Back in the days … when I was feeling wobbly, living in some city in the the flux and flow of a Floridian (as in Richard) coolness, I often thought of the solidity of Helsinki where I was born. You know, this: granite in the kerb-stones, granite in the building and granite as open rock that’s just there because, well, because it is.
Well, Helsinki has since becom
e an Emmental cheese, not to celebrate in a concrete fashion Valio‘s successes in international cheese competitions, not even to extend district heating, but mostly to make room for more CARS.
So today, if you’re in Helsinki as a tourist, don’t be scared by the rumbles, the bangs, the sirens, the blasts. We are seriously mining to create ever more space underground. Blasts for the Music Building’s car park, explosions for extra room in the basement of the Parliament building and, more constructively, rumbling away to build the West Metro to Espoo. Many tourists probably think the rumbling is an already existing metro (you know, like in NYC or Paris).
But the last blasts every weekday evening are getting too big and too bangy to be mistaken for underground trains. Here in Töölö neighbours are getting used to glasses breaking in cupboards, walls cracking and light sleepers waking up from hard-won zzzzzs. And of course last winter there was that concert that had to be foreshortened at Finlandia Hall because of the noise.
Mining is quite obviously “an improper [but ancient] part of the human relationship with nature”, as Pliny noted. Probably today, as in ancient times, it’s fuelled by greed as much as by the massive machinery someone is helpfully putting at the builders’ disposal.
(A much more upbeat perspective 
on underground New Helsinki can be viewed on CNN).
I wonder whether this piece of landscape art in Kalasatama was a comment on this stuff. Not that this blog should be taken as official proof that what was once solidly holding up central Helsinki is now piled up on the building-sites-to-be in Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari.
Jees Helsinki Jees 