Y-Foundation, Finland’s biggest and internationally recognized non-profit housing company, aims to offer reasonably priced rental accommodations for citizens. To celebrate their 30th anniversary, Y-Foundation co-operated with think tank Demos Helsinki to envision and develop the future of housing. In this collaboration Demos Helsinki and Y-apartments, founded by Y-Foundation, created new reasonably priced housing to answer to townspeople’s needs. This was how Y-lab was created in 2015.
Y-Lab explores and experiments with affordable, sustainable and high-quality urban housing. The new services and ways of living are being developed together with tenants, including their experiences and visions of good living.
In 2016 Y-lab launched two new projects, “Uuras” and “Energy Pilot”, to concretize earlier findings and concepts from 2015 projects. The “Uuras” experiment’s focus is on rethinking the ways of urban living and working. The aim of the project is to seek for out of the box operations to support tenants’ employment and increase their incomes.
Y-Lab’s second experiment in 2016 is “Energy Pilot”, which explores how to reduce energy consumption of the tenants. “Energy Pilot” offers meaningful rewards to tenants so that it is easy and convenient to reduce their energy consumption. During the project they are offered new ways, technologies and ideas to do this. These experiments will work as a model for more sustainable living.
Kuva: Peter Minarik 2015 CC