Sustainable Urban Development

Urbanization is one of the greatest challenges of this century that has wide implications for our living environment, well-being, food, education, mobility and services.

Urban development is examined through ecological, economic, social and cultural sustainability. Cities are favorable platforms for co-development of sustainable innovations, where ecology, resilience, digitalisation and smart solutions play a key role.

We aim for developing a city that provides sustainable living environment and well-being for its residents, in partnership with New European Bauhaus.

Ongoing projects

Urban SOS

Urban SOS brings together educational institutions and work place organizations—who work in the cities with social issues caused by life in the City. The objective of the Urban SOS partnership is to contribute to the transnational and transdisciplinary innovation of European social work and social work education.

Urban SOS on Amsterdam UAS website

HYTKE – Creating wellbeing in daily life through Inclusive RDI

Project's purpose is to build participatory co-research, development and innovation activities for Metropolia UAS and to be utilized in networks. The goal is sustainable well-being in people's daily lives by utilizing technology. The project will be implemented in 2021-2023 with profiling funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture.

Virtual Trade Show

The Virtual Trade Show project aims to support the business development, and both national and international networking of businesses in the XR field, as well as support its new innovations and develop its ecosystems. In addition, the project will facilitate a model for virtual events, and a virtual trade show area.

King's Road Renascence

The historic King’s Road used to connect the Nordics to Russia. Now the King’s Road: Renascence project aims to develop and modernize the old post route’s ecosystem by compiling the sights and services of the area onto a digital platform, so they can be explored virtually.

Assisting XR Entrepreneurs Forward (AXE4)

AXE4 aims to create new services and tools for small and medium companies in the XR industry and help them recover from COVID-19.

Completed projects

Augmented Urbans

Augmented Urbans focuses on making the often complex urban planning processes and scenarios easier to understand by visualizing them with novel extended reality (XR) technologies.

Baltic Game Industry

The project aims towards boosting the game industry in the Baltic Sea region (BSR), granting worldwide competitiveness and increasing the overall capacity for innovation.

Culture Tourism for City Breakers

Culture Tourism for City Breakers, CTCB, is a Think Tank based co-developer forum for Finnish cities to capture the potential of the international culture tourism environment.

Virtual Medicine - Creative competence for social and health care

The virtual medicine project responds to the fast structural change in the creative field and current development needs in social and health care. Social and health care and wellbeing fields are a significant market which offers growing employment and market possibilities for creative field professionals.

Healthy Boost

The main objective of the project is to contribute to the sustainable development of the Baltic Sea Region cities and social wellbeing of city residents of the BSR through improved – more innovative, effective and integrated – crosssectoral urban policies.

Helsinki XR Center

XR Center is an incubator for talent, an inspiring cultural hub of co-creation and learning for artists, entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, students and enthusiasts. The aim is to create an XR hub, where students and other operators can come together with XR experts, collaborators, companies and visitors.

Helsinki XR Center web pages