Client: Estonian Centre of Architecture (TAB 2022)
Location: Museum of Estonian Architecture, Tallinn, Estonia
Year: 2022
Sector: Exhibition · Food Systems · Speculative Design
Could Tallinn feed itself? A physical, two-sided lightbox installation for the Tallinn Architecture Biennale answers with hard land-use numbers, not just imagination.
Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022 took “Edible” as its theme. SPIN Unit’s contribution asked a genuinely testable question: how much of Tallinn’s land would actually need to grow food for the city to feed itself — and what would that city look like?
Commissioned by the Estonian Centre of Architecture as one installation within TAB 2022’s “Edible; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism,” curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, delivered in partnership with TalTech and with participatory mapping support from Tampere University students.
GIS land-use analysis quantified Tallinn’s current food-production capacity, cross-referenced against a speculative “planetary diet” scenario based on the EAT-Lancet Planetary Health Plate. Participatory mapping documented existing informal food production — community gardens, backyard plots — while a playful carbon/land-efficiency “nutrition label” concept extended the research into a public-communication device.
Delivered as a physical exhibition: large backlit lightbox prints showing “Tallinn Today” on one face and the speculative “Tallinn 1.5” future on the other, displayed at the Museum of Estonian Architecture through autumn 2022.
- Tallinn currently devotes only about 1% of its land to food production — against roughly 20% (30 km²) that would be needed to feed the city under current diets.
- Under the speculative planetary-diet scenario, that land demand falls from 30 km² to 9.5 km² — a 60% reduction achievable by repurposing roads, obsolete industrial land, and parking into productive landscape.
- The proposed tactics were deliberately concrete and modest: roughly 4% of roads converted to fruit-tree lanes, about 7% of open fields to crops, streets capped at two lanes — and explicitly avoiding any conversion of existing green or recreational space.
- Chose a physical, tangible exhibition format as a deliberate reaction to two pandemic years of digital-only content — bringing research back into a real object people could walk up to.
Gave TAB 2022 visitors a concrete, numbers-based answer to a provocative question, and demonstrated how SPIN Unit’s land-use analysis methodology could translate into public-facing exhibition design rather than only client reports.