(Photo by Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Forget your weekend’s tours to your IKEA store. Helsingborg, a coastal city located in the South of Sweden, is going to become the dream destination for lovers of iconic Billy and Poäng.
The Swedish furniture store is stepping outside the four walls homes and starting a collaboration with an entire city through a project called H22. The aim is to explore solutions to the challenges that come with urbanization and make life easier for everybody everywhere - just like assembling the iconic bookshelf.
Recently named by the European Commission as one of Europe’s most innovative cities, the city of Helsingborg will develop ideas collected among citizens, IKEA and its partners. Then, an expo will take place from 30 May to 3 July 2022 to showcase the results.
“Over the next three years we will use the full potential of the IKEA Business model and embrace radically different thinking,” Ingka Group’s Chief Creative Officer, Marcus Engman, said. “By 2022, we want to present real solutions for sustainable cities that are affordable and practical for people, planet and society.”
H22’s sustainability focus is on three “rooms”: the Garden, the Market and the Kitchen. The first will promote urban farming, which will provide fresh products to the other two.
The harbour area will become a hub for innovative ideas around the future of retail and manufacturing, interactive exhibitions will help citizens approach textiles and printing technology, and the local forest Fredriksdalsskogen will host students’ experiments in sustainable housing.
To help tell the stories behind H22, IKEA is also launching a podcast series. The Oracle series of one-hour episodes will be hosted by industry leaders and people from Helsingborg.
“Together we will explore innovative solutions as we co-create the sustainable city of the future. We know that IKEA has many exciting ideas in regards to this,” the mayor Peter Danielsson said. “Through our collaboration with IKEA, Helsingborg is looking to find solutions to challenges we share with so many other cities around the world.”
H22 is another example of the company’s commitment to sustainability. This includes circular principles like second hand shops, the removal of singles-use plastic, zero emissions home deliveries by 2025, and the reduction of climate footprint by an average of 70% per product before 2030.
It might work. According to a research on IKEA’s customers' reasons for recycling textiles by Lund University, “environmental concerns, convenience and economic reasons are the dominant motivations in choosing a disposal option”. The authors recommend that “policy-makers and businesses work to increase convenience of consumers’ participation in circular product practices, and continually communicate environmental benefits of circular disposal options”.
Economic benefits must go hand in hand with the ecological vision. In this way, Helsingborg may become “home” to a tech and social living innovation.
