Innovative Activity Facility - From Vision to Reality
Since the start of Curve Studio in 2022, we have worked on several projects within the Vestland County Municipality's initiative for Innovative Activity Facilities. This initiative focuses on creating local gathering places with a variety of attractive, low-threshold offerings for physical activity, and, not least, projects with a strong emphasis on good user participation processes.
These projects go straight to the heart of some of the central challenges of our time, such as loneliness, inactivity, and a lack of a sense of belonging. It has been an educational journey that we are very grateful to have been a part of, first together with the county team and then with the individual municipalities as the projects continued.
In 2022, we began work on transforming the outdoor area at Florø Secondary School. The starting point was the needs of the local community, and Kinn Municipality's overarching vision for the project served as both inspiration and a guiding star throughout the process:
An inviting community that promotes inclusion, belonging, learning, and mastery for the diverse youth population and the rest of the residents of Florø.
As part of giving both the students at the secondary school and the wider local community a greater sense of ownership of the future outdoor area, we conducted everything from community meetings and in-depth interviews to pizza nights and walk 'n' talks. The design is based on the desire for an open, inclusive, and diverse facility, with an atmosphere and identity that reflects the diversity in Florø. Based on the vision and findings from the participation process, we designed the school grounds as a collage of social gathering places and activity opportunities—a place to hang out, swing, climb, and play with friends, where the traditional schoolyard concept expands into a shared community space for the residents of Florø. The first phase of the project opened in the winter of 2024, and since then, we have continued working on the plans for the remaining area.
Attractive recreational facilities in all forms are important spaces in our modern society, but the particular focus on thorough needs assessments and inviting, low-threshold offerings for all ages makes the projects within the Innovative Activity Facilities initiative something more. They are, first and foremost, social gathering places with the potential to make a real difference in their surroundings. We look forward to following the progress of both our own and others' projects in this exciting initiative.
