01/10/2026 What Makes a Place Resilient? A Young Planners’ Vision
The VASAB Young Planners’ Summer School 2026 is over, but the concepts shaped during that week remain. In the coming months, we will be sharing the young planners’ ideas, with each addressing one of four emerging spatial planning challenges in the Baltic Sea Region. We begin this series with the winning team and their proposal, “Containing Resilience – A Modern Counterpart to a Historic Icon.”
The winning team – from left Hubert Wulbach, Efia Faschina, Ugnė Bačinskaitė, Wiktoria Jędrusik, Polina Dovzhenko, and their mentor Tīna Šipkēvica, Spatial Planning Expert at the VASAB Secretariat
At the heart of their proposal is territorial identity as a spatial concept for building resilience. Resilience is not only about infrastructure being able to withstand floods, geopolitical disruption or other shocks. Spatial planning can create places for interaction, participation and co-ownership, strengthening people’s relationship with place and, ultimately, the resilience of communities.
The proposal asks how port areas can become multifunctional neighbourhoods while retaining and reinterpreting their industrial and maritime character rather than replacing it with generic urban development.
We learn our places from childhood
The team illustrated the concept of place-based identity with a simple example: the drawings we create as children.
If you grew up in Riga, Latvia, you might imagine a house surrounded by trees, green grass, clouds and the sun. If you grew up in Texas, USA, your mental picture might include a cactus and sandy ground. Distinctive landscapes, buildings and spatial structures become part of collective place identity and can therefore be consciously considered in planning.
The team also enriched their research through expert interviews. One statement, in particular, captures their approach:
“As soon as I have the feeling that I can influence the place where I live, I feel connected to it.”
Participation is not only consulting or informing about decisions that have been already made. When people can actively shape, use and take responsibility for a place, this creates a stronger sense of ownership and belonging.
Connecting places across scales
Guided by the “pearls, patches and strings” approach from the VASAB Vision 2040, the team’s concept links local interventions with regional and Baltic Sea Region cooperation.
- At the local level (Gdansk’s port neighbourhoods), this translates into creating stronger connections between cultural assets, green spaces, mixed-use areas, and mobility networks. The proposal envisions reusing port elements, such as shipping containers to create a neighbourhood identity while applying them as a spatial principle: modular, reusable, and adaptable to changing needs.
- At the regional level (Pomorskie), the team proposes strengthening connections through a Pomorskie Cultural Passport and interactive map, the identification and reuse of unused areas, a Pomorskie Resilience Pact, and a collaborative train ticket.
- At the macro-regional level, the team advocates for an expanded Baltic Sea Region knowledge exchange programme, a mutual support system, and the realization of “lighthouse” projects via strengthening locally based architecture.
Resilience, in this sense, does not require every place to have the same capacities. It can also emerge from networks of places with different identities, resources and strengths that support one another.
By bridging industrial and residential zones, merging soft and hard solutions, and uniting communities with their environments, these ideas deepen both identity and resilience.
The Baltic Sea Region face diverse set of challenges. Different parts of the region follow different development trajectories, shaped by factors such as demographics, energy, labour-force trends and decarbonisation. This means that resilience cannot rely on a one-size-fits-all approach.
By placing territorial identity, community participation and co-creation alongside physical infrastructure, the team invites us to look at resilience as something we build together, through our relationship with place.
See team’s full presentation: Containing Resilience – A Modern Counterpart to a Historic Icon.
More about VASAB Young Planners' Summer School 2026 read here.
VASAB Young Planners’ Summer School 2026 has been funded by the Council of the Baltic Sea States (CBSS) Project Support Facility (PSF).
The CBSS does not make any warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the information in this publication. The views, findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in the publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official position of the CBSS.
