On behalf of Placemaking Europe we would like to thank you all for joining us in the beautiful city of Helsingborg in June 2022 and the city of Helsingborg for this fructuous and inspiring collaborative effort!

This wouldn’t have been possible without your enthusiastic support, creative projects and inspiring talks. A special thanks to Cecilia Fredriksson and Moa Sundberg for having warmly welcomed us in the city of Helsingborg and showed us around on our first day. We got to experience ourselves what a people-friendly city Helsingborg is and how the city is constantly trying to create better, more inclusive and welcoming public places for all as an overarching and committed mission.

We had a chance to hear from Elise Perrault, Clementine Robert and Ryan Smolar about how we can tap into place-led & city centre development putting people and planet above profit. Moreover, Future Place Leadership–a Stockholm based Nordic management consultancy specialising in the development, innovation and marketing of places–co-organised a workshop focussing on city centres in a Post-Covid World. We divided into groups and as a team we analysed various parts of the Söder quarter with the collective goal to come up with solutions and ideas to ameliorate the specific area.

At the end of day one we had the possibility to follow a guided tour of the city and visit some of the areas dedicated to the H22 city expo. Cecilia and André guided us through People’s walk at Oceanhamnen: “What is needed to create places where everybody feels welcome?”

We visited the testbed People´s Walk which was founded upon the idea of creating accessible and equitable public spaces. The area will be further developed following the guidelines and desires of the elderlies of the neighbourhood.

After that, we continued our tour to the IKEA festival and the colourful Pixla Piren–an area completely dedicated to testing new ideas for a smart city, where users can access a square-metre of the old pier to test and play with their own ideas, and even get funded for it! That was super fun!

On day 2 we started the day off at a social enterprise created with IKEA. The DM (Do More) is in the Drottinghög area, where it comprises an urban farm and a second-hand marketplace. We were warmly welcomed and had a chance to speak to some of the people working there, like the gardener who told us about their hydroponic and pesticide-free agriculture systems.

The day proceeded with an amazing panel discussion led by our Charlot Schans between various city representatives - Jesse van Velzen from the city of The Hague, Anabel Gulías and Alberto Oubiña from Pontevedra and Moa and Cecilia from Helsingborg. Here the overarching question was: “how can we plan together based on a collaborative process to realise the vision of a thriving, resilient, safe and people-centred city?”. The practitioners enriched the conversation by bringing strategies and examples from their own cities.

Later in the day, refreshing ‘rapid inspirations’ talks from numerous practitioners (including Ethan Kent, Paivi Raivio, Daniel Radai, Katja Lindroos, Anna Bradley) were guided by Mustafa Sherif who shared with us the story of his Urbanistica Podcast and how it came to be.

The afternoon, on the other hand, was turned into a playful moment and thanks to the beautiful weather, we were able to play outside. We started with Viviana Cordero’s session focussing on how playgrounds can be a place where both children and adults form important social norms and learn about societal and personal boundaries. Anna Bradley made us remember about some of our childhood play adventures while playing by ourselves and finally, Giulia Sicignano and Todor Kesarovski created a unique card game where we had to come up with urban games and we had too much fun!

We finished the second day with an impactful speech by Katja Lindroos–The CEO of Urban Practice, a Helsinki-based office working on urban change, and the co-founder of Nordic CityMaking Week. She focussed on the activist side of her work and how to keep high commitment as achievable in urban agendas.

At the end of these 2 days full of talks, workshops and mutual exchange, we were very happy to hear from the participants that they had found "their placemaking family" - then we guess we can call the event Placemaking as a City Wide Endeavour a success.
See you again in Pontevedra!