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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
The Smart City approach is the favored paradigm of 2010s urban development. Smart cities are hoped to help curb greenhouse gas emissions and improve quality of life. Smart cities strive for these things with technological solutions: information technology can enable new kinds of co-operation and interweave various city elements together…
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It is safe to say that cities in all Western countries see their futures differently compared to their situations just five years ago. Many megatrend-level drivers have made cities, their leaders, and ordinary citizens consider the future as something deviating from the steady development of the past decades: A new…
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This workshop, co-hosted by the Nordic think-tank Demos Helsinki and Meeting of the Minds, will gather urban leaders from cities, corporations, start-ups, non-profits and academia to explore state-of-art methods on urban foresight. The workshop demonstrates how the Nordic way of using foresight in urban regeneration creates better, smarter and more…
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The Circular Design Toolkit helps policymakers move beyond recycling by focusing on upstream design decisions that shape sustainable value chains and industrial transformation.
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Drawing on almost five years of Cities Mission implementation, Demos Helsinki and its partners from Dark Matter Labs and the Mission Board argue that mission governance has reached policy readiness. Its mechanisms have been tested, its governance infrastructure is in place, and it offers a transferable model for delivering on EU strategic priorities at scale.
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Finland managed the Covid-19 pandemic comparatively well. Yet the longer the crisis lasted, the more visible the limits of the governance system became. This brief examines what a prolonged crisis revealed about institutional strength, societal vulnerabilities, and the kind of governance future crises demand.
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What does a stronger Europe actually require? Demos Helsinki’s comments on the State of the Union.
September 18, 2026
Drawing on three EU-funded research projects, we examine the tensions behind von der Leyen’s State of the Union address. Technological sovereignty risks deepening the dependencies it aims to reduce; climate resilience requires funding architecture that lets mitigation and adaptation reinforce each other; and Europe’s strength cannot be measured by economic indicators alone. A stronger Europe, we argue, depends less on ambition than on governance capable of delivering it.
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The next frontier for circularity is governance
September 17, 2026
For cross-cutting policy issues, like the transition to circularity, Demos Helsinki has developed a model that works: beating uncertainty through action, empowering relevant stakeholders with autonomy in problem solving, building a shared coordination structure, and adapting through learning what works. The model has been proven to move the circularity agenda forward, despite its complexity and fluctuating political significance.
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Governing with cities: Europe’s overlooked governance infrastructure
July 21, 2026
The Cities Mission functioned as a natural experiment that revealed an overlooked property of European governance: cities do not merely implement policy more effectively; they generate governing capacity and governance knowledge that Europe should intentionally incorporate into policy design through a revised multilevel governance architecture.
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