The living rooms our city-centres ought to be: Olohuone an urban experiment in Helsinki Railway Station

Olohuone is the Finnish word for living room, as well as the name I gave a publicly accessible installation that I made on the basis of art and action research. I will briefly describe the context of the installation, and then proceed to analyse it as an urban intervention,and finally offer the findings produced by the entire process. Keith Hoggart and colleagues write that ‘Action Research is associated with learning about society through efforts to change it’. Olohuone was part of my action research and a fundamental component of my doctoral dissertation. In it, I framed a situation at a busy urban space and, in so doing, I intervened and temporarily changed the field of my study. Olohuone proved to be a critical case study for my research, mainly because of the responses of the people who interacted with it. In these years since Olohuone, I have lectured about it on numerous occasions. When I talk about Olohuone, the reactions I get encourage me to keep on using it as an example of place-making and of research in urban studies. During lectures, I discover aspects of Olohuone that I have not thought of before, often due to the questions posed by students. This is why I think that my findings from Olohuone merit consideration in relation to action in art and design research, place-making and intercultural dialogue.