Simo Laakkonen
 Senior Research Fellow, Landscape Studies (University of Turku), Adjunct Professor of Social and Economic History (University of Helsinki)


sijula@utu.fi

+358 45 137 7259

Siltapuistokatu 2

Pori


ORCID identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0126-1838

Areas of expertise
Environmental history of the Baltic Sea; urban socio-environmental change, oral environmental history, ecology of war, history of winter.

Research community or research topic
Director of projects involving environmental policy-making, science, technology, and media in the Baltic Sea region.

Biography

I studied political history at the University of Helsinki and completed my MSc thesis in 1991 about the emergence of the new labor movement (CUT, PT) which gained political power in Brazil at the end of the 20th century. I continued my studies in social and economic history and defended my PhD thesis in 2001. After that I worked as a researcher of the Academy of Finland, a Lecturer of Environmental Policy at the Department of Environmental Studies in Helsinki and as an (acting) Professor of Environmental Policy at the University of Joensuu in Eastern Finland. I was also a Visiting Fellow at Södertörn University, the University of Stockholm and the University of Kansas. In 2010-2014 I worked as a Senior Lecturer of Landscape Studies at the University of Turku. Currently I am a Senior Reserach Fellow and I steer a new project supported by the Academy of Finland exploring the history of winter in Finland during the industrial era.



Research


My PhD explored the origins of water protection in the City of Helsinki in 1878-1928. This approach was widened in cooperation with scholars representing, for example, folklore, biology, and engineering, and in 2001 we published an edited book entitled Näkökulmia Helsingin ympäristöhistoriaan, Kaupunki ja sen ympäristö 1800- ja 1900-luvulla (Approaches to the environmental history of Helsinki. The city and its environment in the 19th and 20th century (Helsinki: Edita, Helsinki Urban Facts, 274 pp). Helsinki remained long the only city outside North America that has been the subject of an extensive city-specific study in the field of environmental history.

My main research theme is the environmental history of pollution and protection of the Baltic Sea. Hence I have directed national projects in Finland and multidisciplinary projects that have examined urban and national water pollution and protection issues in Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, and Nordic Countries over the past century. The main results of these projects have been published in two Special Issues (Laakkonen et al. 2001 and 2007) in Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, which is a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Peacetime developments in societies and environment cannot be understood without taking into consideration the impact of war. After coediting with ecologist Timo Vuorisalo our first book in Finnish on this subject, that is, Sodan ekologia. Nykyaikaisen sodankäynnin ympäristöhistoriaa (Ecology of war. Environmental history of modern warfare), (Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society, 2007, 775 pp.) I directed also two other projects that provided the first books published on the environmental history of WWII, that is,  S. Laakkonen, R. Tucker, T. Vuorisalo (Eds.), The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2017) and S. Laakkonen, J. R. McNeill, R. Tucker, T. Vuorisalo (Eds.), The Resilient City in World War II: Urban Environmental Histories (New York, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Recently I have directed an international research project funded by the Kone Foundation (2021-2024) that have explored environmental history of water pollution and protection in Finland and Baltic Countries from the end of the 19th century until today. 


Teaching

Currently I am not involved in teaching except supervising some doctoral studies.



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Last updated on 2025-01-09 at 22:24