood called Kontula, which is often stigmatized in the media as a restless place to live. The result of fiscal austerity and historical urban planning decisions such as placing large amounts of rental dwellings in Kontula has led to the situation where structural inequality shows in the neighbourhood. There have also been many different projects and research that aim to develop the Kontula area. Often without including the residents or without aiming to address the structural inequalities.
During the residency FEMMA Planning’s founders, Efe Ogbeide and Milla Kallio conducted interviews with local residents and organizations operating in Kontula as well as got to know the area. Not surprisingly, the image that the media often paints of Kontula did not match the experiences of the residents.
In the short podcast we reflect on our residency in the Museum of Impossible Forms and ask the question:
What would happen to storytelling, urban planning, and decision-making if we shifted the perspective on Kontula and other similar neighbourhoods and started to ask what they need?
Publishing creative works-in-progress is something we should be doing more of. Floating in a space of incompleteness, in-the-making-ness, and reckoning with each other is something we should be doing more of. And if anything, questing for certainty and completion in our industry is compromising our art on a collective level.
READIn defense of works-in-progress
To Run Deep Down Somewhere is a playlist I put together with 40 of my all-time favourite love songs. I made the playlist in 2019. I had turned 30 that year, so naturally, I was going through this unnecessary dramatic emotional phase where I imagined myself as the cynical heroine of a 60’s French New Wave film.
READTo Run Deep Down Somewhere
Who has the freedom of speech in art? What about the responsibility of speech? Can artworks be misinterpreted? Why do some people’s opinions weigh more than others? What is institutional responsibility? What about the media’s responsibility?
READWho Has Freedom of Speech in Art?
But what if I am comfortable in my own space? What if I don’t want to defy the impossible and all I want is to achieve my goals peacefully? Why should I compete fiercely with others to achieve my aims?
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