He(a)rd this Saturday

Before we offer up a few tweet-like snippets of Helsinki-themed conversation, let’s just note with gratitude the legacy given to our fair city by the old co-operative movement, Elanto.

The bee-logoed co-op didn’t serve just the workers who shopped or worked there or who lived in its blocks of marvellous flats. Every shopper who sauntered down busy, busy (honest) Aleksanterinkatu in the 1950s would have passed by its gleaming new department store. More than likely they’d have seen (if not noticed) the relief by artist Aimo Tukiainen now sadly (almost) covered over.

Yesterday the old building was restored to a new sense of life. We hope.

The Kluuvi shopping mall (we think mall is a more apt word than centre, or even center) reopened. This time it also hosts an interesting riposte to Finland’s disastrous food retail duopoly. In the basement is a  new local/organic food market run by the team behind Eat & Joy Maatilatori. Bizarrely little about this fascinating venture online, so here’s just one of several not-brilliant pics taken yesterday.

Divided up between local-ish producers, and boasting cheese counters, fish, veg, probably overpriced stuff in jars and beautiful bread, oh, and fish smokery and bread oven built in, the place is rather a delight.

Elsewhere in/on Helsinki yesterday:

“I love this city.”

“God it’s cold” (in various languages).

“Things are getting ugly now in Helsinki, I’m sorry to say” – Helsinki resident Carlos Lamuela speaking about plans to cover even more of Espoo and Helsinki with asphalt at Dodo’s annual Megapolis event.

“Some impolite urban planning, here by Le Corbusier” – someone talking about an image of the insane Paris Plan Voisin.

“Please do something before it’s too late”, Lamuela again.

“We’re fed up with the same shit in our food shops”, someone about Kluuvi.

“People are more difficult than buildings”, someone talking about New Helsinki.

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.

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?!)

Between degrowth and under-development (underground car parks, that is)

Helsinkians disagree quite a lot about the best way to go about things. In fact, I’d say this city is pulling in opposing directions in lots of ways. It wants more local services, but also more centralisation. More sustainability, more cars and fewer buses. It follows the imperative to put more money in everyone’s pocket, but there are also some who haven’t just heard of, they want to promote, degrowth. There are those who want more stuff and bigger homes to fit it into and those who don’t. And so on.

Same thing for shops, our perennial preoccupation here at Jees Helsinki Jees. Those who want local shops and services talk about it non-stop. Meanwhile the centralised food retail system keeps us in its constantly expanding clutches. And, on the rare occasions when one ventures to read media reports (Finland’s accelerating lurch to the right means it’s better to avoid broadcast news) it doesn’t take long for either out-of-town shopping or the beloved little shop, squat in its stone-foundations, to be covered.

The same goes for the bicycle. There are those who see it as a threat or a nuisance. And there are those who are eagerly promoting it as the best, safest, most human-sized, quietest, low-emmission, healthy, city-scale, adaptable (shall I go on…?) mode of transport after walking.

Helsinkians’ bikes have always been cool and quirky, like fashion statements. This photo from Megapolis2025 is from when Copenhagen’s Mr cycle chic, Mikael Colville-Andersen, came over to try and persuade us that what (who) rides a bicycle, can be chic too. Don’t just do up the bike, do up yourself!

Alas, for all the efforts to treat cycling as attractive, Helsinki still prioritises the motor car. OK, it goes about it by helping everyone to pretend cars aren’t there and sticking them underground for the day (the ka-boom-growl-brrrm-ka-boom of those granite-exploding car-park makers tells me they’re still at it – nine in the evening!)

And then there’s a green politician using his video-blog to complain that the problem isn’t the lack of cycle provision or a safe environment created by thoughtful motorists. Nope, Pekka Sauri’s ire was reserved for cyclists who cycle too fast.

On a happier note. I returned to the safe circle of Eira (see my earlier post) briefly today. “My” old shop, Laivurin Valinta is still there, still selling all the provisions a family could want. Well, all the provisions that a family that’s happy with only about twenty types of filter coffee, three brands of tomato ketchup, one organic hummous dip and a wide selection of fruit and veg, not all of it imported.

OK, I didn’t actually count them. But compared to the football-pitch-expanses of retail space coming soon (as soon as the dregs of this recession are over with) to a former field near you, it’s pretty small but utterly adequate if not more. To my pleasure it was packed with people of all ages gathering their provisions into baskets of varying quantities before wending their way to the cheerful check-out.

Across the road I decided to forego the waffle and instead got some sweets from the kiosk. Next week it’s time to hibernate, so go get your fix now!

Foodies, apothecaries and interiors

There are, we admit, some truly awful examples of architecture, planning and interior decoration, even in Helsinki. At JHJ we would prefer to think of this city as a haven of perfection, something that would make those Finns who wax lyrical about Finnish design sound merely self-satisfied rather than unbearably smug.

There are some great examples of lovely old interiors being put to delicious new uses. Here’s one, Carelia across from the Opera. Formerly a chemist (apothecary), it is now one of JHJ’s favourite Helsinki restaurants. [Make that "favourite restaurants" Ed.]

Alas, we do have the problem of routinely disastrous refits, as Panu Kaila mentioned in the article in  Rakennettu Ympäristö we referred to in our last post. Between spitting bile about cr*p restaruant interiors, he wrote about the legislation on protecting buildings and noted a rather sweet curiosity: the law on chemists or apothecaries.

If a chemist undertakes to maintain a historically valuable chemist shop (apteekki) interior, they pay less for the various licences that allow them to dispense drugs legally. That explains, perhaps, why there are still a few chemists in Helsinki with rows and rows of drawers and shelves in beautifully varnished wood, “decorated” with bottles and vials carrying text in old fashioned type faces. Here’s the one on the corner of Eerikinkatu and Lapinlahdenkatu.

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!

More on uses for courtyard space

A couple of years back Anne Mäkinen of one of JHJ’s favourite institutions, Helsinki’s City Museum, wrote about the way many of the city’s inner courtyards are disappearing. In keeping with priorities enshrined into planning policy in 1987, she writes, the planners’ main concern are facades. Only the outside edges of blocks are  being left behind while the insides are being razed (ouch! such a word, but oh, so apt). Courtyard life has to make way for cars sometimes, or for more flexible i.e. productive work spaces, but more often and more recently and visibly, for commercial uses. Glass roofed shopping centres mostly. Here’s one, Halonen clothes shop on the north Esplanade at number 37 (nice, boring, long-lasting clothes for people who can’t wear text on their person. End of plug, ed.).

Personally we’d like to say “could do better” but in fact, in her article Dr Mäkinen gives this intervention by architects Gullichsen and Vormala a thumbs up.

In the same article, she notes that

The principles of development for the commercial centre drafted in 1986 are now being applied to the Empire blocks along the south side of the Senate Square. Tuomas Rajajärvi, Director of Planning from the City Planning Department, expressed his ideas about roofing over the blocks in Helsingin Sanomat on 17th October 2997. The glass roofs envisaged by Rajajärvi would totally alter the historial milieu …

Later she notes that this razing process has, despite the losses it creates in the name of universal efficiency

not caused any noteworthy discussion.

As with other Helsinki preoccupations, you might say “not causing noteworthy discussion” could be a sign of consensus. Then again, it might not.

That reference: Helsingin Katoavat Sisapihat or Hesinki’s vanishing courtyards, was published in Ark 2008, number 2, pp. 88 -91

Life and death in the city – a slight disagreement

I try to get my head around the idea that people I respect think it’s a good idea to spend millions of euros (with the quoted figure rising by the month, see here, under LIIKENNESUUNNITTELUPAALLIKKO) on rearranging Aleksanterinkatu at the Senate Square.

But I stumble over the vocabulary. What to me is black to others is white. I love the square and feel it just needs a bit of maintenance and necessary repair, for others it is dead and in need of “renewal”.

To me their vision of renewal looks a lot like “killing off”. Moving tram routes so that passengers have to make awkward loops in their travels, and allowing for restaurants to spill out into the open (shady side of the buildings, see photo) on the Senate Square is to kill off something precious, let’s call it ordinary life, and to replace it with something expensive. I’d call that pseudo life or, if you want specifics, high-end commercial ventures even if the hope is that in their wake will come the “opening up” of the area. The assumption underlying that, is that  city-centre office space is somehow wasted space and that working in them is less lively an act than, say, drinking bubbly or beer.

For me the Senate Square in its current evening glow is a marvel. Others think that it is dead. No bars. No shops. No signs of life, apparently. Deceased, a late square, it has ceased to be …

But obviously a square cannot be dead – it is made of stones, metal and memories, rhythms and meanings and importantly, of livelihoods and mundane routine. This square is not even scary let alone dangerous, even in the middle of the night. But because it does not, it seems, cater enough to the consuming classes and because the small shops that have been there for years, seem not to suffice, the whole now needs heavy-handed altering.

Of course commerce is a big part of cities, always has been. But to confuse showy consumption with life is a mistake and also the result of 100 years of extremely consumerist culture. (The recent Worldwatch Report makes the case v. well). It’s also the achievement (fault) of all those who read and believed in the creative-classes (reg. trademark!) thesis embroidered by one Richard Florida. Despite repeated, heavy (this in Finnish), not to say devastating criticism, the banalities he has so successfully packaged and peddled now routinely pass for good political sense. Florida’s thesis is summed up in the idea that the post-industrial new economy needs new behaviours and new places for its elite, the creative class as he calls them. Cities will prosper if these people find them attractive, because then they will move and invest there, and contribute to city coffers by creating wealth.

The old is valued by the creatives too – it’s bohemian and attracts creative talent after all – but it must be adapted to suit the needs of the 21st century, of course, according to the creative city hype.

Creatives work in marketing, product development and the financial services that sustain them, or they design and entertain for a living. They’re hard to please, but they enjoy considerable status, comforts and, undoubtedly, intellectual rewards. They are lucky indeed, cities everywhere have been falling over their own feet seeking to accommodate their imagined needs – cafes and bars, wired and wireless instant connections and trendiness. Enthusiasm for the creative cities thesis has also allowed people to forget that anybody grows older than, say, 35 years old. Enthusiasm for the thesis has also led to the odd belief that using beautiful spaces to house the office workers is somehow a “waste”. Here is a 1970s annex to the City Hall by Aarno Ruusuvuori. When it was built it was much maligned, but it’s hardly an eyesore.

What is an eyesore are the efforts to turn all that is beautiful into a backdrop for consumption or spectacle. You also end up with homogenous places because you just can’t reproduce the bohemian chic of a seattle or a san francicso everywhere. Instead you get blandness and  inauthenticity. The architecture blogger Tarja Nurmi writes about this in Finnish, notes that even in wonderful Italy places that have been “regenerated” to suit expensive tastes are actually rather, well, dead.

The creative class thesis has supported arguments to “regenerate” a lot that never needed regenerating. But as critic after critic has pointed out, the results often diminish the public realm and reduce opportunities for genuine urban encounters. They even risk turning the most intriguing and layered places into theme parks and disney-esque rubbish.

Helsinki’ Senate Square may be less noisy and less showy than what commercial regeneration and spectacle production likes to call “lively” or “vibrant”, but it’s also less exhausting and probably a good bit more sustainable.

Gradually the creative cities missionaries have woken up to the reality that life isn’t just consumption and spectacle – even in a city. Unfortunatly, cities all over the world meanwhile believed that by following the Florida-recipy, they could avoid thinking too hard about economic or sociopolitical realities. As Prospect Magazine reported last month, this is what one town in New York State is now grappling with:

Inspired, Elmira’s newly elected mayor, John Tonello … oversaw the redevelopment of several buildings downtown. “The grand hope was to create retail spaces that would enable people to make money and serve the creative class Florida talks about,” Tonello says. The new market-rate apartments filled up quickly, but the bohemian coffee shops the mayor fantasizes about have yet to materialize.

It would be so much easir and livelier not to stifle real life by plonking down great, big “renewal” schemes in the first place!

Helsinki as St Petersburg

When Russia was still the Soviet Union and Hollywood film producers couldn’t shoot on site in Leningrad, they’d often come to Helsinki. Doctor Zhivago, Reds, Gorky Park, and many more films, were filmed in the suitably glum and Russianesque streets of Helsinki.

Certainly the architectural resemblances helped – after all, early 19th century Helsinki was specifically designed to be a small and provincial copy of the imperial splendour of St. Petersburg. But it also seems that beyond the architecture, there is often something about the atmosphere of parts of Helsinki that suggest associations with better-known places, images that “everybody” knows from the movies or ads. And if you are thinking of Helsinki, those other places are, inevitably, across the long border to the East.

Emperor Alexander II still stands in the middle of Senate Square in Helsinki, overseeing the most coherent and architecturally significant square of its time in Finland. Drafted in 1812, the year that Helsinki took over from Turku as capital city, it is the result of the labours of Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, politician (to use the language of our times) and Carl Ludvig Engel, architect, although many of the buildings predate that plan. And as occasional tourists reading guide books or plaques on the walls testify, it’s easy enough to read a lot of Finnish and even international history in this architecture. Still, on Monday when this was taken, social and political features felt rather dwarfed by the snow and the guys shovelling it off the roof of the building on the right here, part of the Leijona kortteli or Lion Block.

Sofiankatu, between the Senate Square and Esplanadi to the south, meanwhile is specifically designed to remind folks of history, for instance Helsinki’s erstwhile trilingualism. In fact, it is a museum street. In fact the area has plenty of Helsinki City Museum spaces including a shop. Which makes one think, given that we were on the topic of atmosphere, of late 20th-century urban spaces with their endless supplies of commercial opportunities. Many, many “old towns” across the world were turned into theme-parks of imagined nostalgia and belief in the ability of pedestrian zones and cappuccino culture (as considered a while back in the Architects Journal) to redeem urban life everywhere. To some, clearly this part of Helsinki is simply crying out loud for this treatment.

We await to see what will come of these plans, as the final pieces of the puzzle of Helsingin Leijona’s plans (as discussed on this blog earlier) to regenerate the area are decided on on 25.2 at the meeting of the Planning Committee. (But you’re unlikely to find this out by going on their website with its page of “current proposal”, instead, you have to send emails and phone around). These final pieces are the fate of the trams. It appears that Katariinankatu, pictured above from the south, must be pedestrianised, and this means that the tram must be moved away, and this means that new rails will have to be laid down to enable two-way traffic on Unioninkatu and this means that the entire length of Aleksanterinkatu on the Senate Square must have its rails moved a little bit. Just a little, it seems, to make the new turning technically feasible and … to make outdoor space for new cafes on the shortly-to-be revitalised edge of the Square.

But I was going to write about atmosphere. Katariinankatu, above, has something of the feel of an old St Petersburg, perhaps even the Soviet one. A bit quiet, rather dark, nothing to signal the presence of capitalism and its imperative of marketing – and that, if friends’ accounts are anything to go by, is abundant in today’s St Petersburg.

Whereas here, no neon lights, that is, no global brands, no benandjerrys and no starbucks either. Instead, offices used by city employees (more on which later) and a few small shops relocated from the Kiseleff building which has already been evacuated from under the renovations. We are not sure whether the idea to turn this street into a pedestrian zone would mean enlarging the windows so that they would be better for displaying merchandise and dispensing cappuccinos. We do think something would be lost if they were.

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).