A belly full on facebook?

Social media makes the world go backwards or something. Things only happen once they are documented online. And so it seems a bit odd to be writing about Helsinki’s Restaurant Day on a blog when the internet is awash with glowing testimonials already. Some excellent high-quality photographs too.

When a city has to be an event, it better be one that looks good on a very small screen too, no?

But for those Helsinkians for whom life takes place offline August has always been especially lively. The city is full of people just back from long holidays, the sun shines a lot (as it does in the Finnish summer anyway, and that’s a fact), the stress hasn’t begun yet, most Finns look tanned and healthy, and on a few evenings it’s warm and dark at the same time (how Southern European!)

But enough wittering and certainly no twittering. Just a few photos from the last few days to remind ourselves what this all was.

Street partying in Rööperi, for people who like to push their baby-buggies in the street, not transport them inside the car. Tent sauna for the desperate.

Next, the restaurant stuff.

Delicious food and enough of it! Later the sun came out in full splendour.

By that time we were browsing the flea market offer in Vallila. It’s an area with a lot of the workers’ housing. One of the biggest buildings was built for workers of the Kone & Silta company. It was designed by Armas Lindgren, Bertel Liljeqvist and Elisabeth Koch as a vast perimeter block around a garden with staircases from A to P. To an outsider the garden-suburbesque aesthetic appears to reflect a still existing ethic of sharing and caring. Residents numbered 700 in the 1920s, today about 250, but from what we could see they still share.

Some stunning bicycles.

Later Regatta beckoned and offered a joke I’d not seen before.

And then, after my camera battery fell, exhausted, into well-earned slumber, we took in a bit of Art Goes Kapakka.

The news? Bringing the Guggenheim brand to Helsinki is still high on some folks’ priorities but the culture minister is mildly enthusiastic at best. Meanwhile, the financial markets may be putting everyone else on a long-term diet. Who knows what that will do to the built environment. And who knows, the social media boom and all this blogging silliness might become really old-fashioned too.

From urban unpredictability to tulipmania

URBAN GRIT, 2010

According to writers like Sharon Zukin, the contemporary metropolis is suffering a crisis of authenticity. One dimension of this crisis is the way urbanites both love and fear the unexpected. They want the authentic feel of a real, lived city and they turn up their noses at the macdonaldsization of urban space. Not this sanitised commercialism, they proclaim, we want the real thing, urban grit. But do they really?

Let’s take Helsinki’s Kallio, for instance (beautiful photos of it here). Kallio is one of very few densely populated and evidently diverse neighbourhoods in the whole of Finland. Lots of people say they love the vibe there.

But it also has a visible contingent of people who have drug and alcohol-related problems. Their behaviour is by definition sometimes a bit hard to predict. And so quite a few people like the idea of Kallio and like to hang out there, but are more than happy to live somewhere else. Somewhere less unpredictable.

Then again, as Ulrich Beck wrote back in the 1980s (the original that came out in German), the whole world is a bit of a risk society. Beck was interested at the time in environmental and technological risk. Anyone with a bank account will recently have become acquainted with another pervasive type of risk, financial risk.

In fact, a person these days could be forgiven for thinking that our whole way of life is premised on risk-taking and lack of predictability. Aren’t big salaries in finance to do with the valued capacity to work out how any kind of risk can be exploited, divided up, avoided, shifted into the future or onto someone else’s shoulders and so on?

We digressed. Again.

We were going to comment simply on the rather lovely element of predictability that survives in Helsinki. There’s something about the seasonality that you just can’t escape in this part of the world. Perhaps it’s the slowly but surely changing environment here that makes people come up with ways to mark the passing of time, and to enjoy whatever time/weather (temps, vous voyez…) they happen to be stuck in.

Soon we will be seeing Runeberg tarts in the shops. Then marzipan-filled buns to mark Mardi Gras. We will go and work off the calories afterwards in Helsinki’s parks with our toboggans and our children.

Already the tulip season is in full swing. Compared to many other flowers at this time of year they are relatively inexpensive in Finland. Here are some we were fortunate enough to be given.

Nothing wrong with predictability in this sense. Though tulips were perhaps the start of all this madness in the first place…

What Helsinki has time for

Marinas of all kinds and all levels of luxury pepper this city. Clearly people have time on their hands to use their boats, to sail into the sunset and, perhaps, motor their way back to port after the wind dies down. Still in the sunset, since it lasts for hours even if you don’t live facing north or where the water reflects the rays, like here, in Katajanokka (photo taken in Tervasaari).

And here’s Helsingin Moottorivenekerho with Tervasaari behind. It’s all really easy to miss if you drive along Pohjoisranta in a rush to get to the burbs or the airport.

And here’s a church boat crew training or just enjoying themselves. It’s the small thing in the water, in front of the harbour cranes.

And should you want to get involved in this pastime, we believe that Soutumiehet, located on the other side of the peninsula, on Merikannontie, across the water from the rowing stadium, have the kit and the organisational skills and what have you. Like time.

Should you not have time you might like to find our more about this lot: “Time research institute, 2nd floor. Only by securing time”. Which translates, obviously, as “by appointment only”. If anyone knows anything about them, do let us know.

Sorry folks, that’s all we have time for.

Good night.

Not still going to school

Last night, in a perhaps somewhat emotional state after enjoying the first evening of summer on a terassi, I bemoaned the fact that the schools have still not broken up despite the fact that it’s obviously summer. Kesäkuu, summer-month. Not yet hay month (heinäkuu), and no longer spring-sowing-month (toukokuu).

However, it seems we were hasty in concluding that the school year not being over means that children are being holed up in horrid classrooms with even more horrid school work to get on with, while the precious hours of sunshine are wasted on tourists who are presumably from warmer climes anyway.

No, in fact Finland’s school children appear to beenjoying what one doting parent described to me as a “week of singing and dancing”. They are having parties at school, sports days and even sleep-overs in their school buildings. Hordes of them can be seen in clusters or gaggles all over the city on class outings. Like the lot above, probably the umpteenth class to go and visit the home of Finnish representative democracy, the Eduskuntatalo with its 14 columns and its classic interiors designed by the architect Johan Sigrfrid Siren. The building, finished in 1931, was also designed by him together with Kaarlo Borg and Urho Åberg. We may not see any changes on the surface, but the building will soon be expanded with underground and upper-ground facilities as part of renovation work scheduled to go on for up to 7 or 8 years.

Yup. So much have the requirements of security and “support services” expanded, that they need much more space than can be acommodated without this massive undertaking. Well, compared to the Bilderberg gathering of the unelected, unrepresentable and, it appears, utterly uninterested-in-transparency global plutocracy in Spain, maybe this is peanuts. Rumour has it (and with the Bilderberg lot rumour is all we have), their security has been promoted with a substantial no-fly zone around the town of Sitges where they are to begin their schemings tomorrow.

So, children. Don’t take that representative democracy for granted, or its architectural manifestations. Let’s hope your tour of Helsinki’s most imposing monument to democracy gets you into some interesting places and not just a souvenir shop. I hope that when your generation gets to make decisions, you’ll be able to propose and implement the construction of more great buildings that celebrate precious freedoms and shared achievements.

If you’re an English-reader and curious about democracy and ready to face a bit of critical thinking, you might want to check out the blog Immigrant Tales, where a discussion is going on about Finnish perspectives on immigration, and why Finns are so preoccupied with the fate of two elderly women who are facing expulsion rather than being allowed to remain with their families who live in Finland (the annoyingly titled “grandmother debate“).

And while you’re at it, do swing by Instant Kaamos‘ blog, a long-time fixture of our blog-roll, for some views on how Finnish democracy understands, or doesn’t, the principle of freedom of speech.