Tallinn 1.5 — A Plan for a Planetary City

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.