The three year interdisciplinary project, 'Real Estate and Sustainable Crisis management in Urban Environments (RESCUE)', led by Saija Toivonen (Aalto University) professor in Real Estate Economics who has been awarded funding. This is a really important and timely project that looks at the crisis preparedness (e.g. pandemics, ageing population, climate change) of living and working environments and community infrastructures through a multi-disciplinary lens and at different scales. Learning and mapping best practices from Finland and other countries to then propose policies and designs and systems that support crisis preparedness better. 

The future is uncertain and full of different risks forming a tangled and complex network of future crises. Some crises are the causes from well-recognized megatrends while others appear suddenly and can be called ‘wild cards’. Real estate and land use play a crucial role in future crisis management as they are inevitably tied to the surrounding society due to their significant social, environmental and economic impacts. Crisis preparedness of space and land use has often been planned in silos with unilateral focus concentrating on material losses of buildings or instantly saving lives in acute crises while the long term impacts on social sustainability and wellbeing has received less attention despite its significance when aiming at a resilient crisis management. In addition, the time perspective in crisis preparedness has been front-loaded, focusing on prevention or viewing only the primary impacts leaving the secondary and tertiary impacts without attention. The aim of this study is to promote the dynamic resiliency of societies by identifying, analyzing and concretizing the role of space and land use in both anticipated and unanticipated primary and secondary crisis situations.

Project Website

Key outputs

• Journal Article Avoiding Macro Mistakes: Micro-homes in Finland Today

• Journal Article Resilience in the built environment: Key characteristics for solutions to multiple crises

• Journal Article Housing adaptability: new research, emerging practices and challenges

• Journal Article Home, university, and other spaces: Where Finnish and Italian academics did research prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic

• Journal Article Ten questions concerning residential overheating in Central and Northern Europe

• Journal Article The meanings of home and environmental relations in multi-place everyday life

• Journal Article Passive mitigation of overheating in Finnish apartments under current and future climates

• Master’s Thesis: Green Greams: Urban Nature-Based Climate Adaptation in a Finnish City (Antero Rummukainen)

• Popular Article: What Makes a Sustainable Living Environment? – Researchers Compiled a Checklist

  Popular Article: Crises Never Come Alone