Twin city

The Tornio river is the centrality of the region, it is the communication, the industry and the reason for inhabitation of this valley. Twin towns along the river have a longer history than road transportation and prove that the communities spans across the administrative border. In TornioHaparanda, the border is a construction serving an administrative and touristic purpose, rather than a purpose for the daily life. We want to make the border as a space rather than a line, emphasizing the natural river space and making the Tornio river the node of the twin towns and its daily life again. We improve the pedestrian and bicycle movements around the border space as the key issue for better integration of the twin towns. The railway bridges creates natural edges of the border space and are stable enough to carry pedestrian paths alongside the rails, that also has the potential to serve greater purpose in the Norrbotnian Transport Corridor in the future. As starting-point, our emphasis is the areas of Tornio waterfront, Rajakaari-Gränsbågen, and Haparanda waterfront. Our encouragement is continued development of the inner circle of the Tornio river to finally create a loop of movement, and active and purposeful places. Future TornioHaparanda will be a single, integrated town of two parallel interests: tourism and everyday life, supporting each other and producing a new dynamic for the Twin City.

Our approach of production is to stimulate growing, collecting, repairing, building, and selling at an individual level. In times of environmental awareness there is a change of mindset going on in the Nordic countries towards a lifestyle that is built on localness and reuse rather than the globalness and throwaway lifestyle we have been used to. There is an opportunity in the already helpful and active region of the Tornio valley to implement functional typologies that support the tradition of taking care of ones belongings and eating from the local nature. We propose an infrastructure around the inner circle to support the caretaking of local food, production of goods as well as functions for repairing, sharing and creating. Our proposal is five different typologies to start the process. Our aim is to further explore necessary typologies with the inhabitants of TornioHaparanda.