Sceneries of Helsinki – Adieu on this snowy Independence Day

If you are interested in how ideals congeal into matter, and if you appreciate that a seven-storey building can be “human-sized”, do come and visit Helsinki.

But whether you’re here or just planning a visit, make sure to enjoy it before it’s too late. The “pressure” to build (particularly on the water) is producing a stunning list of new and attractive opportunities for the building sector. The Planning Department’s webpage contains so much architectural and planning dross it makes me weep.

From redesigning the rural idylls of Östersundom and the fast-growing suburbs to the east, to the bombastic dullness of the other so-called New Helsinki zones, up the high-rise-hotel (a new symbol for Helsinki?!) on the western edge of the peninsula, and down to the wrangle over a helicopter pad in Hernesaari … our enormous Planning Department must be a hive of activity.

Presumably everywhere architecture and construction have sped up through computer-aided technology and politics-to-suit-the-rich. The craze for big and showy in Helsinki is also capitalizing on the genuine problem that Helsinki’s land-use is wasteful by European standards (as even Wikipedia will tell you). So as they turn over more and more of the city to speculative building, the usual suspects (Kokoomus politicians like young Mr Männistö who heads the planning committee, for example) have at their disposal a machine more powerful than ever with which to smother the city with monuments to today’s impatient capitalism, but also a vaguely green-sounding argument for building high.

Can protesters and activists keep up? They are beginning to try. Some have stepped up their campaigns with letters to the planning department and to editors (if you have access to Helsingin Sanomat you can follow an interesting exchange here), and with new websites and blogs.

Perhaps the new little exhibition at the Architecture Museum, Unbuilt Helsinki, is also a kind of protest. Maybe. I’d describe it as difficult art. But it is based on a larger, longer project that might yield some stories yet, about how the choices were once made that created the city we  still love.

Is there any point in trying to resist? Haven’t the rich always shaped the city?

Probably. But I can’t believe the rich have always been this stupid or careless. In this little gem of a city we appear to have rich folks who can’t distinguish a fine skyscraper from an a architectural erectile dysfunction.

And, to give me the excuse to share this bit of silliness (below), Helsinki’s rich presumably also think a good evening’s eating out might have some connection to forest sceneries. I think, Helsinki, we have a massive problem on our hands.

If, dear reader, you have any thoughts on the design of future Helsinki that haven’t been taken up on this blog, or that should be taken in new directions, I’d love to know. The thing is, I’m not going away, but I think this blog should now wind up. It’s time for something more serious.

Thank you so much for reading. JHJ.

Nature itself supports the Helsinki City Planning Department’s Visions

Today, 28.5.2012, is the last day for the public to submit comments regarding the planning proposal for a 33-storey hotel just to the west of the city centre, in Jätkäsaari. Late submissions have been known to have been accepted.

Read and acted upon?

That’s different.

According to a glossy corporate website, the Kämp Tower luxury hotel will open in November 2014.

This statement does fly in the face of the plan currently in force (allowing 16 storeys, itself pretty startling and, for architects, challenging, in the current Helsinki context). Such a prospect is also clearly devastating to many Helsinkians. Others are blissfully unaware of the plan, of course.

Future neighbours and some urban aficianados do know. After a public relations hearing in January, followed by a period of soliciting the public’s views (you know, citizen participation) the Planning Department published a robust rebuttal of the critical views. Called a review of the public consultation, you will find this if you swim around the Department’s haphazardly updated website often enough.

Alternatively, if you’re lucky, you may find it via this link to the minutes of the planning committee’s meeting held 13.3.2012. Liite (enclosure) 9 is a report outlining some of the objections to changing the currently valid development plan so that it could accommodate the 33-storey conference-centre-hotel that our Norwegian investor-friend (yes, he of the Herzog and de Meuron debacle in Katajanokka) wants.

Basically, most of the public sees the plans as inappropriate, bad and threatening Helsinki’s most cherished assets.

The Department pooh-poohs such retrograde opinions. The 33-storey hotel is appropriate to the site. It is a good thing for Helsinki and the surrounding areas. It does not in any way threaten the development of the city.

Not incidentally, the implication is that if one is against these very 33 storeys, one is against progress.

JHJ is not impressed with the way “public participation” is interpreted at the City Planning Department. Why would anyone bother to send any more comments, given that the obvious and pretty substantial comments made so far have been dismissed already?

No wonder so many people in Helsinki comment on the power of the City Planning Department. It is said that it employs well over a hundred people, maybe over 200, and operates behind closed doors. On their contacts page though it looks like it’s barely 50 folks.

Someone somewhere though is churning out one heck of a lot of strong rhetoric, verbal and visual, which appears to be paving the way to a strong change in the cityscape and atmosphere of our lovely pocket-sized capital.

Creative destruction, outer coverings and other meanings

The Finnish economy isn’t doing so great (either). But where could one find an economy that WAS doing great? It’s bad news whichever way you look, and plenty of people have already become accustomed to calling what we now have for economic policy “zombie capitalism” or “zombie neoliberalism“, as in, something that should by all accounts and rational assessments have died long ago and given way to something more viable, but that instead persists (scarily) in rising from  the brink of death.

It’s not just the Greeks and europeans-in-general who are in trouble, the cuts have reached Finland. Investment in new housing in the Helsinki area is to be severely cut back in efforts to balance the city’s ailing budget. Jussi Pajunen (of the Kokoomus a.k.a. Coalition a.k.a. conservative party) and his city government announced that they’ve run out of funds to build the massive amounts of new homes that they have been trumpeting since the Port of Helsinki was moved from commercially interesting city-centre sites to Vuosaari.

We hope that in yeras to come, investing in the city will resume, since Helsinki’s charm has a lot to do with the way it’s taken care of, in the way people have invested in it and left a layer-cake of wonderful buildings and places for us to enjoy.

The word “investment”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is not primarily about putting money down up-front in expectation of returns or benefits at a later date. It’s about dressing someone or about “an outer covering, an envelope, a coating”! Then there’s this definition: “The surrounding or hemming in of a town or fort by a hostile force so as to cut off all communication with the outside; beleaguerment; blockade.”

But finally we get this: “The conversion of money or circulating capital into some species of property from which an income or profit is expected to be derived in the ordinary course of trade or business. (Distinguished from speculation, in which the object is the chance of reaping a rapid advantage by a sudden rise in the market price of something which is bought merely in order to be held till it can be thus advantageously sold again.)

We here at JHJ are not economists, but we are interested in how our shared household (the city) manages its wealth. We are beginning to get interested in what, if anything, distinguishes the way you run a city from the way you run a company. Like, do cities really compete the way the gurus say they do? What happens when a city goes bankrupt? What happens to dead cities or dead shopping malls …? What will happen to Helsinki if public investment falls massively?

For now, rumour has it that the controversial renewal of Helsinki’s Senate Square area is going ahead but with far less “investment” going in which translates, we gather, into less of the creative destruction that urban development has been about. So, could one “invest” by not innovating?

By the way, we learn from Arkkivahti that the Senate Square’s public role (which has really energised this blog!)  is, for once, being staunchly defended by the City (and her source is The Usual). It just refused permission to use the square for a ticketed concert. Well done!

Time and Place (or H:ki squeezes into English-language architectural press)

One of the problems with the now scuppered hotel scheme for Helsinki’s Katajanokka, was that the architects (Pierre and Jacques) didn’t demonstrate much local knowledge. Someone with local knowledge of how the area works over time, day to day, season to season, was bound to balk not just at the visual impact of the thing. They were also bound to try to get their heads around how a starchitectural hotel would effect the traffic bottlenecks on the way to what is still an island, and what it would do to the visual arc created by the buildings around the market place, and consider how the market itself would be affected and, of course, they would appreciate the length of shadows in this part of the world.

The area in question is, perhaps, a planner’s nightmare, particularly now that urban space is so definitely, so unutterably commercially, a luxury that a public can only afford, apparently, if it’s provided in partnership with a private “developer”. (I refer you to my short course on entrepreneurial urban governance a while back). In fact, the area is an “urban fragment” according to architecture writer Malcolm Quantrill that even the venerable Alvar Aalto himself struggled with (… my reading of the text finds no trace of irony in this observation by Quantrill …) when he designed the Enso-Gutzeit “palazzo” sticking out of Kanavaranta. That building (the original white [sugar] cube?) has been causing double-takes and not a little disgust at modern architecture  since 1961. Originally Aalto had envisaged – along with many others – something grander, more central to the nation’s collective memory and its future, a parliament building for the site. Alas, what resulted, in the view of many a Helsinkian, was a fragment in the sense of something violently detached from its surrounding, connected whole. In 1993 though, another government building was completed up the street, by Olli Pekka Jokela, which goes some way towards repairing the sense of brokenness (in the pic above the white facade; peeking just above the now-redundant terminal building in the pic below).

Quantrill’s otherwise intriguing text reads as if he didn’t know Helsinki too well either, since he writes that it’s a city which lacks a sense of “downtown”. Either he never made arrangements to meet under the clock at Stockmann (see picture below) or things have changed since the piece was written, one assumes either late 1970s or 1980s. As a native I can guarantee that downtown definitely is there, and it definitely reaches, if not all the way to the Kajatanokka waterfont site, at least to the tram stop at Manta (whose future is, alas, shrowded in the mysteries of the Planning Department’s illogical or at least elusive argumentation).

From his London perspective Jonathan Glancey, on the other hand, has a powerful sense of what is lost if global fashions take over and destroy the times and places that urban (and other) folks dwell in. Writing with his usual forthrightness and wit in Building Design today, he notes that Stockholm is under threat of the “world class city” treatment and adds that Helsinki is too:

This means historic buildings being vandalised to ensure they suit the needs of wilfully vulgar global “brand” shops, the rerouting of trams from the historic centre because these, apparently, aren’t best suited to tourist-oriented “pedestrianisation” schemes and the loss of a culture famous for fighting off invaders and going its own happily modest way. “World class cities” spells architectural bombast, bling and banality.

At least the Vikings look as if they’re sharpening their locally forged swords ready to fight for a true sense of place.
Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=427&storycode=3162340&channel=427&c=1#ixzz0ltZOQ1Re

Well, since it’s arguable whether Finns are Vikings (Fenno-Ugric types is a more common attribution) we hope this doesn’t suggest that Finns are doing something in CONTRAST to Swedes.

Below, the Sokkers clock during that bi-annual (twice a year) bout of madness.

Staying looking good

Well, gush-warning as I find myself – amazingly – well disposed towards Kamppi (the building complex) whose top-floor hosts a reasonably pleasant cafe. This uncharacteristic charitability towards that turn-of-the-millennium excuse for urban space is probably motivated by strong feelings of affection for Helsinki and its (currently) blue skies, smiling tram drivers, buildings painted to just the right shades to catch the magic of spring sunshine, park benches returned to parks, mountains of snow reduced to crusty bumps of grit and next month’s lawn slowly (very, very slowly, it seems) coming to life (see foreground). Of Finland’s four seasons, spring may not be the most memorable, but when you’re in it, it certainly is a season!

But it doesn’t happen all by itself. If the rooftops were teeming with snow-removers a month or two ago, the streets are now littered with “move-your-cars-out-of-the-way-of-the-street-sweeper” signs (if only the cars would just go away and stay away!) and caretakers hosing down the grit and the street dust. It’s tempting to think of this as spring cleaning, but after the winter’s constantly visible signs of maintenance – and on an all-too-fleeting visit from grimy London – I realise that one of the constants about Helsinki in recent memory is that it has a year-round beauty regime. Let’s hope it continues. You can tell when something’s looked after.

I always knew there was a strong sense of good manners and respect for sharing space (a kind of urban version of Finland’s everyman’s right of access to natural areas) and some legislation on maintaining streets in Helsinki. But it’s only struck me this year how many people are visibly working at keeping things in shape.

Alas, I fear our windows are letting the street down. Nobody but me to wash them. A direct hit on my civic conscience was this, the cleaning equipment left outside by a caretaker. Can’t get away without at least a spring clean in that slanting sunshine …

Relief in absentia – waterfront potential (again)

Well, we’ve been rather concentrated on other matters, other event-spaces than Helsinki. Thus the date we had once dreaded came and went without notice. Until, that is, Arkkivahti‘s feed reminded us of the issue of the month: the icy waterfront hotel scheme.

Well, on the seventh of April 2010 Herzog & deMeuron’s icy cross was turned down by the City Council. The local media – based on a v. quick internet search, i.e. Hesari and one or two others – seems to be engaged in some quasi-critical reflection in which it is suggested that the ‘antis’ were (as is usually the case in fast-capitalism), well, if not wrong, at least populist and thus discreditable. We hope there will be more sophisticated and design-savvy commentary elsewhere in time to come, as there was in November for instance, as reported via this blog.

But hey, maybe after six months, a year, three – depending on where you were in the networks of government and construction partnerships, or how keen you were to keep politicians accountable for public space – an outporing of one sort or another was to be expected.

So now, dear friends, with the demise of this bit of silliness (for that it was, however grand a design this seemed) Helsinki’s decision makers (who do, yes, still make the odd decision) have unblocked the development potential of an important and highly valued site. Put another way, just think what a sterile pursuit it is for a city in the boreal zone (cold and coniferous) to plug its waterfront with accommodation for tourists!

Eyes peeled then in months to come for Taivallahti.  Not for tourists, but not for many others either, there’s also the eastern edge of Lauttasaari (below X 3  last November, interestingly YIT the construction firm gets far more coverage than the architects). Whatever else next…

Architecture, global capital and really big countries

There are different ways one could look at the prospect of a two-tier-Swiss-flag-in-glass popping up on the waterfront by Helsinki’s market square. Here’s one, for example.

The port of Helsinki closed down harbour functions here some while ago and what we have left is largely disused building or car-parking space. So perhaps it is time to move on from the port’s understanding (see website) that this is just some prime-quality SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

Though of course it isn’t, and never was, left over that is.The idea of getting some of that footloose and still relatively abundant global (Norwegian) capital to settle in Helsinki is never, so it would seem, far from the minds of the city’s decision makers. Will Finns soon be meekly going where many others have gone before?

Having expanded at length on the HDHD previously and since the damning views by the international commentators are available online anyway (oh, Mr Holl, Helsinki needs you now!) we’ll move on to other aspsects of the debacle. For instance, waterfront development generally. Here’s what Finnish researchers Rauno Sairinen and Satu Kumpulainen had to say about it before the money wobble:

Today, urban waterfront regeneration takes place in a societal environment of increased capital mobility and inter-urban competition (…). Because cities have to compete for investments and affluent residents, city governments cannot merely manage the development, i.e. focus on the redistribution of resources, but have to actively pursue investments and publicity … Urban governance has expanded to involve not only the government but also a range of private and semi-public actors. This approach … based on public–private partnership, flagship projects, aggressive marketing and consumption-oriented projects such as retail and tourism centres, has been labelled entrepreneurial urban governance (…), and it is often well exemplified by large-scale urban waterfront regeneration projects.

(From ‘Assessing social impacts in urban waterfront regeneration’  in Environmental Impact Assessment Review 26 (2006) 120– 135)

If you left things at that, you’d want to give up on any semblance of critical debate whatsover and of course they don’t. In fact, the authors note that

According to the Land Use and Building Act there should be adequate investigation of
a plan’s potential environmental impacts, including implications for the community
economy, social, cultural and other effects. … environmental impacts are
understood as direct and indirect effects on:
– people’s living conditions and environment;
– plants and animals, water, air and climate;
– flora and fauna, biodiversity and natural resources;
– regional and community structure, community and energy economy and traffic;
– townscape, landscape, cultural heritage and the built environment.

Well, we haven’t seen these yet for the plot in question. Nor can we find anything recent on the City Planning Department’s website (even on its sweetly titled “participate and influence” page). [Updated 24.3] Initially we found no trace of the report on the cultural and architectural values of the area that was promised by Hannu Penttila a month or so ago and cheered us up so but a polite email to the City Planning Department fixed that problem and provided the link (in Finnish).

And why are we bothered? Because Helsingin Sanomat and other media reported that the hotel scheme is back off ice again, to be voted on early next month. The City Board already decided it was in favour of Norwegian money in the shape of a luxury hotel by ueber-starchitects Herzog + de Meuron, even while tons of other folks, including the Katajanokka Seura (local amenity society) are collecting signatures to make the (horrid) thing go away. In the mean time, however, the poor old politicians appear to be more and more worried that if they don’t embrace the thing (which some admit to not liking) they feel bound to go with it just so they get their hands on that money.

Alas, to imagine politicians saving municipal budgets through savvy real estate deals is to indulge in make-believe. And we don’t just mean Helsinki – London’s own spectacular Canary Wharf had to be saved by massive, massive injections of public money and by “legal” bolsterings of private enterprise.

And yet there is a precedent in Helsinki. Not knowing what was up, I photographed these port-a-cabins which signalled the start of something new to me back in September. Another hole in the ground perhaps, for Southern Helsinki’s fecundly reproducing cars, I thought at first. I didn’t find out about that one either on the Planning Department’s media outlets but rather via The Usual. It’s the plot on Neitsytpolku, (maybe Helsink’s answer to Maiden Lane) also known (aptly? ironically?) as the Kätilöopisto (College of Midwifery or Birthing Hospital) site. It was sold off in 1990 by the city to the Soviet Union, whose embassy was next door. Sale price: a paltry 75million granny’s markkas. Over the next few years the decision was bitterly contested as some folks suggested getting the land back, others at least to insist that planning permission be conditional on an architectural competition to include Finnish entrants. Didn’t happen.

In those days the journalists at The Usual looked to typical blunders of the times to inject a tone of criticism. They considered the various embassy buildings that Helsinki had, in moments of lax judgement it suggested, sold off to sovereign foreign states who then blithely ignored architectural context if not always planning regulations. Interestingly, they saved their most venomous language for the Norwegians and how they replaced a jugend villa by Selim Lindqvist with a box of aluminium and glass (perhaps to remind them of back home in Oslo?).

This could all be quite amusing if it weren’t for the way 21st architecture is getting just SOOOO BIIIG which in little Helsinki really doesn’t appeal at all. Mr Holl, if you have any views on Katajanokka or Helsinki still, might you publish somewhere prominent quite soon?

“Aleksanterinkatu to be torn up again”

Nobody likes their street being ripped up. Nobody, except a speculative investor with a certain amount of confidence, likes renovations or maintenance to disrupt normal service.

Well – we here at JHJ don’t know if it’s good news or bad news. The Paper (new readers unfamiliar with our patois should be told that this and The Usual, Pravda and similar monikers refers to Helsingin Sanomat) in this country comes out in the wee hours and gets delivered to your doorstep. (Unless you opted for the Centre Partyist’s favoured mode of habitation in which case you have to trudge knee-deep in fresh snow to get it out of the post-box). Actually, it’s just as easy to read online if you subscribe, and even if you don’t you get some stuff.

Interestingly, this morning’s issue was able to report that

Aleksanterinkadun raiteet siirretään nykyistä hieman pohjoisemmiksi, ja pohjoinen jalkakäytävä kavennetaan 3,5 metriseksi. Käytännössä tämä tarkoittaa Aleksanterinkadun rakentamista kokonaan uudelleen katulämmityksineen, raitiovaunupysäkkeineen ja kivetyksineen.

Which is to say:

The tram lines on Aleksanterinkatu are to be moved slightly northwards and the pavement to the north of them to be narrowed to 3,5 metres. In practice this means a total rebuilding of A.katu with its street heating, tram stops and paving.

Besides noting the budgeted cost of this, 14 892 00 euros (we believe they mean to add a zero, making it 14 892 000), it says pretty much nothing – nothing about the plans to revitalise the old partly vacant buildings in the area, (and so risk killing off the remaining vestiges of small-scale or non-commercial activity) nothing about the hassle caused to the tram network of the entire city, nothing about the damage to the historic shape of the square not to mention nothing about the heavy-handed and homogenising handiwork of the brand-consultants whose gentrifying efforts were quietly and outrageously passed by the Planning Committee before Christmas.

What, you might be thinking, did we expect.

Well, we were not expecting the news to break when the meeting of the Planning Committee had not yet even taken place. That was scheduled for 15.00 today, 25.2.2010. Accessed on this same day at 22.50, we find it’s still there but of course the minutes aren’t. So we can assume that the machinations of city government and planning continue on their merry way behind closed doors in the usual cabinets. Except we have been startled by the difficulties that Helsinki seems to have in deliberating about the future of shared and valuable assets. (Oh, and by the way, the City Board is supposed to OK these kinds of things before they are considered policy. I guess it’s called rubber stamping to distinguish it from serving the citizens.)

Has Helsinki always been run like this? In the wake of not just this example of anti-democratic (as well as uncivilized – but that’s a slightly more subjective view point so we put it in brackets) decision making but with Katajanokka’s designer hotel debacle fresh in our minds, and the ugly spectre of Sipoo becoming Helsinki too, to be governed from afar. We wonder. We wonder.

Meanwhile property owners and building managers in this part of the world are having to cope with more snow than has been seen here since 1941. The media is full of pictures of snow on roofs, on trucks, cars, anything and everything, and of stories of why, how, by whom, how not and by whom not to get excess snow off your roof before it either collapses or causes damage. Drains in the mean time are being steamed off to stave off disaster, as here in Hallituskatu a few days ago.

I wish I could say my concerns about the Senate Square are just so much hot air. I fear a battle may be in the offing. Even more I fear that I will have to work out whether or not my stand on it will make me a snob. And then I’ll have to work out whether or not that bothers me. All things considered, that’s a minor concern compared to ripping up everybody’s history in the most literal possible way.

Life and death in the city – a slight disagreement

I try to get my head around the idea that people I respect think it’s a good idea to spend millions of euros (with the quoted figure rising by the month, see here, under LIIKENNESUUNNITTELUPAALLIKKO) on rearranging Aleksanterinkatu at the Senate Square.

But I stumble over the vocabulary. What to me is black to others is white. I love the square and feel it just needs a bit of maintenance and necessary repair, for others it is dead and in need of “renewal”.

To me their vision of renewal looks a lot like “killing off”. Moving tram routes so that passengers have to make awkward loops in their travels, and allowing for restaurants to spill out into the open (shady side of the buildings, see photo) on the Senate Square is to kill off something precious, let’s call it ordinary life, and to replace it with something expensive. I’d call that pseudo life or, if you want specifics, high-end commercial ventures even if the hope is that in their wake will come the “opening up” of the area. The assumption underlying that, is that  city-centre office space is somehow wasted space and that working in them is less lively an act than, say, drinking bubbly or beer.

For me the Senate Square in its current evening glow is a marvel. Others think that it is dead. No bars. No shops. No signs of life, apparently. Deceased, a late square, it has ceased to be …

But obviously a square cannot be dead – it is made of stones, metal and memories, rhythms and meanings and importantly, of livelihoods and mundane routine. This square is not even scary let alone dangerous, even in the middle of the night. But because it does not, it seems, cater enough to the consuming classes and because the small shops that have been there for years, seem not to suffice, the whole now needs heavy-handed altering.

Of course commerce is a big part of cities, always has been. But to confuse showy consumption with life is a mistake and also the result of 100 years of extremely consumerist culture. (The recent Worldwatch Report makes the case v. well). It’s also the achievement (fault) of all those who read and believed in the creative-classes (reg. trademark!) thesis embroidered by one Richard Florida. Despite repeated, heavy (this in Finnish), not to say devastating criticism, the banalities he has so successfully packaged and peddled now routinely pass for good political sense. Florida’s thesis is summed up in the idea that the post-industrial new economy needs new behaviours and new places for its elite, the creative class as he calls them. Cities will prosper if these people find them attractive, because then they will move and invest there, and contribute to city coffers by creating wealth.

The old is valued by the creatives too – it’s bohemian and attracts creative talent after all – but it must be adapted to suit the needs of the 21st century, of course, according to the creative city hype.

Creatives work in marketing, product development and the financial services that sustain them, or they design and entertain for a living. They’re hard to please, but they enjoy considerable status, comforts and, undoubtedly, intellectual rewards. They are lucky indeed, cities everywhere have been falling over their own feet seeking to accommodate their imagined needs – cafes and bars, wired and wireless instant connections and trendiness. Enthusiasm for the creative cities thesis has also allowed people to forget that anybody grows older than, say, 35 years old. Enthusiasm for the thesis has also led to the odd belief that using beautiful spaces to house the office workers is somehow a “waste”. Here is a 1970s annex to the City Hall by Aarno Ruusuvuori. When it was built it was much maligned, but it’s hardly an eyesore.

What is an eyesore are the efforts to turn all that is beautiful into a backdrop for consumption or spectacle. You also end up with homogenous places because you just can’t reproduce the bohemian chic of a seattle or a san francicso everywhere. Instead you get blandness and  inauthenticity. The architecture blogger Tarja Nurmi writes about this in Finnish, notes that even in wonderful Italy places that have been “regenerated” to suit expensive tastes are actually rather, well, dead.

The creative class thesis has supported arguments to “regenerate” a lot that never needed regenerating. But as critic after critic has pointed out, the results often diminish the public realm and reduce opportunities for genuine urban encounters. They even risk turning the most intriguing and layered places into theme parks and disney-esque rubbish.

Helsinki’ Senate Square may be less noisy and less showy than what commercial regeneration and spectacle production likes to call “lively” or “vibrant”, but it’s also less exhausting and probably a good bit more sustainable.

Gradually the creative cities missionaries have woken up to the reality that life isn’t just consumption and spectacle – even in a city. Unfortunatly, cities all over the world meanwhile believed that by following the Florida-recipy, they could avoid thinking too hard about economic or sociopolitical realities. As Prospect Magazine reported last month, this is what one town in New York State is now grappling with:

Inspired, Elmira’s newly elected mayor, John Tonello … oversaw the redevelopment of several buildings downtown. “The grand hope was to create retail spaces that would enable people to make money and serve the creative class Florida talks about,” Tonello says. The new market-rate apartments filled up quickly, but the bohemian coffee shops the mayor fantasizes about have yet to materialize.

It would be so much easir and livelier not to stifle real life by plonking down great, big “renewal” schemes in the first place!

Plenty of theres there in Helsinki

If Manta (that’s Valgren’s Havis Amanda’s nickname) could turn around a little further on her pedestal, she’d be able to see the stretch of now underused waterfront that’s caused such a stir in Helsinki.

On which note Helsinkians can heave a sigh of relief over the possiblility that waterfront redevelopment of the gentrifying and/or tourist-tattifying kind will at least be slowed down if not definitely shelved. That’s to say, if some piece of starchitecture does go up on that hard-to-access plot in Katajanokka it won’t be because of an oversight but the result of a carefully pondered-over decision made by elected as well as appointed “representatives” of the citizenry. Of course, the citizenry will also have to cope with whatever the planning committee comes up with after next Thursday’s meeting at which major, major changes to the look and the transport links around the Senate Square are to be discussed. Not that details of coming decisions are available on Helsingin Leijona’s website or on the “current proposals” or even “on view now” menu of the Planning Department’s site. Watchful citizens, mindful of the possibility of megalomaniac rebranding schemes in stone, steel and glass are certainly being kept busy!

Meanwhile starchitecture is recognised as a bit of a handicap in the international architectural media – if the UK’s weekly, Building Design qualifies as such. Proving that lumpiness (as we discussed earlier) and all the over-crowding that goes with it is highly developed within the architectural profession, BD reports that when Peter Eisenman, deconstructivist theorist and architect from over the water went to Edinburgh recently to give a lecture, crash barriers were needed to control the mob… Even more eye-catching is what the great man had to say, apparently, about architecture’s role in creating zeitgeist or sense of place (genius loci):

Contemporary architecture expresses neither, he argued. Vegas — a phantasm of Parises and Hiltons conjured up in the middle of nowhere — is the quintessence of the contemporary city. It could be anyplace, anytime.

Well, the designer hotel scheme that’s now temporarily on hold (as mentioned in earlier post-s) certainly had something of the iciness of an old-fashionedly cold Helsinki winter, but other than that, it looks exactly like the kind of contemporary architecture that is conceived for anyplace, anytime. So much for contemporary. It rather reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s remark about Oakland, “there’s no there there“.

And old? Architects may not like it, but the old often has a strong grip on everybody else and often helps sustain if not create the “there” that folks get attached to. If they find it hard to attach to novelties, that’s understandable (and has caused much architecture-critical ink to be spent), and sometimes architects could acknowledge their own role in making the public be so critical of their gimmickery and fashion consciousness. Architectural productions stick around for us to have to live with. Buildings that on reflection we don’t like so much after all, can’t be discarded or replaced that easily.

But here’s some we like, not perfect, not new, but definitely magical in the quiet of a Wednesday evening. Just one of the many, many “theres” that are (still) there in Helsinki.