Shops or brands? Reflections on looting

Shops and their effect on the city street have been a staple topic on our wee blog since it started. After all, the whole JHJ silliness began with a rant against the harshness and selfishness built – literally – into the heart of our city in the shape of Kamppi. (With the help of some dynamite and neoliberal orthodoxy, commuting was turned into enforced shopping).

Shops are now a hot topic in the news. UK headlines: looting and fears of tin-pot justice for those involved. Finnish headlines: better food shops for Helsinki.

Here in Helsinki there’s a lively debate going on about food shops and local services. Everybody seems agreed we need more of them. And as is so often the case, there’s an official strategy about it… Still, supermarket monopolies and regional politics that spawn out-of-town shopping hells mean that the results are probably minority affairs.

Meanwhile there are the struggling specialist shops whom the Poikkea Putiikissa (nip into a shop – my translation) campaign is supposed to help. And then, of course, there are the kinds that the actual economic/political decisions of a neoliberal city government fosters.

The kinds, obviously, that can afford the rents in a place like Kamppi – chains and big players that always appear from behind slick (if often unimaginative) hoardings proclaiming international fantasies. Happiness is drinking champagne (instead of milk) at mealtimes.

To shop is often said to be the defining activity of the contemporary citizen who, as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman notes, has long since become a consumer. No wonder the blogosphere is awash with articulate commentary about what has happened in the UK.

Hard to disagree with the idea that the good person these days is the good consumer. But if you have no income, how do you achieve that? Aspirations alone won’t get you there, particularly if you suffer the continued humiliation of inhabiting a poor British neighbourhood. (With proposals for drastic cuts (in Finnish) in municipal budgets in Finland, a part of me worries that even Finland will see humiliation-by-built-environment in the future).

But when there are others at hand to draw you into the get-the-stuff-for-free frenzy…? The shops that have been most looted have been the ones that sell brands but some of the independents have as well. As Zoe Williams noted that’s when we pay attention. In a cornershop (as the quaint Britishism has it) behind the stuff there are people. Shopkeepers, entrepreneurs, people who try (comp. the Finnish yrittäjä).

I take her point and recommend the article. But I’m sad that the people behind the branded goods can’t be brought into these stories. At the prices some of those brand shops in Kamppi are selling their stuff, you have to suspect it was produced in slave-like conditions.

P.S. Perhaps this Finnish shop, Spring House, which sells ways to turn yourself into a brand product [surely find happiness and success? ed] is the way to go – nothing material there to loot.

First day of summer

It’s the first of June, and horror of horrors, children are still going to school.

Not when I was a child! School finished on the last day of May. Always. And then we went off into the countryside to help our parents with all the agricultural work and pose for Suomi Filmi camera crews. (This, kind of, was what I was taught at a “good” school in the UK in the early 1970s.)

Meanwhile, in 2010, who could fail to be in love with this city? The buildings reflecting the sun make the idea of going home to bed just ludicrous. Anyway, it’s not dark yet. So I had another beer. (Fortunately they import the stuff these days.)

On the way home I was reminded, however, that there’s a price for the cushy Finnish way of life. 200 million kg of plastic waste are produced by us 5 million Finns a year! This clearly demonstrated in a bit of street art, of sorts, in Narinkka Square in front of Kamppi, in an installation by Kaisa J. Salmi (pdf of their poster downloadable here). Rubbish on rubbish, I thought, but then realised that the real rubbish had been left on the steps rising out of the square. It really is remarkable, how this square just seems to suck up people who leave papers and cans and food wrappings in large quantities, to fly around and catch on the steps.

But catching the view past Lasipalatsi, thought again that some things sometimes are done just right. To catch just that right angle of the setting sun.

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 …

What’s a city without shops?

The words kauppa (shop, commerce, market) and kaupunki (town, city) are of course related. Towns grew up around commerce. Then they took shape, at least in this part of Europe, very much around their shops, in Finland usually built into the stone foundations of a building, hence known affectionately as kivijalkakauppa (stone-footed shop [we invented that, by the way, hee hee]).

So now they’re in trouble, according to Helsingin Sanomat. And you’d exepct them to be. Not just because of the recession or, as so may writers and decision makers seem to make us want to believe, because we “vote with our feet/wallet” and buy cheaper elsewhere or online. Actually, they’re going because it’s so unbelievably difficult to compete against the darling of the Helsinki decision makers: BIG.

Shopping centres/malls tend to prefer to give “representation” to big brand names rather than support small traders, even if they do make a profit. (Which is an odd way of expressing it, since the word “representation” in connection with urban government used to have something to do with democracy, as in people electing a few well-informed individuals to represent them to the rest. So it goes in our topsy-turvy political world.)

Then there’s the other aspect of this thing. That you (er, the city) help build enornmous amounts of floorspace like in Kamppi, where only the big chains will be able to operate (actually, you probably stitch up a deal before hand, working together, after all, with the “stakeholders”), and you put it, for good measure, where a sizeable proportion of the public HAS to walk past (twice?) every day – the bus station. (“Convenience store” thus defined from the point of view of the commuter, the lynchpin, one supposes, of the innovation economy and who thus has to be managed with care, i.e. offered services that make work-ife easy.)

And if you forget something you were going to get from here – or if you aren’t actually a commuter after all – you might be able to get it somewhere like here. This particular example of shameful greater Helsinki retail architecture is from Mankkaa.

Of course, you can just choose to love the places that, for a short time at least, were “Finland’s/Europe’s/the world’s” largest shopping centre (Itäkeskus, below).

Which wouldn’t be a problem (maybe) for cities if it weren’t for the impact on the street. Hmm, on which note, maybe urban planners and designers should just get rid of the street altogether. As cars recede into history (as they surely won’t. Ed.) and as people retreat into anxious privacy anyway, maybe cities can grow to look like something totally different from what we’ve got used to living in and loving over the last 100 to 200 years.

Funny thing though. In Helsinki, flats located in the old fashioned urban street and particularly the street near the shops, have the biggest price tags – decade after decade (as published in this pdf by City of Helsinki Urban Facts).

Kamppi by day – ordinarily excuisite

Some visuals to keep us going here. These were taken when the sun was still out, at street level whereas those in the previous post (7.1.2010) were from rather further up.

That’s a little park between Eerikinkatu and Kalevankatu. Here the 2 blocks to the left/east of this path.

The park above is at the western end of Kamppi, almost in Ruoholahti. Beautiful under-stated houses mixed with more beautiful buildings, though it’s quite rare that you stop to really take them in. Sometimes it seems a shame there aren’t more people around, but perhaps temperatures between ten and twenty below might have something to do with it. Or just 21st century urban rhythms, not sure.

There’s quite often news about the other, Mannerheimintie end of Kamppi and its history, and even more about the bus terminus that has all but usurped the name, but there’s more to Kamppi than meets the casual eye.

The name Kamppi comes from “camp”. There was a military parade ground here under Swedish rule (pre-1809). Kamppi as a neighbourhood is in fact one of the most densely populated parts of the whole of Finland and also has masses of jobs. Dense or compact city, this, once berated as “urban jungle” but increasingly popular with those who can afford to pay.

Not then, the “garden metropolis” which our Vanhanen seems to like so much, as reported over a year ago in the Usual (long time ago maybe but hey, some stuff like Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture, is worth reading hundreds of years after it was published. Well, bits of it.)

A park can be put in the tiniest of spaces.

On being dense

Ooh, we like the way these attics have been put to good use – people can live in them and help make the city better by making it more dense. But density isn’t a simple concept. In planning and architecture (or regeneration if you’re into euphemisms) it’s either hugely technical or pretty vague depending on who you talk to and where. One planning glossary gives us this which kind of covers it:

Density – in the case of residential development, a measurement of either the number of habitable rooms per hectare or the number of dwellings per hectare.

Generally people who think green these days, and who think sustainable, think of urban density at least as some kind of opposite to the arch enemy, urban sprawl. So, to have 70-100 dwellings per hectare gives you a nicely dense urban fabric, with people living close to each other and moving relatively short distances to satisfy their daily needs. For entertainment, say, or a shop, or work. Suburbanites have fewer dwellings per hectare and travel, as we know, in cars rather than on foot.

But then it starts to get complicated and the figures start doing your head in. In many cases, the things that get counted in one place don’t get counted elsewhere, making comparison by numbers a bit tricky.

Finland, for instance, isn’t that interested in density in terms of dwellings per area. More attention is paid to how much room a person has to mess around in, and in this sense Finland’s formerly cramped living conditions are gradually giving way to more square metres per person (currently on average between 34 and 35 in Helsinki itself). But there’s potential for confusion – what is Helsinki? The centre? Does it include Vantaa and Espoo? In which case “Helsinki” really isn’t a dense city at all.

Helsinki itself is interested in “asumisväljyys” it seems, or “habitation spaciousness” not density as such. Also, stats in Helsinki, give you loads of stuff on tenure – currently about 45% owned, 45% rented (higher than Finnish average) and the rest various forms of supported tenure or, amazingly for this country which inherited Sweden’s love of statistical sciences for governing and a strong bureaucratic streak from Russia’s Tsarist administration – unknown!

So, if the figures are complicated, can pictures help? We think they can. Here one more image from Kamppi (the neighbourhood) that we hope speak for themselves.

And here an image from the other Kamppi. Not all commuting then happens by car, even in Finland, even though it is often mistakenly thought of as a part of the United States or Canada mysteriously cut off from the motherland but equally crazy about the motor car.

“Be safe, buy our products!”

Safety first! High-vis jacket seen here in Helsinki’s dark early(-ish) mornings. And, just to be sure no urban battle vehicle (Hummers are quite popular here) slams into the it, headlights and tail-lights on the dog too.

Never seen either of these before. I thought the new habit of dressing children in high-vis was rather sweet. Here are some kids using the local park for outdoor recreation in rotating groups from a nearby day-care centre. Cute, but what’s the benefit? Unless you assume that one of them is going to run off on her own and try to cross a busy street without due care, which one hopes is an unlikely scenario in these supervised situations.

Well, some people behave as if the world were a really dangerous place. Shame, because for residents of Helsinki the world has become less violent and less crime-ridden than twenty, thirty years ago. Although Finns still murder each other (mostly people they already know) at a stupidly high rate, and Finnish culture has (as author Sofi Oksanen reminded the nation earlier this month) a strong and often alcohol-fuelled violent streak, men in particular and women to some extent, encounter far less violence than they did a generation ago. Crimes against property are also, in the long run, not a serious problem.

And yet, Finns, like lots of other wealthy folks, are nurturing fear and protectiveness like never before. And it is becoming visible in the streets as well as in our consumer habits. We buy safety this, that, and the other while the “safety sector’s” profits just grow and grow. And, with the helpful encouragement of insurance companies, developers build crime-prevention into architecture.

Arguably, being afraid is something that urban politics encourages directly, by building new spaces on the assumption that private space is more secure than public, for example. Well, it might be (but might not) when you fix CCTV all over it and have private security guards patrolling it, as journalist Anna Minton argued in Ground Control: fear and happiness in the twenty-first century city. And meanwhile, of course, rather than investing in genuinely public spaces, cities have tended to provide for consumer spaces instead which may be semi-public and sort of shared, but not exactly civil or civic.  (I refer you back to Kamppi as a non-civic space, the post with which this blog began!)

It’s not of course just the world “out there” that shows the signs of a paranoia about safety, but the homes we retreat to when the outside seems threatening. British researchers even talk about a culture that encourages a bunker mentality and of “panic rooms” and the growth of “aggressive” ways of protecting homes, which are now (in the wake of governements’ giving tax and other incentives to promote ownership rather than other forms of tenure) a focus of anxious investment. Yup, home owners are more and more capitalist even if they don’t directly contribute to the architecture of extreme capitalism.

But back to Helsinki. Having found Minton’s survey of the anti-social things that have been built throughout Britain, we found that Hille Koskela, an innovative Finnish urban geographer was up to something similar. In August she published a book, Pelkokierre, on Finland’s love-affair with fear and what she shows to be counter-productive safety gadgetry. Instead of making us feel safer and happier, Koskela points out, the effort to build safety into all we do, makes us more apprehensive and, worse still, mistrustful of others. We start to assume that any Other (to use the academic habit of capitalising) that we don’t know or recognise as being like us, is potentially dangerous. She encourages us all to be more courageous and to venture out more boldly, and calls for more tolerant urban policies that encourage people looking out to protect each other instead of assuming everyone else is up to no good.

Still, with luck and a little sensible argument, Helsinki may yet avoid the worst. And anyway, the economics of greed on which all this rests, according to the researchers, is falling apart anyway. No?

Helsinki’s got rhythm

Protagonist: One of the things I’ve always loved about Helsinki, and that I missed when I lived in California and England, is umm, umm …

Narrator: Small, independent shops?

P: Of course not. San Francisco and Berkeley both have (at least had) fantastic specialist shops. And London too though it has its problems. No, even if they weren’t being systematically killed off, Helsinki’s shops could never flourish like that.

N: So what does Helsinki have that they don’t?

P: Rhythm.

N: Jazz!?

P: That too, but no I mean a rhythm of life. Autumn is different from winter is different from spring is different from the summer. Week-day is different from Sunday. December has always had a bit of a mad rhythm, party-wise and cooking-wise and shopping-wise, with fairy-lights and Father Christmases everywhere. Still, it kind of gives things a particular tempo this pre-Christmas madness, and let’s face it, there isn’t a place or a time which is more in need of a festival of lights even if it is just Kamppi’s efforts in in Christmas displays! And then January has its own tempo – especially if you’re one of the thousands who try to stay off alcohol for the whole month.

N: I assumed you’d be gutted by the Sunday opening thing but you seem to be saying the Christmas shopping rush is a good thing.

P: Yes and no. I’ve avoided going into town, certainly. All the shopping centres and Aleksanterinkatu have advertised “events” to draw people in this week-end. But if there had to be a month of shopping madness, laced with sickly-sweet drinks and spicy cakes, so be it. But you can’t keep it up all-year-round.

And I do love it when people are critical. Look, here’s a wonderfully to-the-point letter to the editor I found in Helsingin Sanomat on 19.11.

“Suomen kansalaisille on nyt järjestetty ohjelmaa, ettei kovalla työllä hankittu vapaa-aika kulu hukkaan. Nyt suomalaiset voivat viettää vapaa-aikansa kaupassa.”

Marketteihin pääsee vastedes kesät talvet myös sunnuntaisin, ja nimimerkki Eemeli ennustaa HS.fi:ssä, mitä asiasta seuraa.

N: Translation please.

P: “Citizens of Finland will now be offered activities to help them avoid wasting the free time they have earned through their hard work. Now Finns can spend all their free time shopping”

N: And lose the rhythm.

P: Have you noticed it’s not December yet?

Taking the environment seriously

It’s outrageously cold. It’s 6 June, 2009. A woman at the bus stop said “below 10 is unreasonable”, and I couldn’t agree more. Except who’s there to reason with when you talk about the weather! It just is. No?

Our topic remains, of course, Kamppi. Since it got put there, it’s like the weather, it just is. It’s an environment, a background. It’s a context. When social scientists talk about context they’re usually after some kind of idea that people’s behaviour is shaped by what’s around them. Environmental determinism is out though, it’s old fashioned and it’s wrong.

Environments determine very little, actually, though architects and planners have put a good chunk of intellectual work into writing about whether and how they do. Back in the 18th century even, much (relatively speaking) ink was utilised in debating whether or not noble people came from noble places with noble buildings inspired by noble weather.

So, if today’s ignoble temperature is anything to go by, by that theory the Finns wouldn’t have a gnat’s chance in hell of producing decent architecture.

But there, dear narrator, you’d be wrong. Very wrong indeed. Helsinki is a charming town, a lovely city, an elegant place. But it was never determined anywhere that it should be, not even by town planners of whom its had a few, and some very influential ones too. Like architecture in general, Helsinki depends. And that’s borrowing from the title of a recent book, Architecture Depends by Jeremy Till, so it’s not as if I’m the only one thinking like this.

Sure, it depends on its environment. Architecture being a mix of art, engineering, money and politics, it depends on what’s going on in all those other fields beyond it. Feedback loop, complex stuff, you get it I’m sure.

If you turn your back on Kamppi (literally) you’re likely to stumble quite quickly on some of this loveliness.

It’s not imposing. It’s simply a very beautiful composite. On one side you get the white functionalist box of Lasipalatsi which was almost demolished but then became hugely cool when Finns got really good at doing up-to-date retro. Even the seagulls can’t destroy its charm.

In the other direction, once you’re past the late 20th-century hotel and office boxes or the slightly earlier office plastered in a particularly dull pale brown you get, especially in the early hours of a spring morning, an experience that you can only get up here – an indescribable quality of light.

We’re far, far north, and the sun never rises very high. Most of the city’s residential growth from the late 19th century took this aspect of the environment very seriously. The results are stunning, particularly on winter days and summer nights when the sun is low. The light embraces you and the world around you producing subtle colours and hues, reflecting off the surfaces of yellows and pale greens and browns, whites and red brick. It would seem strange not to be entranced by this quality of Helsinki.

Helsingissä varhain aamulla. // In Helsinki at early morning.

Thanks to viima for this lovely shot, titled Helsingissä varhain aamulla. // In Helsinki at early morning found on flickr.

This is a street just to the north of Kamppi, before the city turns into the rather bourgeois solidity of Töölö or the leafy and elegant solemnity of the cemetery hugging the water to the west.

So, this is the context I grew up in narrator. It’s what just was, the world I took for granted. So I suppose it’s helped shape me and the things I like. I’m so very, very grateful to the people who lived a long time before I was even a remote possibility, that they built a Helsinki that wasn’t grandiose and didn’t ignore or try to obliterate the harder obstacles that made up its environment.

It’s not imposing. It may be quite elegant, and if that’s not to your taste, you may wish to seek out some less elegant bits or go elsewhere.

I know you think I’m dying to say, “they’re destroying it all”, but I don’t think that’s possible just yet. The construction sector is in a mess. Apparently last time there was a truly massive interruption in the world of architecture and construction, in the throes of the First World War and then the Finnish Civil War (in the late 1910s), the architecture profession apparently took the opportunity to stop and think. And often they thought by writing. That’s handy. We can still go back and learn from them.

You notice that? I shifted topic along the way. From slagging off Kamppi, to putting my slagging off into context. Give me time, and I’ll learn to stick to a point.

What they say about Kamppi

Narrator: So why are you so het up about Kamppi?

Protagonist: Because it’s wrong, it was one huge missed opportunity. And, what makes me so irritated, that it comes from the pen (well, you know what I mean) of one of my favourite Finnish architects.

N: The press hasn’t complained. And the shiny new guide to the Helsinki region’s architecture is glowing. Here, listen. It says it’s called Kamppi because it was once a military training ground, and that it is now, and I quote from this publication, “a lively combination of shops and offices, central apartments and a bus terminal. Because the long distance coach station, the Espoo bus terminal, car parks and maintenance premises were located underground, the quality and scale of the pedestrian environment improved decisively. Kamppi Centre is easily accessible by public transport. This miniature city within the central area can be reached by foot, metro underground railway and bus.”
I rest my case.

P: Where do I start? Can I quote stuff back at you maybe?

N: Why not, but can we have some reasoned arguments against that description first?

P: Yes, it’s lively – Friday and Saturday nights it’s a party zone or, more accurately, drinking zone. It’s lively too because, for goodness sake, if you live in Espoo and work here you have little choice but to walk through its glass doors every day. And yes, the pedestrian environment was a bit poor in the old days. It was a blimmin’ field of tarmac after all, with the buses lined up diagonally from end to end. But you could see the sky. You felt connected to Fredrinkinkatu as well as Mannerheim’s statue at the other end. You had a wonderful station building, with real people and genuine help just one step away from the platforms, visible as soon as you entered the area from any direction. But yes, I admit, it’s the seeing the sky that’s the problem. And the fact that I was hoping vainly that Helsinki might avoid the terrible fate that’s befallen all other supposedly successful cities recently, of becoming one giant shopping experience.

N: I see what you mean. Not a lot of sky here.

P: No. Some engineer has obviously worked out how to build underground, kind of like H.G. Wells in his sci fi dystopias from almost 100 years ago. Yes, in a cold city it’s useful from time to time to escape the wind and the sleet into an underground passage way, but did you know there’s now actually an underground zoning plan here, so much of the granite is being blasted to kingdom come?

Kamppi is a symbol for me of forgetting that the city is to be lived, not seen. The work that you used to see being done all around has been hidden underground. All the services, deliveries, maintenance of sewage and electric grids and what have you, all the men in work clothes have been banished from the city centre.

N: You mean like with the docks?

P: Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. This city has become a shrine to consumer capitalism basically.

N: Gawd. Here we go…

P: No, I’m serious. Jonathan Glancy incidentally wrote something just like that in last week’s Building Design. Here, take a look. “Where once cities, their culture and their architecture, were defined by what they did, or made, today they are just as likely to be recognised for what they show, or serve up, as pure spectacle.”

N: Spectacle?

P: Well, that’s a bit of an academic fashion word, has been for some decades. You know, images, surfaces, facades being more important than the real thing, shiny and attractive so that passers by will drop by and buy.

N: Yup, Kamppi certainly provides for the shopaholic, twice a day at least, if they’re commuters. Plus the side of the shopping centre is covered in advertising, those constantly moving images that make you feel a bit ill. Times Square or Piccadilly Circus in London. We’ve arrived!

P: You’ve got it! So, forget that fancy language, the point is that the old bus station was a genuinely public space, kind of open, you’d bump into people you knew, people you didn’t and you’d see people that otherwise you never would come into contact with. You’d see all those people at work too. Kamppi is closed, in every possible way. Besides, it’s not a city within a city, it’s a blimmin’ transport hub! Well, I suppose it symbolises exactly what Glancy talks about, that all we do these days is shop and for those who don’t, there will be no space in the city. But it’s so wrong, so wrong. Shopping and marketing is just a small part of what life is about – even in a city.

Here, let me quote some more, from this Finnish urban theorist, Panu Lehtovuori, who in turn is quoting a philosopher of life chappy, Zygmunt Bauman, who (I’m getting there) says that recently built urban spaces, like Kamppi, are public but not civil. ‘Those spaces for organised entertainment are characterised by a “redundancy of interaction”, lack of friction togetherness and any deeper reason to communicate.’

N: So you’re suggesting that your experience of the litter and the generally unpleasant visual side of this square isn’t the fault of the people but that the space somehow makes people want to be uncivil and uncommunicative?

P: Sigh. Yes. Kind of. Except that, like I said, it’s built by a fabulous architect, and I don’t understand what happened there. Gotta go. I’m so sad.

N: See ya.