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?!)

What do you hear?

While JHJ is pondering carbon footprints and the elasticity of time-space in a comfortable flat in Helsinki, our foreign correspondent, currently in far away South London, reports that the major impact of Iceland’s volcano on life for him (apart from the temporary absence of a [house]mate) is the SILENCE overhead. No planes.

And not in Helsinki either. Helsingin Sanomat asks “When will we fly again?” on this ad in the window of our local R-Kioski. Tampere and Turku yes, where airports are due to open for six hours today, but not here. I can, on the other hand, hear the soothing sounds of a tow-truck, removing a car that was left parked, despite warnings, on a stretch of street about to be washed. (I refer you to my post of 14.4.2010).

And the sounds of Helsinki?

Alas, the not-so-sweet sound of a seagull struck me yesterday. Yes, that irritating, ice-cream-snatching, no doubt bacteria-infested, ugly and menacing product of nature mixed with culture (helping themselves to left-overs in outdoor cafes and restaurants over the years has left its mark) is back. Here, for once, I find myself in some sympathy with the city’s mayor, Jussi Pajunen, who has urged Helsinki residents to wage a personal war against these birds, by destroying their nests. Irresponsible, say BirdLife Finland via YLE.

Meanwhile, hearing loss may be offering a new retail opportunity in an empty shop near you. Help is at hand, at a price presumably, for those who can’t hear the crunching of snow underfoot, the crisp sound of a knife peeling an apple, the rustle of leaves on trees (not yet an issue in Helsinki, I must add) or the rain falling.

With which observation, I can seguey to the topic of people istening to headphones in the company of other people, something which has become popular among the youth of this fine country and left us older people to wonder what’s going on – what happened to sociability not to say courtesy? Presumably as well, the biological hearing apparatus that has served homo sapiens sapiens so well so long, is under some kind of assault from the variety of technological buzzes and hums. (I mean, in a silent environment with healthy hearing, presumably the seagull’s approach as it swoops to get your ice-cream, would be given away by some noise. Then again, maybe not – don’t they just dive bomb, the b*****s).

From city bunnies to new business models

Will “nature” get its revenge on “culture” as progress promises to profit creepy crawlies but also furry mammals while enfeebling the populace? In Helsinki the scourge of the punkki, a.k.a. lyme disease-carrying tick, has become accepted, but what about this, a mink in the very heart of the city?!

Yet for all the problems with ice-cream snatching sea-gulls, insistently irritating insects and other creatures, there is occasional news of a win-win situation! Helsinki zoo in Korkeasaari will henceforth do its bit for the recession at the same time as solving an urban fauna problem. It will catch the urban rabbits which have bred like rabbits and feed the catch to the zoo’s carnivore inhabitants. Check out this.

And the link with planning and architecture?

Leijonien ruokahuollosta vastaa tulevaisuudessa Helsingin kaupungin rakentamispalvelu. Se vastaa puistojen ja viheralueidein hoidosta, johon kuuluu nykyisin olennaisesti myös kaninpyynti. (HS.fi 15.09.2009)

Feeding the lions will, in future, be the responsibility of Helsinki City’s Building Service. Its concern is the upkeep of parks and greenspaces, a remit which nowadays obviously includes catching rabbits. (protagonist’s translation)

As one follows the links from stories such as these, one can’t help hopping and skipping around news items, press-releases and corporate websites and bumping into a feast of information. This piece of news brought to our attention the existence of this new unit of city government with its revamped business model and promise to be in the business of creating a better Helsinki. Should this blog have a future or, indeed, should there be any other product from these ruminations on one’s native city, documents about these so-called innovations in governance are bound to contain important clues to help explain more visible and visceral transformations.

P.S. How did researchers manage before the world-wide-web?! [Note to anthropological self: study the documents on how the new unit was justified for probable instances of undoing professional judgement in the name of customer responsiveness.]

What one can’t find, alas, is an English-language name for this new unit. For which we are in fact quite grateful, this suggesting that there are aspects of life around these parts that do not need to be translated into the third domestic. Can’t help wondering why the second domestic isn’t there either, though.

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.

The Baltic’s fallen daughter

Here in Helsinki everything is clean, or used to be. That was before they plugged the Hole with a shopping centre designed by Franz Kafka, that succeded where the Swedes, Russians and Germans had all failed by destroying the Finns’ consensual cooperativeness and self-, no let that read “other”-respect. The square with it’s diagonals intersecting on a huge turd became a magnet for every kind of detritus, fast-food wrappers, broken glass, free newspapers and still-breathing (just) human bodies.  Without warning, nor agreement, pedestrian crossings were casually ignored like the Romanian beggars kneeling behind dirty grey polystyrene mugs containing a few coins. Those who noticed them — while pretending they didn’t — wondered how they supported themselves. Was it a grant from the City Arts Department? Was it a plot by the unreconstructed Communist Party of Finland (Marxist-Leninist)? Were they actually a collective illusion,  a form of mass hysteria? What no one could deny were the ever more daring, dive-bombing seagulls that would, as some who lived to tell the tale recounted,  snatch ice-cream out from the mouths of babes and sucklings. Some even claimed that sucklings had been plucked from their mother’s breasts but those who noticed that Hyla ice cream eaters were immune (what species would add to the woes of the lactose-intolerant?), also insisted that this breed of seagull was vegetarian, driven to such extreme conduct by their dogmatic avoidance of fish. Meanwhile, a crime had been committed under the very noses of the taste police. Someone had stolen the restaurant from the railway-station and left an eyesore of a sushi-pod in its place. Or rather completely out of place as what place would such an abomination have in the Temple of Saarinen? Cracks appeared in pavements, windows went unwashed and the Four Cyclists of the Apocalypse thought about it for a bit but decided to give it a miss this year.