Latest content
Our latest updates, thoughts, and events — as they roll out.
In Imagining Change Through Science – Demos Helsinki Research Encounters, we explored how science and research have shaped societal change.
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Demos Helsinki is currently involved in 14 Horizon Europe projects. From exploring the societal impacts of new technologies to tackling climate challenges, these projects reflect a growing demand for research that sparks systemic change. Discover how we are working across disciplines to shape fairer, more sustainable futures.
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These three research projects are: 1) Reducing polarisation via material participation (MaDem); 2) Coastal waters under pressure – safeguarding a healthy Gulf of Finland in a changing geopolitical and environmental landscape (CoWup); and 3) Safe Water for All (WaterFall).
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In the future, the new technologies will
emerge that combine physical and digital
realms. This doesn’t mean that the Internet
will be everywhere. It means that the physical and the virtual world will collide, come together, and exchange qualities.
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The stories of places like Songdo in South Korea or Masdar city in Abu Dhabi fit the classic Smart City mold: technologically highly advanced, newly built cities, planned in a top-down manner by leading architects and technology companies. This, however, is not the reality in which most of us urban-dwellers live.
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Urban development is not the same as it used to be. In many cities in the Western world, urbanisation continues, while compromising on a building stock in dire need of renovation. Radical changes in structures of economy and work, our need to drastically cut our greenhouse gas
emissions, the emergence of the sharing economy, and many other strong drivers are changing the way we live, faster than ever before.
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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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The next MFF should institutionalise what mission governance has proven
July 21, 2026
The challenge for the next MFF is not to invent a new governance model, but to organise European decision-making around the governing capacity that already exists.
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Governments can steer with wellbeing at the core (but nobody said it was easy)
April 28, 2026
Governments keep promising change and then hitting the same walls with the old machinery. Reorienting governance around human wellbeing is both urgent and possible, and the work continues even when the political climate turns.
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