TURF to Acceptance: Transforming Urban lawns for Resilience, a Framework toward Acceptance

Application summary

Urban lawns dominate up to 75% of cities’ greenspaces, yet remain monocultural, resource-intensive, and ecologically poor. The TURF → Acceptance project transforms these areas into resilient meadows and applies diverse mowing regimes to address urban challenges: climate adaptation, biodiversity loss, carbon storage, and water regulation. Meadows support higher biodiversity while enhancing soil carbon and improving the sponge properties of cities, buffering floods and droughts. For implementation, institutional and public hurdles must also be addressed so the spaces are democratically accepted. This project unites ecosystem research with landscape architecture to test six treatments: traditional lawn and urban meadow, plus four design mowing regimes (refuge, layered, sinus, and mosaic). It will generate comprehensive data on soil health, vegetation traits, insect dynamics, carbon budgets, and social acceptance. Results will be synthesized into best-practice reports, giving municipalities evidence-based tools to cut management costs, improve ecosystem health, and provide citizens with valued, climate-adaptive greenspaces. The international dimension strengthens the design: Helsinki, Lahti, and Mikkeli represent large, medium, and small Finnish centers, paralleled by Auckland–Hamilton–Rotorua with a near-identical demographic and urbanization structure in New Zealand. This unique collaboration across boreal and warm-temperate/subtropical climates enables the replication of ecological and social findings across distinct cultural and environmental contexts. A postdoctoral researcher will work across both countries, supported by PhD candidates in Finland and New Zealand and a network of associated researchers. By bridging ecology, design, and acceptance, the project delivers globally scalable solutions for converting lawns into urban meadows, turning knowledge into action where people live.