Analysis of user research

Total 24 young people are invited to answer the questionnaire. There are 10 responders who are between 16 and 18 years old, while 14 are over 18 years old and under 25 years old. In general, most of young people in this survey are seen with a positive attitude of living environment and city development. A linear scale from 1 to 5 for the responders to indicate their agreement with each statement, that is, 1 presents “Strongly disagree” while 5 presents “Strongly agree”.

A large majority of responders (83%) are very satisfied with their overall living environment (over degree of 3). Most of the young participants (71%) expressed highly carefulness of city development. Nobody thought it is unnecessary for the citizens to participate in city environment planning and constructing process (under degree of 3).

Figure 15. Results of general environment attitude with age classes

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The results of general environment attitudes in the survey is presented in Figure 15 with the subgroups of age. It can be seen that there is no obvious difference of environment attitudes between teenagers (age-group of 16 – 18) and young adults (age-group of 18 – 25). Young adults showed slightly higher sense of responsibility of public affairs. In addition, there are no teenagers under 18 years old in this survey showed the highest satisfaction (degree of 5) of their living environment, however, all of them considered public participation is needed in city planning process (over degree of 3).

Figure 16 shows the results of this part in the survey with the subgroups of citizenship.

Total 15 local young Finnish people answered the questionnaire, while there are 9 responders with foreign citizenship including China, Russia, Germany, South-Korea and etc. It is good to see not only the most of local youth (80%) feel highly satisfied with their living environment (degree of 3), but also the majority of young foreign people (89%) said they enjoy living in Finland (degree of 3). Though responders showed different in the degree of how they care about city environment, all the responders thought citizens should express their opinions in the process of city planning.

Figure 16. Results of general environment attitude by citizenship class With the question of “Do you think ideas from young people are important to improve city environment?”, most of the responders gave the affirmative answers. Based on their responses, the reasons can be given as following:

- “City development is strongly connected to the young people” in current growing age, thus, creating a healthy and friendly environment is essential and beneficial to youth.

- Since the young generation will be the majority of city population, “the future should be shaped for those who will be using it”, that is youth.

- Young generation have a willing to improve the city and would like to provide some good ideas.

- Young people are considered to have more “fresh and creative ideas” and “usually dare to throw in more daring ideas than the older citizens”.

- The city officials are lack of young generation who “may not know youth’s needs and interests”.

- Youth should be given a sense of value that “they are listened”.

However, despite young people have intention to participate in city planning process and make their efforts for city development, some difficulties are found based on the survey results:

- There is no proper and easy way to give feedback, which is mentioned mostly by the responders. Especially for the foreigners without fluent Finnish language skills, it is hard to find correct channel to express their ideas. Communication between the city government and the citizens is not strong enough.

- Some responders think ideas from them may not be respected and valued by the older people including the city officials.

- Due to personal characters, there are responders feel their ideas would bother the city officials, and also someone thinks he has no skill of identifying issues.

The survey collected the attitudes of five specific city issue types from responders: Safety, Local transport, Social life, City planning and Caring for environment. Every topic is split into two parts: “Do you think this topic is important for public to give feedback?” and

“Would you like to give feedback related to this topic?”. The responders indicated their attitudes to each statement with a scare of 1- 5. Based on the results that are presented in Appendix C, the findings for each topic are listed below:

Safety

The majority of responders thought it is important to manage the unsafe areas in neighborhood. Over half of responders (54.2%) indicated the highest degree of 5. Total 66.7% of responders would like to report the dangerous conditions to city official to a highly degree of 4 and 5.

Local transport

The number (52.5%) of the responders who concern about local transport a lot (at the degree of 4 and 5) is slightly more than the ones who (47.5%) do not care that much. Most of the responders (87.5%) would like or do not mind giving feedback of transport issues (over degree of 2).

Social life

It is the topic that the responders pay the least attention on. 40% of responders expressed highly interests in public events like park concert, open-air ice rink and craft workshop.

A large number of responders (45.8%) indicate degree of 3 to the willingness of suggesting social events.

City planning

None of the responders thought public ideas should not be considered during city planning and constructing process. The percentage of the responders who indicated the degree of 4 and 5 reaches 91.7%. 62.5% of responders strongly like to take part in planning public environment.

Caring of the environment

Over half of the responders (54.2%) think citizens should take actions to protect urban areas and help surrounding natural environment to the highest degree. 62.5% of responders would highly like to report the environmental issues (over degree of 3), such as litter in the forests, emissions from industrial facilities and insufficient garbage cans for classification.

In addition, some responders showed interests of politics and leadership of the city.

Student social benefits is also concerned. The responders mentioned some city environment improvement like traffic noise control, city lights management and planning of sidewalks and bicycle lanes.