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Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
The services of housing are underdeveloped, if not non-existent. Yet housing makes up the largest share of both our ecological footprint and our national income. This was the starting point of our joint project with the biggest constructor of the Helsinki area, Foundation for Student Housing in the Helsinki Region…
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Kesäkuussa 2012 Ajatushautomo Demos Helsinki ja valtion muotoilutoimikunta kokosivat 120 pohjoismaista muotoilun asiantuntijaa piirtämään päiväksi kuvaa muotoilun suunnasta. Tähän muotoilupääkaupunkivuoden Design Round Table – tapahtumaan osallistuneet muotoiluammattilaiset visioivat, miltä hyvin muotoiltu Suomi näyttää vuonna 2030 ja pohtivat, mitä toimenpiteitä tarvitaan tänään, jotta parempi tulevaisuus toteutuu. Tuloksena syntyneeseen julkaisuun “Muotoiltu huominen – suomalaisen…
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Helsinki was the World Design Capital in 2012. The central stage and forum of the design year, the WDC pavilion was a centre for entertainment and learning from May till September 2012. Demos Helsinki curated the programme including discussion on poverty, design markets, lunch yoga, a short film festival, and…
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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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