Cool and authentic

Well it finally is cool.

At the end of another ridiculously hot summer, Helsinki and its residents are beginning to return to something akin to normal. It being the second week of August, traffic jams are back and terrace bars/waterside cafes/Helsinki streets are heaving.

Helsinkians also have to learn how to share the city with those other urban residents, the dreaded and well-fed  Helsinki seagulls. It is they, by the way, who are behind such high sales of fishing line in contemporary Helsinki.

Apart from the stringing up of anti-sea-gull devices, there are many, many other recurrent events which come with the seasons. We aren’t suggesting anything to do with autumn yet, merely that the summer has reached a new phase. It’s now crayfish season, raspberry season and pull-pea season (anyone who knows where to buy “vetoherne” please let us know), and athletics season.

We are horribly aware that there is something akin to looting season going on in the UK. So-called high-street shops but also independent shops into which individual and collaborative effort has no doubt been poured over years, perhaps decades, is being smashed up in a frenzy of, well, disaffection and despair among other things.

“Get a job”, people are saying about the looters and rioters. Alas, not many jobs around (see our previous post).

Meanwhile, though storm clouds have been seen (and heard! were you here last night?!) here in Helsinki the looting is just on a screen in two (at most) dimensions. In fact, Helsinki’s enterprising types appear to have revved up the energy-levels over the summer. Everywhere you look there’s a new shop being built!

Interestingly, it’s marketing folks who seem to be behind some of this stuff, like the Aitokauppa in Ullanlinna.

Also, rumour has it, public money is involved. Sitra is actually bankrolling this future “chain”. So whereas the delightful Laivurin Valinta at the other end of the street remains a genuine independent, the idea of the good folks of Ullanlinna becoming the beneficiaries of state-supported access to good, real food as some kind of human right. Well …

How much do we care? Not sure. With such schemes at least Helsinki’s often dead streets have some hope of being brought back to a life they had in the 1960s, the glory days of Finnish retail.

The Aitokauppa is a pun. From (m)aitokauppa which people of my generation still remember, “milk shop” or ordinary shop, but Aito means authentic so it’ll be more real, say, than chain store stuff.

It was once a  Siwa. Ex-co-op movement they may be, but so ugly are they that I can’t say I’d ever miss one of them. Their branding people want the cheap look and think this is achieved by being seriously ugly. So ugly in fact that I will not have JHJ defaced with an image of them! Instead, a gratuitous if seasonally apt image of a K-shop.

(You ever tried cooking live crayfish?!)

Rhythms of work

Later today Dodo.ry are organising a public discussion on the theme of the built environment and its rhythms in Helsinki, with a short but interesting-looking line-up of speakers. No doubt the benefits of ecologically sustainable construction, cycling, flexibility and a reliable and green transport infrastructure will crop up, and Vancouver will once again be used as the exemplar of a green metropolis.

But the thing that makes an urban rhythm stick, and that recent strikes have reminded urbanites of, is the routine requirement for economic activity. You’ve got to work, basically. And if you can’t find paid work that you’re qualified for or able to do, or you’re discriminated against because of a recognised, not valued identity, or because of ill health, or because you’re doing upaid work looking after someone else, or because you have a disability, well, all those things shape your urban rhythms too.

So while Dodo are, we think, interested in flexibility from the point of view of making life for ordinary people better and, in the process, of saving the planet (they are, after all, an environmental NGO) the headlines are about the cost of globalization to those needs: the employer in the food sector is requiring more flexibility from the workforce. From The Usual today:

Elintarviketeollisuuden mukaan tuonnin kasvaessa ja kauppojen aukiolon laajetessa yritykset tarvitsevat joustavuutta työaikojen järjestelyyn: työ on tehtävä silloin kun sitä on. [according to the food industry as imports grow and shop opening hours are extended, enterprises need flexibility in organising work shifts: the work has to be done when it's available]

So, will the Dodo folks pick up on the fact that the law was changed only a few months ago to allow for longer opening hours, and thus (in)advertently supporting the big chains and weakening alternatives like market halls and small shops? The new law was bemoaned then not just by religious leaders but by shop keepers, people on low salaries being drawn into ever more anti-social working hours, and types like me who just think that non-stop consuming is bad for the soul, the planet and for a decent city life. And will they be able to talk about the negatives that come with these inherently positive-sounding things like flexibility without sounding nostalgic for times that never existed or throwing out the good with the bad? Or sounding judgemental or moralising, a HUGE problem in today’s Finland, we have to note.

But clear thinking is possible, and better understanding is possible as well as desirable. I read a great article by an ‘environmental ethicist’ on something along these lines yesterday. The American Robert Kirkman writes for a journal on technology studies (that’s about all the material, physical, technical and thus seemingly less negotiable bits of the world are actually social and cultural as well), that he is interested in what people hope for, but that to find out more, he has to work out what are the:

limits on what people can see, what they can imagine, what they can want, what they can choose

and later about the fact that in our understanding of ethnics it is:

the individual who judges and acts and the individual who is to be judged. If there is anything that ethicists should learn from social scientists who engage in technology studies, it is that the efficacy of ethical action has to be understood at least partly in social terms, not just individual terms.

(Kirkman, Robert (2009) ‘At Home in the Seamless Web: Agency, Obduracy, and the Ethics of Metropolitan Growth’, Science Technology and Human Values, 2009; 34; 234.)

I’ll leave it there except to say that Finland perhaps more than other places I know, has some very hard work to do in trying to understand that ethics and civil life are fundamentally, utterly, irreducibly social. In fact, Finland could do with a concerted effort to create something like a metropolitan ethics – in all its dimensions!

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).

How many shopping days left?

It’s a November Saturday in the northern hemisphere. We all know what that means. Although most shopkeepers are desperate to get people in, not everyone is welcome. According to YLE a shopping centre in Lahti has apparently decided now is the time to try a techno-fix to get rid of adolescents who hang around, not being nice and not buying stuff. The gadget emits a high-pitched noise that adults can’t hear but young people with good hearing can. It has already been tried in Britain and Holland at least. Unsurprisingly it also has a good number of oppenents, like the campaign group Liberty, who view it as an infringement of young people’s rights.

But our concern is Helsinki. Here a few Ullanlinna/Eira window displays – photographed before any of them had time to hang up the fairy lights and other “seasonal” decorations.

Korkeavuorenkatu has long had a reputation as a top-end shopping street. Well, by some standards it’s quite small as an area, but for all that rather lively.

Older, newer, home decoration and antiques, fashion for him and her, old and not-so-old, a few cafes, flowers, chemist, goldsmith/watch repair shop, a few restaurants. Many of them “atelje”, “boutique” and so on, all of them kivijalka or “foundation” shops, that is independently run, of course.

It’s not obvious who the people are who have the opportunity to wear the creations on display here, but whoever they are, the window shopping isn’t unpleasant at all.

Retail trends Ullanlinna-style (1)

What goes on in Finland’s retail sector is just a little too depressing to dwell on so instead we’ll let you ruminate on these:

Brain Wood, a specialist interior decoration company’s show-room next to a massage shop (Finnish-style as is the name, un-translatable as “efficiently relaxed”).

A couple of places clearly aimed at dog lovers with some grasp of the English language (and maybe Swedish too). (“All Fur Dogz” and “Eira’s Dog-torer” as in a twisted form of the Swedish doktorer the meaning of which is easy enough to guess.)

And finally, random stuff that’s delightful for not being an empty shopfront. Or a “mute” or “silent” one as Panu Lehtovuori of Helsinki University put it in a poetic style that reflects his idea that shopping has become a form of internal dialogue where once it had required at least some verbal communication between buyer and seller. (I wasn’t sure whether he meant back before Paris introduced the world to the department store in the 1850s or a more recent period.)

Hungry for eco-gourmet and small shops

Gourmet will meet eco and all will be well. This sentiment, initially publicised by the Slow Food movement, used to sound like an invitation to scepticism, or worse. In 2009 in Helsinki it remains a minority interest but certainly has  momentum as this blog has already indicated. Between such yearnings and the world of city planning there isn’t that long a distance.

The monopolisation of food retail is a giga-trend that’s making life harder for the rich and poor alike, in the global south as well as in northern pockets of privilege where we mourn the loss of those old shops. But if you don’t mention the monopolisation of agribusiness and its tight embrace of food retail it might seem hard to debate what’s wrong with it all. But it’s not impossible it seems. Megapolis 2024 barely touched the centralisation of food retail. Instead, it was enthusiastic, inspiring and fun.

Held in Vanha in Helsinki it was the fourth annual urban festival organised completely by volunteers in the organisation Dodo. This in turn was formed in 1995 as a forum for townies to talk about environmentalism. In those days that topic, at leat in Finland, was largely dominated by people interested in saving bits of nature from industrialisation. Dodo was inspired by people who anticipated that the environmental crisis is above all an urban problem.

And how many times did we hear that statistic (dubious if still powerful) about more than half the world’s population now living in cities – and more coming every day. Grim, grim statistics. But those who came to the event and certainly those who spoke, from Finland and beyond, came from the optimistic end of the humanity, and the one where life has to be more fun because you’re doing interesting, fun and ethically defensible things, like urban gardening off the old railway tracks in Pasila, for example, picked up by the press too. Here a few shots of that wonder.

Megapolis 2024 (as in looking ahead 15 years to that year) included an impressive line-up of speakers on topics to do with food and its place in making cities happier and more sustainable places, a host of exhibitors, some sessions with the ‘Allotment garden game’, films about food and the politics of food and a late-night club to top it all off. In this photo you can see the terrace of Vanha sadly shrouded in a “Sale” sign. But it still gives a view of Stockmanns and the Three Smiths that, well, that’s good for people watching and that one had forgotten about since growing out of the target demographic.  

Proceeds from the night’s entertainment were put to excellent use.

This morning Michelin-quality chef Pietro Leemann, the only such creature who doesn’t serve meat in his gourmet establishment, teamed up with Finland’s Carrot-mobbers to offer a  vegetarian brunch behind Lasipalatsi. Ten minutes after the advertised start time the queue was huge, hundreds had shown up.

We got the very last glass of vegetable ‘jus’. To our  chagrin the last beetroot towers went about seven queuers ahead of us.

Second post for the sixteenth: more on shops

This should have been posted last month.

Then, in the usual press resource, a series of articles went completely unnoticed by yours truly, outlining some truly phantasmagoric facts about retail planning. Meanwhile, Herttoniemi (image below), in the eastern suburbs of this beautiful city, prepares for its share of Finland’s hectares of shopping aisles. The prefixes super, hyper and mega will not suffice to capture the essence of what is to come here. It will be a giga-market.

But from the article a few nuggets merely: 5,24 million square metres floor space is in the pipeline. According to the Environment Ministry (as reported by our trusty source of information, HS) of the 196 projects surveyed, one fifth were contrary to current valid development plans either at local or regional level (“maakuntakaava” or “seutukaava”). 45% of them are outside town centres (which means towns, in fact, when you try to visualise in your mind what the average Finnish town might be). And yes, dear reader, there are regulations similar to the UK’s town-centre-first policies here too to assess and mitigate the deleterious consequences of allowing the big retailers to rule the roost.

A box attached to the article observes coolly that despite both expert advice to the effect that large retail developments have significant negative impacts on local neighbourhoods, and the simple fact of plans being progressed in defiance of existing legislation, “city leaders” are strongly behind all the projects. We get a nugget of TINA-fundamentalism too, in the words of one, for whom major development is “the only chance to secure local people’s well-being” and so there’s no point in invoking the spectre of corruption. The article doesn’t make it clear who had invoked it and why.

It is hard not to speculate on the reasons why Finns seem so utterly uninterested in campaigning around shops and retail (and I suppose I already had a stab at it earlier in this blog). Certainly they are mostly unaware of the huge interest in the English-speaking world in curbing the excesses, both commercially speaking and in terms of destroying landscapes, of out-of-town retail. One can only assume that the idea of a website – nay several websites – devoted to dead shopping malls never did occur to them. Hey Finland, I got news for you: it’s on wikipedia therefore it exists.

Here endeth today’s posting.