Client: The British Council for the World Design Capital Helsinki
Site: Suvilahti, Helsinki (2012)
Designer: Wayward
Partners: Dodo
The British Council commissioned Wayward to represent Britain at the World Design Capital 2012. The Helsinki Plant Tram was a participatory urban action in two parts: a city-wide intervention and a temporary garden installation for the Everyday Discoveries – International Design House Exhibition at the old Suvilahti power station. The urban action transformed a working tram on the Helsinki Transport network into a mobile garden. As it travelled through the city, it invited public participation—mapping overlooked or underused spaces for potential urban growing, collecting plant donations from residents, and sparking conversations about how cities might cultivate new forms of public space.
At Suvilahti, we designed a large-scale garden installation inspired by the iconic wooden roller coaster at the nearby Linnanmäki Amusement Park, built for the 1952 Olympics. Over 200 metres of winding timber planters wove through the industrial site, alongside an orchard of twenty mobile planters offering fruit trees and public seating. The garden was filled with the donated plants collected on the tram route.
Crucially, the garden was designed for deconstruction. Every element could be dismantled and repurposed without waste. At the close of the exhibition, the entire installation was taken apart and reconfigured into 100 raised-bed planters, which became new community gardens for the local environmental organisation Dodo across the city. This intentional afterlife was embedded in the project from the outset—ensuring that the design lived on, not as waste, but as shared infrastructure for community growing.
Throughout the process, we worked closely with Dodo, centring collaboration, engagement, and participatory exchange. As an urban action, the Helsinki Plant Tram reimagined both transport and landscape as civic tools—demonstrating how existing systems might be activated for ecological and social transformation.