Back in Boomtown

I know I’m back in Helsinki, crane-filled boom-town. I woke up to a god-awful explosion that took place some dozens of metres below my bed – BOOOM!!! At some minutes past nine in the evening (listening to the storm brewing outside) I hear what I hope is the last blast of the day. BOOOMM!! I am wrong. Another dose of the dynamite sends shudders through the granite at a few minutes before ten. BOOOMMMM!!!!

A letter from the building manager is among the less boring bits and pieces that I gather up from between the outer and inner front doors as I return. (This being Helsinki, my post doesn’t drop into some tin box by the sidewalk or flop onto a cutesy doormat, it gets wedged ever deeper and thicker between two extremely functional doors, one that opens in, the other that opens out. In the absence of a picture of a door to the stairs, here’s a pic of a Helsinki double-glazed window, circa 1902).

The letter informs us politely that residents are to ensure compliance with legal requirements by installing one smoke alarm per 60 square metres of living space.

It goes on:

In the Töölö area each day one can hear series of explosions. These emanate from the tunnelling works for the car parking being constructed underneath the Music Centre [I still think it should be called Music House] and the Finlandia Hall. … we recommend residents keep an eye on the walls and ceilings of their properties for possible cracking. Any cracks should be reported … and compensation …

Yes, a little money to shut up the old ladies from Töölö might be forthcoming. But, I ask, what about stopping the cancerous “growth machine” or the “boomtown” phenomenon that’s at the core of this car-friendly excavatory madness? The battle between jobs and resources/environment about which Americans write so much and with such eloquent anger?

Not likely in Helsinki as the new Pasila is being planned with its new multi-lane highway, while underground parking caves are being dynamited into existence throughout the Helsinki peninsula.

Note to self, blog about the odd coincidence of having just finished Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, the one with mountain-top-removal (I still struggle with the idea that that is an intelligible concept!) at the heart of its plot (kind of) and flying back to Finland only to read that some people think that its future landscape will be one great, f***ing moonscape of an open-cast mine, by 2020. (To explain, from living off the forest to living off Nokia, it’s not a mad idea to suggest that Finland may soon be living off its minerals…)

Mining for space – or generalised acupuncture

It can be a long way down once you’ve been digging for long enough. Or with sufficient energy. (I assume they still use dynamite, but I haven’t found out). In Helsinki, the stairs are there for some folks to use.

This week the world turned its attention – and its hunger for good news – towards a mine called San Jose in Chile.

The week before (or maybe before that) in Helsinki, Töölöläinen, the free local paper in this hallowed haven of bourgeois bohemianism, ran a tongue-in-cheek story about digging for gold in central Helsinki (well, Meilahti).

Hiding cars under the ground is, indeed, a figurative gold mine in this city. Or at least, like so many phenomena that attach to capitalism, digging underground is one of those activities that can be described as a rush, a frenzy, a kind of collective madness. A boom, in fact. (And there was one!)

But Finns have a preoccupation with innovating, i.e doing new stuff. And so their version of digging isn’t so much about seeking out shiny, precious stuff from out of the ground, like diamonds, but about producing something that you wouldn’t have thought was in short supply in this country: space!!!!!

One neighbour noted that working in his office near Temppeliaukio Church is like getting acupuncture on your feet. I think he meant reflexology. One keeps wanting to post about something else – and then there’s a great, big, annoying and, possibly, structurally damaging explosion! And one has simply no choice.

On which note, Finns do also dig for precious stuff. The environment minister‘s husband is one of several who expects wealth to flow from a newly opened mine in Sotkamo. Wonder what the public debate was like around that one.

Crane index or shipping news

Apparently city fathers, municipal politicians, decision makers, development corporation executives, whatever you want to call the people who get to decide on big investments in the urban context these days, talk of a “crane index“, i.e. the number of tall (sky scraper-scale) building cranes they can see from their own office window. (Presumably said window is located on one of the upper floors of an already finished piece of turn-of-the-millennium corporate architecture, giving a good view.) Some even attribute the phrase to an Australian politician who dismissed his economic adviser’s councel on the grounds that all he needed to know was what he could see with his own eyes, out of that window: cranes = $

A Finnish decision maker might see this out of their window, but only if the perspective was from their own home or a walk on the (still publicly accessible) stretch of water in Lauttasaari.

Well, such a Finnish decision maker is most likely up to his or her neck in economic woes professionally speaking if not personally. Regarldess, many, like the Australian politician, are willing and able to brush off the relevance of available research evidence.

It might not immediately strike one as an urban issue, you’d think, but recently there’s been a flurry of reports about the quality of research done by stakeholders, including government ministries, on the impacts new mineral extraction. Kainuu and Lapland have plenty of economic woes but also, it seems, a lot of raw materials waiting to be dug out of the ground with the willing labour of local jobless people. Good thing, bad thing? Worth the billions in investment? The impact of new mines on the environment? University researchers and others disagree vehemently.

However, the cranes visible in the picture above are mostly not of the construction type but what’s left of central Helsinki’s harbour functions.  Though minerals are cheaper to extract where life is cheaper, it’s likely that any minerals excavated in Finland will also find a buyer however expensive and disruptive it might be to get at them. Contemporary urban growth and activity still needs one heck of a lot of STUFF and METAL to keep it going, virtual or no.

Personally, I prefer a harbour town where the harbour functions, cranes, ships and ugly industrial buildings and all, are visible, to one with only tarted up consumer-centred waterside boulevards.

In Helsinki the port was moved out of (some people’s) sight. Still, the shipping industry is going strong, much, much stronger than thirty, forty years ago. It would give the city variety and liveliness, and it might even be wise in some weird way, to keep the shipping world in view when the rest of us city dwellers go about our business. Of course, in an era when we take it as given that cities never have enough money, the small question of land-values does complicate things a bit. Waterfront housing development, anyone?