Sceneries of Helsinki – Adieu on this snowy Independence Day

If you are interested in how ideals congeal into matter, and if you appreciate that a seven-storey building can be “human-sized”, do come and visit Helsinki.

But whether you’re here or just planning a visit, make sure to enjoy it before it’s too late. The “pressure” to build (particularly on the water) is producing a stunning list of new and attractive opportunities for the building sector. The Planning Department’s webpage contains so much architectural and planning dross it makes me weep.

From redesigning the rural idylls of Östersundom and the fast-growing suburbs to the east, to the bombastic dullness of the other so-called New Helsinki zones, up the high-rise-hotel (a new symbol for Helsinki?!) on the western edge of the peninsula, and down to the wrangle over a helicopter pad in Hernesaari … our enormous Planning Department must be a hive of activity.

Presumably everywhere architecture and construction have sped up through computer-aided technology and politics-to-suit-the-rich. The craze for big and showy in Helsinki is also capitalizing on the genuine problem that Helsinki’s land-use is wasteful by European standards (as even Wikipedia will tell you). So as they turn over more and more of the city to speculative building, the usual suspects (Kokoomus politicians like young Mr Männistö who heads the planning committee, for example) have at their disposal a machine more powerful than ever with which to smother the city with monuments to today’s impatient capitalism, but also a vaguely green-sounding argument for building high.

Can protesters and activists keep up? They are beginning to try. Some have stepped up their campaigns with letters to the planning department and to editors (if you have access to Helsingin Sanomat you can follow an interesting exchange here), and with new websites and blogs.

Perhaps the new little exhibition at the Architecture Museum, Unbuilt Helsinki, is also a kind of protest. Maybe. I’d describe it as difficult art. But it is based on a larger, longer project that might yield some stories yet, about how the choices were once made that created the city we  still love.

Is there any point in trying to resist? Haven’t the rich always shaped the city?

Probably. But I can’t believe the rich have always been this stupid or careless. In this little gem of a city we appear to have rich folks who can’t distinguish a fine skyscraper from an a architectural erectile dysfunction.

And, to give me the excuse to share this bit of silliness (below), Helsinki’s rich presumably also think a good evening’s eating out might have some connection to forest sceneries. I think, Helsinki, we have a massive problem on our hands.

If, dear reader, you have any thoughts on the design of future Helsinki that haven’t been taken up on this blog, or that should be taken in new directions, I’d love to know. The thing is, I’m not going away, but I think this blog should now wind up. It’s time for something more serious.

Thank you so much for reading. JHJ.

Day days

“Dayday is a day when anyone can create a day for a day”.

It was only a matter of time before some joker posted this one on facebook. Not least because last weekend’s effort at another “day” in Helsinki, certainly in Töölö, felt a bit contrived. Cleaning day is nice but it’s nice too to walk in the park, take the boat out, head out to the mökki.

Seems some Helsinkians are exhausted after a summer of running from one pop-up event to another. Perhaps they’re even wondering why they’ve turned into producers as well as consumers, prosumers, of urban culture.

We now create our own “content”, we even take part in  planning [can we check this? Ed], and we are told to set up our own businesses rather than relax lazily into lifetime jobs.

Yet it’s a stretch just to get the kids to school and find time to talk to the spouse – though Finns do work shorter hours than most. Still, we can forget the lazy Sunday afternoon – those over-equipped little leagues filled that slot long ago.

So it might be time that that the experts who get paid for their trouble took a bit more seriously their role in “content creation”.

Sure, we like public participation though it has its troubles. But we still/also have some seriously crap planning. Regular readers, and anyone with an interest in Helsinki’s construction projects, know this.

The latest bit of annoying planning in Helsinki concerns the railway warehouse in Vallila/Pasila. Though it’s nice that the interesting building is to remain intact externally.

And it’s nice that the Teollisuuskatu area – which is in danger of becoming a strip-mall-type insertion into the otherwise liveable (but only after popular struggle!) urban surroundings of wooden Vallila and properly dense Kallio – will become a place of work as well as of sleep.

It seems the “choice raisin in the bun” is to be carved out of the wider former railway lands and given (almost) away by VR in unceremonious haste, when a better negotiated and more encompassing planning deal or masterplan would surely be worth it and possible.

OK, many of us are upset because this means that the one genuinely multicultural venue near central Helsinki, Valtteri’s flea-market, will have to go. Why couldn’t the entire area be developed into a mix of homes, workplaces and a fleamarket that attracts a solid crowd three days a week?

It’s not too late to comment on the plans. (Visit the usual site and scroll down to Aleksis Kiven katu). But it would have been good to get in there earlier. Maybe we’ve just been too busy doing day-days to notice what’s being done in our name.

Pierre Huyghe. Streamside Day – One Year Celebration. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation. CaixaForum Barcelona

The usual formula for Helsinki’s South Harbour

We are decamped to where birdsong dominates. Here the Baltic Sea still looks lovely even as the battle against using it as a dump falters.

Meanwhile, like every Midsummer, Helsinki has apparently been given over to the tourists and the seagulls.

Looking at the results of the City Planning Department’s South Harbour Ideas Competition, it’s clear that the summer and the tourist (not least the Baltic Sea cruise passengers) are very much to the fore in the city managers’ thoughts.

For me the images highlight the gulf between my dreams and the dreams (?) of those who manage the city. Once again they have followed the usual and deadening formula: rhetoric of vitality + Computer Aided Design = winning entry.

I love the South Harbour, iconic view and image, and still as real as the pain in my toe. What, I wonder, do the tourists make of the market square and its surroundings?

If they are arriving cruise passengers, what do they perceive? An interesting city scape? Or other cruise ships six times the size of the largest edifices anchored on dry land?

JHJ had the pleasure of arriving by ship just last week. Beautiful. Interesting. People doing stuff.

The Harbour, at least from a distance, looked like a hive of real activity.

It made me think of a recent essay by that unbelievably prolific anthropologist David Graeber, called ‘Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit’. What, the essay ponders, are we all so busy with?

In Helsinki it wasn’t so long ago that office workers, university people and perhaps some local housewives (and at least one -husband I know of) frequented the market, the market-hall and the area around, for shopping, meeting, taking boats to islands and passing through on their way to somewhere else. And a good few people used to work here.

Some still do.

Not that there is that much work for dockworkers. Plenty of work for cleaners though. A startling proportion of those we saw appear to be darker skinned than most Finns.

Back to Graeber. I understood him to be saying that capitalism + computing has managed to reduce us all to administrators of our own and others’ lives. Creative doing is as hard as creativity-talk is necessary. All creatives do is try to sell.

The Planning Department and the City are selling Helsinki. As JHJ noted in an earlier post, this involves lots of image-making. And endless power-points accompanied by linguistic novelties like the “future dogmatic” or “future positive”, supposed to make us gaze misty-eyed into the lovely future and forget about the mess we continue to produce (my thoughts returning once more to the poor old Baltic).

The South Harbour Jury Report (available on this page), though not quite completely information-free, is pretty much in this vein of vacuous rhetoric. (But was the only thing they were looking for a way to get a decent cycling facility to get through the bottleneck of the market?)

P.S. Only one of the 4 winning entries, Meren Syleily, mentions work that’s not related to entertainment. Shame the prose is so complicated.

Keeping working
Just as importantly none of the proposals run counter to the essential requirements of the shipping terminals, ensuring that the activities of the port can continue unaffected, unconstrained by the imposition either of new obligations or overlapping functions.

Nature itself supports the Helsinki City Planning Department’s Visions

Today, 28.5.2012, is the last day for the public to submit comments regarding the planning proposal for a 33-storey hotel just to the west of the city centre, in Jätkäsaari. Late submissions have been known to have been accepted.

Read and acted upon?

That’s different.

According to a glossy corporate website, the Kämp Tower luxury hotel will open in November 2014.

This statement does fly in the face of the plan currently in force (allowing 16 storeys, itself pretty startling and, for architects, challenging, in the current Helsinki context). Such a prospect is also clearly devastating to many Helsinkians. Others are blissfully unaware of the plan, of course.

Future neighbours and some urban aficianados do know. After a public relations hearing in January, followed by a period of soliciting the public’s views (you know, citizen participation) the Planning Department published a robust rebuttal of the critical views. Called a review of the public consultation, you will find this if you swim around the Department’s haphazardly updated website often enough.

Alternatively, if you’re lucky, you may find it via this link to the minutes of the planning committee’s meeting held 13.3.2012. Liite (enclosure) 9 is a report outlining some of the objections to changing the currently valid development plan so that it could accommodate the 33-storey conference-centre-hotel that our Norwegian investor-friend (yes, he of the Herzog and de Meuron debacle in Katajanokka) wants.

Basically, most of the public sees the plans as inappropriate, bad and threatening Helsinki’s most cherished assets.

The Department pooh-poohs such retrograde opinions. The 33-storey hotel is appropriate to the site. It is a good thing for Helsinki and the surrounding areas. It does not in any way threaten the development of the city.

Not incidentally, the implication is that if one is against these very 33 storeys, one is against progress.

JHJ is not impressed with the way “public participation” is interpreted at the City Planning Department. Why would anyone bother to send any more comments, given that the obvious and pretty substantial comments made so far have been dismissed already?

No wonder so many people in Helsinki comment on the power of the City Planning Department. It is said that it employs well over a hundred people, maybe over 200, and operates behind closed doors. On their contacts page though it looks like it’s barely 50 folks.

Someone somewhere though is churning out one heck of a lot of strong rhetoric, verbal and visual, which appears to be paving the way to a strong change in the cityscape and atmosphere of our lovely pocket-sized capital.

A wooden monument to optimism

This post is effectively a huge thanks to Dan Hill and everyone else at Helsinki Design Lab/Sitra where they are promoting low-carbon urban planning. The freshly pressed visualizations on their blog, of the bizarreness otherwise known as parking norms in Helsinki, should make it harder than before for the peddlers of business-as-usual to argue their case. For, as JHJ has noted before, it should not be an easy case to make. (But then in Helsinki cases aren’t so much made or argued, it’s more a case of taking and sticking to positions. Read on.)

Yesterday’s post on the HDL blog compares new-build in London (the massive Shard skyscraper at London Bridge) and in Helsinki (the massive New Helsinki boom that is transforming what used to be Helsinki’s West Harbour). Note, the Helsinki project is being peddled as exquisitely green. Dan then on the HDL-blog (here’s that link again):

A typical block [in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki] will be designed to have around 7 floors and have to make space for approximately 120 parking spaces. Both cities are well-served by public transport (in fact, Helsinki has previously been voted as having the best public transport in Europe) and Helsinki being a compact city, you could walk to most bits of central Helsinki from Jätkäsaari.

But the visuals, only one of which I’m copying here because it’s worth reading the whole post (there was the link again) are really provocative:

http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/blog/week-165

On the back of this, let us pontificate: for Helsinki to stay as lovely as it is, let alone become even lovelier, its management must get rid this tendency to clog things up either with cars or sclerotic ideas. HDL’s visual will help.

What it will also require, though, is something that is in shockingly short supply here, namely self critique. In fact any kind of critique (not to be confused with dissing or haukkua in Finnish) would be a bonus.

Instead of debate and self-critique, we have something that makes me think of the allegro of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, oddly enough: Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Happy gathering of country folk).

As lovely as Helsinki is, endless self-congratulation is tiresome. The UK’s The Independent newspaper is the latest to pour heaps of dubiously argued (argued?!) praise on the whole country. Sure, it was once a fabulous place, and still is. But it sure is at risk of being messed up by amateurish and selfish decision-making, as any regular readers of our rants must know. Helsinki’s media (social and journalist-produced) is in danger of turning into a wooden monument to (misplaced) optimism. (The phrase borrowed with a twist from that excellent blog post. Did I already give the link?)

Helsinki optimism is really getting to us actually. Perhaps a short trip to smelly London is called for. It’s not as nice as Helsinki, but one knows that it will give one an injection of critical thinking. For instance the politically engaged Planners Network UK who know that now is not the time to foist solutions on others as much as to ask questions (Disorientation-guide pdf). Healthy disorientation in a time of obvious crisis (obvious outside Finland) can also be achieved through urban gardening in London. Looking forward.

Helsinki car farce

If anyone can shed light on this weird story, do please let us know.

There have been a few news items recently (here in pay-to-read HS) about a spat in the City Council over parking spaces. Representatives of Kokoomus (whose supporters generally like big cars) are unhappy that representatives of the Greens (whose supporters profess to dislike all cars) appear to be gaining unfair advantage in Jätkäsaari. Bizarrely enough, we know now what cars they all drive (or don’t)!

Jätkäsaari is one of New Helsinki’s building sites now. It used to be a place folks went to swim and hang out. Then it became harbour. Then it became container harbour. Then it became a field of concrete before the builders arrived.

The City is plugging the reasonable idea that Jätkäsaari lends itself to particularly environment-friendly living. One of the buildings will be Sitra’s Low2No project. Another is a communal block being built by the Hem i Stan association for their own needs. As the article in Helsingin Energia’s recent newsletter pdf put it:

Rakentamisen periaatteina ovat yhteisöllisyys, ekologisuus
ja esteettömyys. Yhteisiä tiloja rakennetaan tuplasti sen
verran kuin kerrostaloihin yleensä.
– Kattoterassi ja sauna, pesula, juhlasali ja suurtalouskeittiö
astioineen asukkaiden yhteisiä tai kunkin omia tilaisuuksia
varten, yhteinen olohuone…

or

The principles of the building are community, environmentalism and access. There’ll be twice as many communal spaces as in an ordinary block of flats.

- A roofterrace, sauna, laundry room, banquet room [juhlasali, anyone?] with a large kitchen so residents can organise shared or even private parties, shared living room…

Sounds great! And since these people have taken on board the hype about green Jätkäsaari being near public transport links, they feel they can survive with fewer cars.

And how this pisses others off!! And the others may yet force the builders to add a million Euro to the budget and remove 22 parking spaces worth of scarce resource to meet Helsinki’s building standards. Legally.

What we don’t understand is how this became a party-political thing. Except that, unsurprisingly, some of the folks involved and due to own property here, happen to be Green politicians. Good for them, say we.

Besides, we had always thought that parking standards are about reducing car-dependency, as it puts a strain on shared resources. But it seems in Helsinki parking standards don’t set maximums but minimums.

The only legal or regulatory info we found was  from Finlex, Finnish law. The statutes, from 1958, stipulates that enough (not specified) space must be provided for private vehicles.

Lampa Mystery

Cities, big ones in particular, offer fabulous prizes for those who take risks, who speculate. Actually, the correct word is gamble. Not that there isn’t a lot to be recommended in this fact, as Marshall Berman showed in his brilliant (recently reissued book) All That is Solid Melts into Air.

Around the old centre of Helsinki, currently under renovation or rejuvenation, there are ample opportunities to speculate with some remarkable built heritage. I’ve heard it from my gossip sources that the sale price of the 1817 building, Lampa Talo or House, on the corner of Pohjois Esplanadi and Helenankatu was so eyebrow-raising it couldn’t help but make you suspect foul play.

According to the web the area now rebränded as the Tori Quarter offers “forward-looking, bold and elegant” business opportunities for transforming a loved and incomparably valuable yet architecturally anti-iconic ensemble of buildings into all shiny shops. The responsibility for achieveing this transformation of the blocks south of the Senate Square lies with the unelected Helsingin Leijona Oy. On their Finnish-language pages they note that in April 2008 Lampa House was sold to Kari Management Company to be transformed into a 40-room hotel. The City had owned the building since the 1930s.

The owner of Kari Management Company is Ilkka Kari, a former Conservative Party councillor from Espoo, businessman and engineering graduate whose Wikipedia page tells a fascinating if brief story of a career in speculating on the built environment. Elsewhere too (The Usual, Taloussanomat, YLE) you can find out that Lampa, one of Helsinki’s oldest buildings, was sold to Kari for 3-point-something million Euros on condition that the site be renovated and a hotel open for business by the end of 2010 (that’s three and a bit weeks); that renovations are barely under way; that the whole has been sold to an unknown buyer for over 7 million Euros; that the police are investigating and Kari is suspected of gross dishonesty etc. etc. etc.

No wonder the reputable face of contemporary capitalism, oops, urban government/ management can’t keep its web-presence up to date. There are, however, bits of information written in metal all over the area for those who are interested in more reliable information.

The experts who have produced these are undoubtedly more expert in their job than the city officials and other hapless types who are responsible for running the city and its finances.

It doesn’t help to know that all over the world, even in London,”people who [are] in thrall to the promised dream of capitalism but [have] no clue about business” are helping things along.

Then again, if one can only feel sorry for Planning Departments and City Real Estate Departments for getting themselves mired in corrupt deals, who is there left to hold to account?

Designer designs for a design-wharf

Last year Helsinki was gripped with fear lest the main market and its environs be sacrificed to the whims of footloose capital, travelling salesmen and tourists. We were being asked to say yes to the icy design hotel by Herzog + de Meuron. The level of debate was remarkably high as we reported in earlier posts. The design(er) hotel scheme was turned down not because of a knee-jerk reaction against foreigners or glitz, but because people felt and understood that it would destroy something vital.

Since then computer-aided image mongers at the City Planning Department and the architects offices it’s commissioned, have produced a steady stream of New Helsinki bumph. They’ve been eager and able to add sun where it has no hope of shining, offer us sleek and carless roads (left), designer-designed dentists surgeries and other unlikely designs for our shared future.

Architects’ drawings are much loved by JHJ and there’s no reason why a computer-aided version should be any less valued or meaningful than a line drawing of a proposed construction by, say, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. But it just seems that almost all that we’ve seen in this department over the last year and a bit has been appalling – one way or another. It demonstrate alienation from any sense of environment and reality. Most of it presents buildings of blandness or bombast (or combinations of both). It’s the sort of stuff that inspires Britain’s excellent architecture critics, like Jonathan Glancey, Jonathan Meades or Owen Hatherley (where are the women in this list!?) to exercise their verbal virtuosity and architectural, er, nose. They would presumably see/smell these too as examples of architectural homicide and urban de-generation by the usual culprits: shopping, shopping, banks and tourist “attractions”.

Alas, Finland doesn’t really do critique about professional expertise (it’s usually said as an excuse that the pond is too small, nobody wants to or can afford to, dirty their own nest). We are, however, grateful to Arkkivahti (who is not a man). But when the Swiss duo and their peculiar hotel was presented as the obviously progressive choice against all the critics’ varied and thoughtful reservations, the local public just kept coming back with even more thoughtful and sensible objections until the Council eventually voted against.

The BIG DESIGN hotel may be off the agenda, but design-fever has displaced innovation-mania and gripped the city from Herttoniemi to Hietalahti/Punavuori. This is an area much loved for its lack of designed design. Re-branded with the offending d-word plans for its future are now being presented by the Planning Department (at Laituri and the web) to howls of derision from most of the respondents on the website.

“Design Telakka” (telakka = wharf) is the really, really old waterfront area of Helsinki, on the end of Punavuori. Only a decade ago you could see men making ships here. Here in particular Helsinkians could see and sense that their lives were connected to the world beyond the oceans, just as they could appreciate the significance of shipbuilders’ skilled efforts to make real things to a high quality. (Not, as the blurb on one of the designs being showcased, “high-class”, which makes one think of whores – though given that this was also a red-light district in the 17th century already and there is some porn for sale quite close by, it’s an association to make one smile.)

Below, for your delectation, some translated snippets from a random selection of online comments.

The proposal pretty much combines Merihaka‘s and Eiranranta’s negative aspects. (About the design called Hot Dock)

Redundant squares are the bane of Nordic towns. I’ve yet to see one that works. Could turn into car parks though I suppose, it’s what usually happens. (about NOAH)

Totally arse that Nosturi will be demolished and ELMU who do good stuff for young people will have to go to make way for the rich creamy-arses who’ll get another of their galleries into the best spot in the centre, and let young people go somewhere on the urban fringe to party, thanks again City! (about NOAH)

Very good but should be perimeter blocks. Why on earth can’t these idiot architects plan proper blocks any more? (on Living Harbour)

The modern, dark towers don’t fit the surroundings. Even uglier than the sausage building.

Aren’t we getting enough of those in Keilalahti anyway [see JHJ's earlier post] so you’d think they didn’t need to come to spoil the city centre? (On Eighteensixtyfive)

Note, Living Harbour (below and here) seemed to get the warmest reaction (understandably), NOAH also avoided blanket condemnation.

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…)

The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth

That’s the name of an interesting new book by Robert Kirkman, subtitled, ‘the future of our built environment’. Though Kirkman is from the USA, the cover photo shows London’s M25 “ring road” with its right-hand-drive traffic bunched magesterially across five lanes going one way, a little less cosy on five lanes going the other, all amid England’s green and pleasant (as was) land.

So whilst we all love to slag off Americans-in-big-stupid cars, we might as well be a bit more ecumenical and admit that people in big-stupid-cars flourish everywhere. Even in Helsinki. Even in my beloved Eira. Especially  in Eira.

Some effort goes into working out just how many cars ARE in Helsinki and around it.

Top left, the yellow line shows trips in private cars compared to trips  by public transport in the Helsinki area. Top right, the steady reduction in the proportion of journeys made in the Helsinki region by public transport. Bottom, mode of transport crossing the boundary between Helsinki and its neighbours (top down: motor car; bus; tram; metro; train).

It was with some satisfaction then, that we found a piece of polite but firm anti-stupidity about Helsinki and cars from the environmental organisation Dodo. As part of the recently closed consultation on the first part of the Pasila redevelopment plan (the competition is open for the next bit), they wrote a thoughtful letter to the City that they also published on their website. Here a few translated snippets.

With our suggestions we would like to strengthen Mid-Pasila’s identity as a place and not just as a compulsory through-road. We believe that as central an area needs to be planned from a premise whose motto could be: “not a square metre of uninteresting space”.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. So now, let’s everyone do all we can to abolish those stupid ideas of routing a four-or-more-lane highway through the area. Let’s just remind ourselves of what we are actually talking about. At least, as it was for much of last summer.