kaire 
The greatest challenge for Estonian towns and rural municipalities is to move from governing to enabling. An enabling locality facilitates its residents’ initiative and cooperation between local actors .
The FinEst Twins Smart City Centre of Excellence aims to establish a platform for Estonian smart cities to match Estonia’s high-level presence as a digital state. What are the challenges that Estonian municipalities must face when creating a smart living environment?
This article is based on Demos Helsinki’s report ‘People First: A Vision for the Global Urban Age’ published in June 2020.
Smart cities are not merely for people and robots. Due to climate change and biodiversity decline, the combination of the physical and the digital is increasingly related to the needs of all species. Combining the natural and built worlds can be assisted by biotechnology, for instance, the use of bioreactors as a source of energy and by the smart application of landscape data in urban design, for instance, by means of biodigital twins or augmented reality. It shifts our perspective and poses the most critical and intriguing challenge of a smart living environment—how to adopt a life-centred rather than human-centred approach.
Bathology is an example of a possible artistic method which attempts to take into account the object’s perspective, the object as is. The budding bathology was inspired by the Lithuanian artist Marija Baranauskaitė and her exploration of sofanity. Namely, in 2018 she started developing the Sofa Project, a conceptual clowning performance where the target audience is not sentient, not even human but a sofa. In addition to being entertaining to human audiences as well as object-audiences (hopefully), it is also compelling for theoretical reasons, evoking among other things musings in the vein of Philosophy of Technology, Critical Posthumanism and Object-Oriented Ontology as well as exercises in non-anthropocentric thinking, and attempts to place something other than a human in the position of a subject.
How can human well-being and cognitive processes benefit from evidence-based design? We discuss it on the example of teaching and research facility in the Delta Centre of Tartu University and the creative house Vita of Tallinn University.
This issue of Maja is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Estonian Association of Interior Architects.
Rather than exhibiting objects and asking questions, the contemporary museum has become a place for experiences requiring submission to the logic of storytelling. Triin Ojari considers how the reconstructed Narva Castle relates to history and providing experiences.
Space Popular is a multidisciplinary design and research practice led by Lara Lesmes & Fredrik Hellberg. They make physical spaces — buildings, interiors, furnishings — and virtual spaces, concentrating on how the two will be fused in the future. Their augmented virtual reality project “The Venn Room” was on display at the Tallinn Architecture Biennial main exhibition.
Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) “Beauty Matters: The Resurgence of Beauty“, 11.09–15.09 2019.
Although architecture may help to solve (and it does solve) problems, we should not regard it as a primary tool for solving social etc. problems but as a creator of values, novelty and wellbeing. In the 20th century, the creative part of architecture that can also deal with the question of human condition has been undeservedly overshadowed by pragmatics.
