Kirjoittaja: Eveliina Harsia

In November and December 2021, we experimented with various ways to reach the entrepreneurs of Kontula Mall and offered them different participation modes. First, we distributed a leaflet about our pilot and ways to get involved to all the entrepreneurs in the mall. The leaflet was written in five languages: Arabic, Bengali, English, plain Finnish…

Our experiment made it clear that the involvement of our target group in the development of the city goes much deeper than participation in planning. Entrepreneurs understand the surrounding communities, residents and customers. They know what works and what doesn’t work at the mall. Many have dreams of business development and new business ideas based…

Our participatory pilot at Kontula mall particularly highlighted the fact that silent participants are not necessarily participants who do not want to participate. For the entrepreneurs who took part in our experiment, the mall is an important everyday environment, and they participate in its development if they have the opportunity to do so. By opportunity…

From the point of view of foreign-language entrepreneurs, the most essential factors for participation are access to information in their own language and conversational encounters during the mall’s development. It is crucial to consider the target group’s needs when designing interactions. The experiment we conducted was praised in part because the methods were designed with…

In the Kontula Mall pilot project, we developed a multilingual map survey for foreign language respondents using the Maptionnaire tool. Maptionnaire is an e-participation tool widely used in urban planning. It has also been used by the City of Helsinki. We chose this tool precisely because it is a familiar and well-established tool in the…

Our multilingual map questionnaire received 21 responses during the pilot. Most of the respondents were entrepreneurs in Kontula Mall. The majority of respondents were male (72%). Respondents ranged in age from 20 to 60 years old. The most common mother tongues of the respondents were Bengali and Kurdish. There were also a few respondents who…