Charming Urban Policy

The grand old man of urban policy Eero Holstila and young gun Timo Hämäläinen further boost MDI’s urban development wing.

Eero is well known for his central role when the first wave of urban policy came ashore in Finland in mid-1990s. Since then, Eero has run Culminatum Ltd and made Helsinki funnier and more competitive as the Business Director of City of Helsinki. Lately he has focused on the vitality of municipalities. Eero knows European research and development networks through and through.

Timo is a planning geographer having an influence nationally and also internationally in the forefront of urbanism. He knows cities, their most wicked problems, and also means to solve them. He has burst onto the urban scene as an analytic thinker with his blog From Rurban to Urban (urbanfinland.com) sparring Finnish cities and city developers. Timo is also the co-founder of Urban Helsinki, a collective designing fringe plans. Timo has gathered schooling, experiences, and know-how from different continents. His past includes consultation, centre of expertise programme, and UN, future MDI.

Co-founders and partners Jarl Matti Anttila, Anssi Uitto, and Jukka Vesalainen continue in MDI’s advisor team, alongside with Tero Vuorinen and Jesse Heimonen.

MDI’s thesis on urban policy are published in Piparkakkutalo in Hämeenlinna on 23 September 2014 at 5 pm. 

A sustainable green transition is achieved by investing in the diversity of RDI activities – the AGDA project continues to work on this theme

AGDA is a Nordic development project funded by the Nordic Gender Equality Fund (NIKK). The project focuses on the opportunities that a greater focus on diversity and inclusion could create in the RDI-field, particularly in respect of green transition.

Read more A sustainable green transition is achieved by investing in the diversity of RDI activities – the AGDA project continues to work on this theme

MDI leads the co-creative process of developing, piloting and sharing practices for wellbeing in Sustainable Cities

The challenge bundle work is the cross-cutting co-development of the “Sustainable City” programme, co-ordinated by the Ministry of the Environment, with the aim of producing and sharing information, knowledge and solutions to the challenges linking cities’ management and practice in the area of leading work towards sustainability. The work produces concrete development measures, new ways of doing things and peer learning.

Read more MDI leads the co-creative process of developing, piloting and sharing practices for wellbeing in Sustainable Cities

A new project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture will explore multi-locality from the point of view of companies and their employers: is place-independence becoming the future norm of successful companies?

Although remote working and place-independent work have already been examined extensively from both the public administration implications and individual perspectives,…

Read more A new project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture will explore multi-locality from the point of view of companies and their employers: is place-independence becoming the future norm of successful companies?