News – YTK/IFHP Summer School 2009

YTK/IFHP Summer School in Helsinki, Turku and Jyväskylä 2009

The 15th YTK/IFHP Urban Planning and Design Summer School was held in Finland in August 2009. The annual course is organised by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies (YTK) in the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) in cooperation with IFHP. This year the summer school hosted 34 students and young professionals of 19 nationalities. Educational background of the participants varied from architecture to urban planning and social sciences.

YTK/IFHP Summer School is organised in cooperation with two Finnish towns in which the fieldwork took place. The theme of the course was “Mapping Urban Sapce”. In Turku the students concentrated on finding hidden potential of urban space. The task was to look for under-used spaces in the city centre and propose new temporary or more permanent uses for the upcoming European Capital of Culture year 2011. In Jyväskylä participants created plans for a mixed-use area,7 kilometres from the city centre. The idea was to create good plan on a local scale and also to consider the challenging regional level.

All the proposals produced in the summer school 2009 will be presented in a book which will be published later this year. The publication will also contain articles and essays on this year’s theme written by some of the participants of the course.

The preparations of the Summer School 2010 are already well under way. The concept of the course will remain essentially the same. However, the partner cities will change – Vantaa and Rauma will host summer school workshops next year. YTK is looking forward to cooperating with the new partner cities and also to receiving numerous applications from planning students all over the world. The application period will start in January 2010.

http://ytksummerschool.tkk.fi

Last Updated @ Friday, 02 October 2009