NODUS TALKS: How Many Ways to Hope?

When:
26.03.2026 16:15 – 17:45

Where:
Oodi Helsinki Central Library Saarikoski rug, 3rd floor

Registration period:
02.03.2026 - 26.03.2026 16:00

Event language(s):
English 

Johanna AHOLA-LAUNONEN is an Academy Research Fellow at Aalto University Management Department.

Hope is often treated as a necessary response to crisis—and therefore rarely questioned. This talk challenges that assumption. Hope is ambivalent: it can support resilience, awareness, and collective action, but it can also distract from structural change, obscure power relations, and sustain the status quo.

Drawing on examples from sustainability and technological optimism, I examine when hope enables meaningful change—and when it turns into a harmful attachment, a form of cruel optimism tied to reassuring promises. The key question is not whether we should be hopeful, but what kind of hope helps in confronting ecological and social limits.

Katja LINDROOS is the co-founder and CEO of Urban Practice.

What does hope look like at street level? Not the hope of policy documents or masterplans, but the kind negotiated in community spaces: local restaurants, informal meeting rooms, and everyday conversations between residents and those who claim to speak for them.

This talk draws on Urban Practice’s work across Helsinki and Finnish cities, focusing on neighbourhoods that are being planned, replanned, and sometimes simply overlooked. It looks at the distance between sophisticated planning systems and lived experience, raising questions about power and agency: who shapes space and how, and what happens in the gaps between planning intentions and life on the ground. It also considers what building an infrastructure for hope might look like in practice.

All welcome! We’d appreciate if you register using this link but registration is not mandatory.