The bundle of challenges of the Sustainable City program: Prosperous communities in a socially sustainable city

The Challenge Bundle project was part of the Sustainable Cities programme. The main goal of the challenge work was to facilitate peer learning, while also creating new ways of doing things and promoting concrete development measures. The work was organised around co-creation sessions, designed to produce information on and solutions to the challenges that link the common management and practice of cities. Built on peer learning, encouraging and experimenting with new ways of doing things, it seeked to produce concrete development actions for the local communities involved.

In the context of the work, close cooperation was encouraged while practical interaction was supported in order to utilise the information collected in various projects, enabling learning, scaling and impact. The team specifically invested in the solving of cross-cutting challenges that combine the need to address sustainability themes and strengthen cooperation both between municipalities and within them, as well as between cities and the various state-level organisations.

There was five municipalities in the core team involved in the wellbeing challenges, namely Imatra, Jyväskylä, Karkkila, Kuopio and Lahti. 

The two parallel projects were implemented by a consortium, where MDI and Demos Helsinki are the project leaders (MDI in the wellbeing theme, Demos in sustainable urban planning theme), the wellbeing challenges were supported by additional expert work from a team at the National Institute of Health, this support was coordinated by Paula Saikkonen at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL).