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Nature is an essential part of human-environment relationships in the Arctic. Nature is often seen in terms of biodiversity, renewable and non-renewable resources or ecosystem services as part of various human activities in Arctic rural areas. This blog focuses on multiple roles nature has in the urban Arctic environment. In a city like Rovaniemi, nature is a collaborator with, competitor to and catalyst for human activities in everyday life. Nature as a collaborator creates wonderful snowy winter lands with colorful northern lights and in summer nightless nocturnal landscapes for locals and ..read more

Petrozavodsk is one of the largest cities in the Barents region with around a quarter of a million people living in this city that is located at the shore of the second largest lake in Europe, Lake Onega. It is a place with a long history throughout diverse eras. Archaeologists found evidence that already 7000 years ago, settlements had been located, where Petrozavodsk is nowadays. However, modern Petrozavodsk developed from several villages in the medieval ages. The name Petrozavodsk means Peters factory and origins from an iron and cannon manufacturing site established in 1703 to honour Tsar ..read more

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The 4-day communal event consisted of keynote speeches, workshops, artistic interventions, hospitable get-togethers and excursions outdoors for experiencing the Finnish Lapland. The multidisciplinary and boundary breaking colloquium challenged mainstream solutions for the future of our planet embedded in research, activism and artistic work. The aim of the colloquium was to move beyond the techno-capitalist regime, calling for new and more radical ways for addressing current social-economic crisis, to envisage a new narrative of change that is based upon deep transformations rather than mere ..read more

The first Winter School on Energy Transition in the North took place from 12th to 18th March 2017 as a result of a new cooperation established among four of the northernmost universities of Northern Europe. As a matter of fact, during the Arctic Europe Forum held in Oulu in September 2016, the University of Lapland and the University of Oulu from Finland, the University of Tromsø from Norway and Luleå University of Technology from Sweden signed a joint Arctic agenda. The aim of such agreement is to foster the cooperation among these academic institutions as regards research and education; as w ..read more

This is a topical, controversial issue in the city of Rovaniemi. The city centre is being rebuilt third time around within one hundred years. The reconstruction has taken place after the fire of 1909, the destruction of 1944 war of Lapland, and now in the last ten years or so when the remaining “old” houses, that is, houses mostly built after the Second World War, are being dismantled and new buildings are being built or planned to be constructed. The city of Rovaniemi appears for locals and visitors a city without a history, without memories. There is no sense of history in the city.  T ..read more

I got interested in Russia as a teenager. I studied Russian language at school and before the matriculation exam I decided to visit Russia to strengthen my language skills. That was a cultural shock for me, even though I had visited the Black Sea coast during the Soviet era as a child. In spite of the shock, something happened during that short language course and I fell in love with the decadence romantics of St. Petersburg and more broadly speaking, with the Russian way of life. After language studies in the Polytechnic University I entered the Department of Slavistics in the University of H ..read more