Kaarina Market Square
What residents value in a growing town centre.
Design · Sweco · 2024
Run as guided subconsultancy inside Sweco’s interactive vision plan for the City of Kaarina, a resident workshop on 30 May 2024 generated around 354 bilingual prompts and put 28 AI scenarios of the market square to a participant vote. Recurring themes — greenery, pergolas, water features, cafés, play, giant chess — flowed into the vision plan, which the technical committee approved in late 2024; construction of the greener square began in summer 2025.
Who took part
Residents and stakeholders in a facilitated session, within a wider 2023–24 engagement programme that included workshops for children, the elderly and disability groups.
What the tool did
Three session modes — a professional interface, photo-first and idea-first — with voting logged per scenario; Sweco’s own project page credits the tool with visualizing the plans.
What changed
The vision plan was approved by the technical committee in late 2024 and the redesigned green market square went into construction from summer 2025 — resident-generated scenarios traceable into a built scheme.
Sources
- Green meeting place for Kaarina’s market place — Sweco — sweco.fi
- Hilmer 2025, Between Imagination and Image — GI DL — dl.gi.de
Delivered together with project partners.