Tallinn 1.5 — A Plan for a Planetary City
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 1.5 – A Plan for a Planetary City
