Helsinki: Game for change
Every year, Helsinki sets aside a pot of money, challenging its citizens to find a way to spend that cash to improve the city. And this is not a small endeavour, the city allocates 4.4 million euros to the OmaStadi initiative. It is an inclusive project, seeking input and ideas that will improve the city across seven districts, with the final selection of projects being voted on by anyone aged 12 or over. Whether the idea seeks to create a more sustainable city, a cosier or more vibrant one, OmaStadi is looking for ideas that can make that happen.
This year, OmaStadi received in excess of 200 proposals, spanning environmental initiatives, social media challenges, sport and training activities, and many more besides.
But how have people come up with these ideas? Some are needs noticed by civic-minded individuals, but to help others think about how to improve the city, OmaStadi created its own card game. Available in Finnish, Swedish and English, the game is designed to help identify and develop suggestions to contribute to OmaStadi.
First, the team must decide what theme their suggestion will have, for example deciding if they are looking to create community, promote safety or equality, and what area of Helsinki their idea might affect. Next comes the ideas phase, where the cards offer suggestions for ways to generate ideas, including random citizen cards to discuss how they would be affected. The final phase is to use the cards to review the limiting factors that might affect their proposal. Once the game is over, groups are encouraged to submit the idea to OmaStadi, or find some other way to make the change happen.
Anna Lenkewitz of Nicehearts ry facilitated the game at twenty workshops with 100+ participants in Helsinki and Espoo, organised through Nicehearts’ Neighbourhood Mothers group. The workshops were hosted in various languages to create an easy way for non-Finnish speakers to be involved in the participatory budget project. “The feedback was very positive. The game was easy to understand and easy to use, either following the guidelines or as a tool to get the discussions going,” Anna said. “Sometimes discussions got really intense, so the workshop time was not enough. But that is more a positive problem.”
“Some participants had never really been involved in such democratic ways of participating and influencing,” she added. “The experience of ‘My voice is heard’ was positively surprising.”
“All in all, the game created a lot of engagement and led in total to more than 30 ideas our Neighbourhood Mothers could send to the City,” Anna concluded. “They included better environment handling, upgrading the parks and playgrounds as well as offering indoor playgrounds.”
Proposals are now closed for this round of OmaStadi, but the game is still available if you’re interested in beginning your pitch for next year. You can find the game on the OmaStadi material bank.
In fact, The Shortcut team is amongst those proposing ideas for this year’s OmaStadi (plot twist!). And the game was very helpful for the team in its ideation process. Hanna Smorodinzeff of The Shortcut said, “The game gave us structure to our brainstorming, setting time to select ideas and then move on, keeping the process moving forward.” Which is why my suggestion — to change the city’s traffic lights so that you had to roll double-six on two dice to get them to change, or miss a turn — was quickly moved past.
You can check out all of the proposals for this year right now on the OmaStadi list of proposals, including The Shortcut’s proposal to create Community spaces across the city.
