Urban Biodiversity Parks as co-creative platforms for enhancing biodiversity, learning and community involvement in urban ecological regeneration

This project promotes urban biodiversity parks as a tool for urban ecological restoration and regeneration. It reflects Turku’s ambition to become one of the world’s leading ‘nature and climate cities’. 

Piloting one main urban park and four smaller schemes, the aim is to create urban biodiversity spaces that can be used not only for recreation but also for community and learning. The park and the four selected pilot areas provide a platform for experimenting ways to preserve and actively enhance biodiversity in urban environments. 

Diverse groups such as local inhabitants, NGOs, education institutions and private actors are involved in planning and implementation. These activities help integrate biodiversity protection into the maintenance and construction of urban infrastructure. In this way, Urban Biodiversity Parks increase stakeholders’ awareness of biodiversity conservation – and their capacity for actively supporting it. Activities include providing capacity building for private actors, and developing a model for including biodiversity parks in the voluntary ecological compensation scheme under Finland’s Nature Conservation Act. The project also involves citizens in participatory nature management, and cooperates with educational institutions to develop and use biodiversity parks as real-life learning environments. Additional activities include developing smaller scale suburban biodiversity pilots together with local communities, and trialling the biodiversity friendly greenspace design of a housing property.