The Great Transformation

So long, summer. Hello electioneering. We hope.

Municipal elections are on 28 October and, gratefully, the Great Transformation is at least somewhere on the agenda.

By Great Transformation I’m not talking about the shift from a kind of all-round existence to the market fundamentalism most of us now take for granted. (See Karl Polanyi’s great book of that name for that story.)

Nor am I talking about the great climate transformation that this blind fundamentalism has brought with it. (Check out George Monbiot’s text about that here).

I am of course talking about New Helsinki and all the stray bits and pieces of urban development going on around it.

Did I say development? Slip of the keys.

At the small scale Helsinki is, and is likely to remain, wonderful. At the bigger scale, well, watch out and invite your friends to visit soon. Something big and ugly is expected near here soon.

Almost whichever way you look, the Helsinki Planning Department is getting a lot wrong. It makes room for cars not people, that is, for cars, not people. It plans to chop down forests where it doesn’t need to. It drives big roads into the city centre. It plans for megamalls instead of local shops. Perhaps it’s even opening the door to mediocre and anti-social architecture. (Surely not!)

It wants to build high and although plenty of people and quite a few bloggers are aghast, I have yet to find anyone who believes the madness could actually be stopped.

Saying “no” or looking for alternatives to “the authorities” perhaps doesn’t come naturally to Finns. (See here for a relevant and nice Finnish piece on the topic).

New Yorkers had been saying “no” with a vengeance since the 1960s and the prickly, saintly Jane Jacobs. Even in Stockholm there must have been critical voices over the years, since nothing like the high-going hubris of Sergels Torg has ever been allowed (at least near the centre) since that went up in the 1950s.

JHJ and friends are grateful to those who are doing something to be constructively critical, e.g. here, here and here. (This last link gets in because before the Töölönlahti moonlight swim of a few nights ago – where ordinary folks protested/rejoiced in the bay with their bodies – Peltsi Peltonen made an impassioned speech on behalf of the sea and against business-as-usual that was music to JHJ’s critique-starved ears.)

Looking forward then to urban planning inching its way onto the political agenda.

Changing tempos

Latin languages treat time and weather as the same thing. At least they are given the same word (temps, tempo). Such usage presumably once captured a sense of cosmic order as reflected in a cyclical pattern of weather. Much like the last couple of years of JHJ’s blogging, where, to our surprise, “weather” was a very frequently used tag.

The beautiful colours of autumn 2009, the great snow of 2010 followed by the great heat of the summer of that same year. Then there was the even greater snow of 2011 and the almost equally amazingly warm and wonderful heat of the long summer of 2011. And then, from around early November, it’s been c**p.

We do not believe in retribution by weather gods or any other kind, but this feels uncannily like payback time.

But it also makes one think back to say, 15-20 years ago. Today’s 26 metre per second (in a snowless/cheerless) December was something I imagined happening in decades to come if the political powers didn’t do something drastic. Ho, ho, ho, I’d never have believe a Durban would be possible in those youthful days.

Now I know that the closer you get the poles the more you notice the changes in the climate. Alas, proof of the matter is undoubtedly going to remain as elusive as the mystery of the Makasiinit. And so columnists and irritating people will keep bleating on about how anthropogenic climate change is just an international conspiracy.

The relevance?

Many of us Helsinkians have left the city in search of a traditional christmas (snow). Some are already heading back into town to escape the power cuts, fallen trees and other emergency situations that the miserable mostly snowless weather conditions are offering.

(Below a real-time map of all the places the emergency services have been busy today. Notice the icon for a fallen spruce.)

It all seems to fit the mood this christmas. World = bad. Friends and people I know = good.

Must get out. Going stir crazy here!

Ephemeral or solid – architecture and weather

Sunday night’s thunder storm was a spectacular switching-off-of-the-lights-in-the-sky. Many Helsinki residents photographed it, stared at it, got caught in it and were frightened by it. It seemed the Apocalypse rolled into town within just a minute or two. (And beyond town too. English-language info available with “readers’ pictures and videos” all over the net.)

It left me rather pleased that I had one of those eminently thick and solid central Helsinki residential blocks to hide in and take shelter in. Shelter is pretty fundamental to architecture, no? And where nature is “harsh” as it’s said to be in Finland, solid building is pretty important.

The Finnish architectural world is always being lauded for taking nature into account, but often it’s not so much for giving shelter as for symbolising some fragile naturalness of humanity – or was it nature? There’s a lot of hyperbole about the sea and the land embracing each other, the urban and the savage merging into each other, forest and technology in perfect harmony.

British architects and architectural writers (like Jonathan Glancey) seem to detect mostly an unflattering (for them) contrast between the brutalism of British architecture and Britain’s urban space (“brutal” in the way Anna Minton says the UK has become) and the sensitive wisdom of Finland’s subtle, oh-s0-wonderful architecture and its architects, who appreciate the rough and the bodily as well as the fancy. If they don’t invoke Saint Alvar as their authority on this, these days they (like Jonathan Glancey) are likely to refer to Juhani Pallasmaa (who does write beautifully).

An example of the adoration might be the interior-design student Pieta-Linda Auttila’s wooden hotel or rather, the blurbs about it. It was nature meeting sophisticated technology, the ethereal character of a natural material reminding a user of our collective vulnerability… Basically, from the photos (it was a 2009 project), it looks like a gorgeous but totally impractical wood building for temporary enjoyment.

All the stuff about respecting nature through how we design is a good point to make, we guess. A bit of respect for the elements goes a long way when the winds are 25m/s. And it’s not just that a few records have been broken in a place near you recently, climate change is here. Finns have taken note at least at the level of projects and plans and educational events. Meanwhile, chaos reigns in many parts of the country in the wake of recent storms.

So when another big storm comes my way, I must say, old-fashioned and solid is good for me. It doesn’t have to be granite to the n’th degree, as in Kallio’s church by Lars Sonck. But then again …

Musings on whether to angst or to float (revised)

I recently came across a text where the writer pondered which is more likely, that the world will end or that capitalism will be reformed so that the world won’t end…

People everywhere always have planned, but modernity turned planning into a professional, technical and quasi-scientific business. Though when it comes to urban and spatial planning and even to architecture, you could argue that current trends are deprofessionalising or deskilling these activities once more. Then again you could argue, like Demos UK did, that it’s just a question of re-inventing it all. Ho hum, with so much uncertainty around, the idea of planning does begin to feel a bit odd.

Never ones to give the impression that they feel beleaguered as professionals, Helsinki’s Planning Department has just announced that Helsinki is going to experiment with floating homes in Kalasatama, one of the bits of former harbour that’s up for grabs waterfront development-wise.

But it’s unclear to us here at JHJ whether building floating houses is seen as the way to beat climate change or more as a way for the architectural and planning professions to feel good. After all, they do tend to go on about how they’re going to beat the problem even though they’re involved in one of the most carbon-hungry forms of economic activity there is i.e. building new stuff.

The point about floating houses isn’t just that they use up less energy though a lot do make use of things like wave power, as followers of Bratt Pitt’s contribution to rebuilding New Orleans will know. (Architectural utopianism Hollywood-style, but who knows, it could turn out well. Or not.)

Floating buildings aren’t just low-energy, the RIBA’s futures research crowd, Building Futures, say that they can also be used to “attack” the sea and beat climate change that way. As in, rather than waiting for the water to engulf our homes and destroy us, let’s go out there and greet it, “hello sea, come on up!”

This does suggest a get-out clause for capitalism-as-we-know-it, since if enough of these things go up it might seem not to matter if CO2 emissions grow. Bring on the strange weather, we’ll be ready for it.

For a more sophisticated and realistic take, here’s a great book that I’m half-way through at the moment: Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet by Tim Jackson, a multi-talented professor from Surrey University. Having worked on sustainability from both an engineering and a humanities/social perspective, he makes a pretty good case for being extremely worried but also for making sure we don’t just sit here and hope for the best.

Which brings me to what young Finnish people, according to opinion polls, are hoping for. (Though news about opinion polls in recent days has been on a different and thoroughly depressing topic, on Finnish attitudes to immigration and racist ignorance, which we are not going to link to). There was news reported in Hesari on 20.3 about the soft and cuddly values of young Finns. The subscription version quoted one young woman:

“Ilmastonmuutos ahdistaa ihan sikana. En tiedä, mitä voin itse tehdä jäätiköiden sulamiselle. En kai oikein mitään”

And my (not word-for-word) translation again:

“Climate change makes me like really anxious. I don’t know what I can do myself to stop the ice from melting. Nothing, I guess”

The respondents also said they don’t much care about money and power. And on the basis of young people I know around here, this sounds quite plausible. And to make my day there was ever such a sweet letter to the editor from a school pupil telling the world to slow down enough to work out whether they really are enjoying life. Impressive.

So, here’s hoping they’ll reform everything – and get rid of the slush.

Did “proper” winters and a “real” city designed for inhabiting just fall out of fashion?

The joys and benefits of living in a block of Helsinki flats are many. They include the services of professional caretakers to ensure that the day-to-day maintenance of the building and shared spaces adjoining it are taken care of. In recent days friends who live in houses have started to obsess about clearing snow in the driveway and, less frequently, about whether they should even bother in the areas where only foot traffic is expected, here on the right for example, in the outer suburbs. These moaners are, usually, their own caretakers, and in Finland they remember which winters had a lot of snow and which didn’t.

(If I were writing in Finnish I’d have to specify whether I meant a talkkari, an individual who works for one or several buildings and lives nearby, or a huoltoyhtiö, a company that offers the same service without the living nearby, but often with bigger machines. Older people and people committed to the sociable side, the knowing neighbours and having a sense of mutual responsibility about things being nice, tend to prefer the former, though we have been pleased with the big company that does our building, possibly because it’s been not just the same company but the same main man for over ten years.)

But we are writing in English – get back on message.

In town walking is not as hazardous. Granted, here too the roadways get cleared considerably faster than the pavements. And when finally they do get cleared, for the first couple of days at least the problem (snow) just gets shoved from the roadway somewhere else – the pavement – making life maximally awkward for pedestrians. Older friends, less sure on their feet or with walking sticks feel aggrieved, as do people with prams and other narrow wheels.

Then comes the grit, spewed out of the back of contraptions like this. (Note the new flats in Arabia – all for private tenure we believe – by Pauliina and Juha Kronlöf in the background – freckled? pock-marked? cute? irritating? HS has investigated). The snow and the clearers compete against each other in a hard-to-predict vicious cycle, but in the last few days most of Helsinki, suburb-estates and central areas inclusive, seems to have cleared up so there are lots of nice space for people to hang out. Good thing too, since today is a national holiday.

Snow, or too much of it, is a pain then, for those in a hurry. Most others love it still. Perhaps the City didn’t expect that we’d get the kind of light you get from snow. Certainly this kind of run of crisp snow has become rather rare in Finland in recent years.

Perhaps it was in anticipation of a dark, kaamos-y, miserable, wet, depressing kind of winter of the kind folks here had got used to, that Helsingin Energia (whose lights produced those giant mutant animals in Esplanadi) and the spectacle-mongers of the City (who have been given a fresh boost of energy and probably loads of money in the wake of this design-capital-business) decided to scatter crowd barriers all over the Senate Square in an effort to cheer us all up with technology. They “gave” us a light show of weird shapes distorting the thought-out shapes of the Cathedral and creating hideous glare around the Parliament taking light-pollution to new heights by Helsinki standards (which I have not photographed but see PPusa.)

We know that the forecast for “proper” winters is not great (though a total freeze is also on offer if the Gulf Stream packs it in!).

But, oh, if only the real thing, snow, and the real experience of an experience that’s not produced by an experience-producer, were available with some semblance of routine. Alas no, spectacle it is. And a rebranding of what used to be a home for Helsinkians but is rapidly becoming something less cherishable. The new concept: Helsinki The Venue.

Snow notes

In case JHJ gets bogged down in things that prevent blogging, a quick update on life with snow.

Studded snow tyres on bicycles come into their own, and the studs on four-wheeled vehicles no longer make that horrible scratchy noise on the (bare) tarmac. The snow does wonderful things generally to noise. Even the sound of a snow plough toing-and-froing somewhere nearby can seem like poetry.

Meanwhile everyone seems happier. There is a little light in the sky. There is light reflecting off the snow. And take it from people who know, 8 below zero is far more pleasant to walk in, even to wait at a bus-stop in, than +1.

I first read about the possibility of climate change or global warming in Time Magazine in the early 1980s. It chilled my teenaged heart like never before. Still, I reckoned that even with the car lobby and the evil destroyers of tropical forests I had found out about, decision makers would figure out some way of steering development towards ecological sanity – by gradually moving away from private cars and air travel, progressing railway technology and installing renewable energy, that kind of thing.

Well, here we are, in 2009, in Helsinki’s Punavuori. Here’s a railway that’s no longer being used.And here’s a link to what might befall not just Helsinki and its identity as a city that has a white winter, but the forests in the rest of Finland. Remember them? From the days when it was said “Finland Lives off its Forests”?