Paulina Emilia Nordström

Associate Professor Department of Global Development and Planning

Email: paulina.e.nordstrom@uia.no
Phone: +47 38 14 14 10
Office: H2034 (Universitetsveien 25, 4630 Kristiansand, Norway)

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Areas of responsibility

Paulina Nordström, Ph.D. is associate professor at Department of Global Development and Planning. She Holds a Ph.D. from University of Turku. Paulina studied the concept of creative landscape by exploring the concept of landscape and event philosophy side by side. By way of the concept, she contemplated the changes that occur in multisensory seeing. The study includes experiments in applied theatre as a method for participatory urban planning, glass architecture, urban photography and 3D laser scanning.

Current research project focuses on rooftop urbanism.

Research

Selected publications

Hautala, J. & P. Nordström (2019) Creative city, mobility, and creativity: Finnish artists in Berlin, Mobilities, DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2019.1616445

Nordström, P. (2018). Creative landscapes: events at sites of encounter. Annales Universitatis Turkuensis, Series A 2, Biologica, Geograhica, Geologica.

Nordström, P. (2017). The site of glass architecture and the surface aesthetics of urban photography. Space and Culture 20 (3): 271–286.

Nordström, P. (2017). Through laser scanned point clouds to techno-sight and a landscape on the move. GeoHumanities 3 (1): 122–143.

Nordström, P. (2016). The creative landscape of theatre-research cooperation: a case from Turku, Finland. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 98 (1): 1–17.

Nordström, P. (2013). Taidehanke taidetapahtumana: Meidän perhe -hanke Euroopan unionin institutionaalisen kehikon tällä ja tuolla puolen. (Art project as an art event: Our Family project on this and that side of the institutional framework of European Union) Alue ja ympäristö 42 (1): 3–12.

Kymäläinen, P. & P. Nordström (2010). Temporary geographies of the city: The experienced spaces of asylum seekers in the City of Turku, Finland. Fennia 188 (1): 76–90.

Research groups

Urban and Regional Planning (URPLAN)

Nordström, Paulina Emilia (2026). The More-Than-Human Planning Event, and the Emergent Publicness of the Hollenderhagen Public Space in Risør, Norway. Planning Theory & Practice. ISSN 1464-9357. doi: 10.1080/14649357.2026.2660705. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
The paper advances a more-than-human perspective on planning events and contributes to broader understandings of public space development. It traces the transformation of the private Hollenderhagen garden in the small coastal town of Risør, southern Norway, into a public space, focusing on how the planning event unfolded amid chance, uncertainty, and temporal dynamics. The study also highlights the more-than-human entanglements through which a planner and an artist, together with the affordances and subtle representational roles of non-human actors, shaped the emergent publicness of Hollenderhagen.
Bafarasat, Abbas Ziafati; Baker, Mark; Cheshmehzangi, Ali; Goodspeed, Robert; Scott, Mark & Sharif, Ayyoob [Show all 27 contributors for this article] (2025). Planning competencies and transformative pedagogy for sustainable development. Progress in Planning. ISSN 0305-9006. 200. doi: 10.1016/j.progress.2025.100996. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Understood as “a means by which society decides collectively what urban [and rural] change should be like and tries to achieve that vision by a mix of means.”, there is broad consensus that planning should fully incorporate the notion of sustainable development. Planners have a critical role in envisioning and driving local transitions to sustainable development. This requires transforming what planners learn and how they learn in higher education. This study is the first to identify a set of planning competencies for sustainable development. It proposes in three areas planning competencies for sustainable development, including (a) knowledge to understand human settlements, (b) skills to plan sustainable settlements, and (c) values to stand for sustainable communities. Following a conceptual analysis of transformative pedagogy as a superior theoretical approach to teaching for sustainable development, this study is also the first to identify types of transformative learning activities, including (1) unlearning- relearning activities, (2) learning through new experiences, and (3) ill-structured problem solving. The study therefore makes original contributions to both planning and education literature, in addition to its interdisciplinary methodological contribution through an original design of ‘framing and sensemaking + reframing’ applied for knowledge recombination between two fields – i.e., sustainability competencies, and planning competencies. The study presents case examples submitted by planning schools around the world to demonstrate transformative learning activities that enhance planning competencies for sustainable and resilient urban development.
Nordström, Paulina Emilia (2024). Poetics in the work of three urban photographers: Love for the chaotic city from the site of urban rooftops. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. ISSN 0020-2754. p. 1–16. doi: 10.1111/tran.12727. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
By exploring the poetics of three photographers, this article attempts to capture the relationship between urban denizens and the ephemeral, tumultuous city. I understand poetics as arising from their spatial affection for, and sensemaking of, the city, which in turn engenders visual landscapes. I first outline poetics as the art of inhabiting, which generates affection for the city, drawing on the writings of Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Next, I examine how the poetics of photography is crafted in terms of creative sensemaking, where the affected body attunes to percepts and finds resonance with the city's vital forces, thereby enabling poetical landscapes to be captured by the lens.
Lundman, Riina & Nordström, Paulina Emilia (2023). Creative geographies in the age of AI: Co-creative spatiality and the emerging techno-material relations between artists and artificial intelligence. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. ISSN 0020-2754. 48(3), p. 451–670. doi: 10.1111/tran.12608. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
Artificial intelligence (AI) expands the more-than-human perspective on creativity and creative geographies, as new techno-material relations and spatialities are formed when humans and AI create together. In this paper, we suggest the concept of ‘co-creative spatiality’ to refer to the special sites, relations and processes of human–AI collaboration in artistic creative practice. Our study builds on interviews with 26 Finland-based artists who have used AI in their artistic work. In our analysis, we focus on the questions of what, how, where, who and with of creativity, through which we study the spatialities of creativity and their links to AI. We discuss, how the emerging techno-materialities of AI affect co-creative spatiality by stretching the boundaries of (human) imagination and sparking creativity across new imaginative terrains. Co-creative spatiality reveals novel and unfamiliar collaborations that constitute our material worlds and, therefore, we believe it invites geographical analysis from all those interested in the transformations of creative and artistic practices in the age of AI.
Nordström, Paulina Emilia (2023). A rhizomatic research story about the changing landscapes of rooftop urbanism in Peckham, London. Landscape Research. ISSN 0142-6397. 48(4), p. 561–582. doi: 10.1080/01426397.2023.2167961. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
In this article, I introduce rooftop urbanism as a landscape between earth and sky. The concept of landscape provides a framework within which rooftop urbanism can be studied as a multi-sensuous, bodily lived relation with rooftop sites at various heights in the urban fabric. Through encounters with the materialities of the roof and the rooftoppers of the former Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, London, I craft a rhizomatic research story. I discuss the moving landscape experienced by inhabiting a rooftop above ground level and under the sky, and how the mobile landscape can be an affective means of sense-making, connecting rooftoppers beyond the rooftop. Given that changing landscapes cannot be reconstructed, I evoke impressions using images and words, which can then be read as expressions for further thought.
Nordström, Paulina Emilia; Lundman, Riina & Hautala, Johanna (2023). Evolving Coagency between Artists and AI in the Spatial Cocreative Process of Artmaking. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. ISSN 2469-4452. 113(9), p. 2203–2218. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2023.2210647. Full text in Research Archive Show summary
This article applies theoretical and empirical discussions of emerging human and digital technology relations to our interest in collaborative artist–artificial intelligence (AI) artmaking processes. Thus far, the theoretical focus has largely been on mediating (code) and merged (cyborg) human–technology relations, with mutual (coagency) relations yet to be adequately explored. To address this, we nuance the theoretical discussion and extend the empirical research, analyzing the spatial cocreative artmaking process through video interviews with eighteen Finnish artists using AI. Drawing on the work of Barad, we regard humans and AI as fundamentally entwined, receiving their agencies through intra-action. Building on this, we demonstrate how the agencies of artists and AI emerge and mutually evolve across three stages of the creative process: (1) coding and data, (2) learning and training, and (3) curating the outcome. Thus, through our empirical research on how artist and AI create new material and meaningful artworlds, we are able to nuance understanding of coagency as a spatial process. Key Words: agency, art, artificial intelligence, cocreativity, digital geographies.
Arslan, E Seda; Nordström, Paulina Emilia; Ijäs, Asko; Hietala, Reija & Fagerholm, Nora (2021). Perceptions of Cultural Ecosystem Services: spatial differences in urban and rural areas of Kokemäenjoki, Finland. Landscape Research. ISSN 0142-6397. 46(6), p. 828–844. doi: 10.1080/01426397.2021.1907322. Full text in Research Archive
Hietala, Reija; Ijäs, Asko; Pikner, Tarmo; Kull, Anne; Printsmann, Anu & Kuusik, Maila [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2021). Data integration and participatory process in developing integrated coastal zone management (ICZM) in the northern Baltic Sea. Journal of Coastal Conservation. ISSN 1400-0350. 25, p. 1–15. doi: 10.1007/s11852-021-00833-4. Full text in Research Archive
Hautala, Johanna & Nordström, Paulina Emilia (2019). Creative city, mobility, and creativity: Finnish artists in Berlin. Mobilities. ISSN 1745-0101. 14(6). doi: 10.1080/17450101.2019.1616445. Full text in Research Archive

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Nordström, Paulina Emilia; Pull, Karl Emil; Scoville-Simonds, Morgan Storm & Huidobro-Goya, Jose Alejandro (2022). Film screening about urban development: struggles for social justice and housing rights: "Dirty Games: Olympic Evictions in Rio de Janeiro". Full text in Research Archive
Ystanes, Margit; Nordström, Paulina Emilia; Pull, Karl Emil; Scoville-Simonds, Morgan Storm & Huidobro-Goya, Jose Alejandro (2022). Film screening about urban development: struggles for social justice and housing rights. Full text in Research Archive

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Published Apr. 16, 2024 11:22 AM