The library’s success is the result of more than two decades of participatory planning and consultation that put the public at the center of the discussion, creating a library not designed for them, but with them. As far back as 1998, then Culture Minister Claes Andersson proposed a new library, with preliminary studies slowly taking place over the next decade. Construction began in 2015, and was completed by the end of 2018.
The scale of this collective planning process was vast, according to Virve Hyysalo, whose PhD dissertation examined how Oodi was created together with more than 3,000 citizens. The process included crowdsourcing ideas in a project known as “The Tree of Dreams for Central Library” (both a digital platform and a real tree touring the city in different urban events), giving citizens the ability to vote and comment on the library’s architectural design, and…
