The Great Transformation

So long, summer. Hello electioneering. We hope.

Municipal elections are on 28 October and, gratefully, the Great Transformation is at least somewhere on the agenda.

By Great Transformation I’m not talking about the shift from a kind of all-round existence to the market fundamentalism most of us now take for granted. (See Karl Polanyi’s great book of that name for that story.)

Nor am I talking about the great climate transformation that this blind fundamentalism has brought with it. (Check out George Monbiot’s text about that here).

I am of course talking about New Helsinki and all the stray bits and pieces of urban development going on around it.

Did I say development? Slip of the keys.

At the small scale Helsinki is, and is likely to remain, wonderful. At the bigger scale, well, watch out and invite your friends to visit soon. Something big and ugly is expected near here soon.

Almost whichever way you look, the Helsinki Planning Department is getting a lot wrong. It makes room for cars not people, that is, for cars, not people. It plans to chop down forests where it doesn’t need to. It drives big roads into the city centre. It plans for megamalls instead of local shops. Perhaps it’s even opening the door to mediocre and anti-social architecture. (Surely not!)

It wants to build high and although plenty of people and quite a few bloggers are aghast, I have yet to find anyone who believes the madness could actually be stopped.

Saying “no” or looking for alternatives to “the authorities” perhaps doesn’t come naturally to Finns. (See here for a relevant and nice Finnish piece on the topic).

New Yorkers had been saying “no” with a vengeance since the 1960s and the prickly, saintly Jane Jacobs. Even in Stockholm there must have been critical voices over the years, since nothing like the high-going hubris of Sergels Torg has ever been allowed (at least near the centre) since that went up in the 1950s.

JHJ and friends are grateful to those who are doing something to be constructively critical, e.g. here, here and here. (This last link gets in because before the Töölönlahti moonlight swim of a few nights ago – where ordinary folks protested/rejoiced in the bay with their bodies – Peltsi Peltonen made an impassioned speech on behalf of the sea and against business-as-usual that was music to JHJ’s critique-starved ears.)

Looking forward then to urban planning inching its way onto the political agenda.

Metal cows and f*** idiots

Everybody likes to hate an expert, especially a planning expert.

Sadly.

And yet.

Experts have been hated at least since Jane Jacobs became Saint Jane by suggesting that New York City could be made nicer by sacking its planners. She figured that nice self-organizing people are the best guarantee of a nice environment. (You can see why she’s popular these days.)

In Finland we slag off experts by calling them fakki-idiots (Fachdiot which is German for Subject Idiot – someone who is challenged by the idea of a wider context, of all other things not being equal. The English idea of a silo-mentality comes close.)

We here at JHJ actually believe in expertise, but we are beginning to suspect that at least when it comes to Helsinki’s transport planning, f*** idiots are solidly in charge.

Why? Because of the cars. The weird situation in Jätkäsaari that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago isn’t an isolated case. It’s official, Helsinki MUST HAVE MORE CARS!

And so it’s been wonderful to see some critiques. Even The Usual is reporting that one parking space costs 40K euro and asking who should pay (10.9.2011 if you have a subscription). Now Hesari readers at least realize that those of us who prefer life without a car are subsidizing the very thing we most hate and suffer from: other people’s excess metal cows and the s**t that’s farted out through their quaintly named “exhausts”. (On the left, metal cows parodied by Miina Äkkijyrkkä – more about her and her “sacred” cows on Hellosinki).

So, on 10.09.2011  Hesari got a lefty Green and a Conservative (Kokoomus) chap to explain why a driver should pay his own way and why society should subsidize a driver, respectively.

A week later the paper reported on another aspect of Helsinki’s love-affair with cars: this business about blasting into the granite on which our fair city is mostly built, in order to stuff cars into them and off the streets. (Will a similar solution be suggested for anti-social behaviour soon?) Unlike our lefty Green friend, JHJ does not endorse this practice.

As you may know, JHJ’s editorial offices have from time to time been affected by the scary and perverse sounds of underground dynamiting too. Now as OP Pohjola expands its premises, Hesari reports that the old wooden buildings of Vallila are to be put at risk to make room for the growing backsides metal cows of workers at Pohjola. According to the interviewed rep from Pohjola, employees are simply not always able to use public transport.

Might these be the same people who were clogging up Tuusulantie (in both directions) the other day when we were on the bus going to the airport?

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.

Tram jam

Cars in recent decades have reproduced as societies have acquired more money. No wonder Helsinki’s traffic jams just get worse and worse. And that’s despite all the effort that goes into shoving cars underground in this fair city.

For at least ten years the occasional solitary online commentator has quipped on the holey-cheesey nature of subterranean Helsinki. Meanwhile even reddish Greens like Osmo Soininvaara have advocated more underground parking while sustainable transport campaigners observe in bewilderment as the city throws vast amounts of money not just into holes in the ground, but into building them. However, only a more patient googler than yours truly has time to find the recent ones, not to mention to draw a straightforward and punchy blog post on the topic.

The most recent hit was not about Helsinki but about Tampere, that former-industrial city with the two lakes and quite a nice music scene, where construction for “massive” new underground car parking has caused some protected industrial heritage (now used as a music venue) to crack horribly. A facebook group was even set up to “monitor” the situation. (Back to Helsinki. Ed.)

The author of the book The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, Robert Kirkman, who also calls himself an ‘environmental ethicist’ writes about the really intractable problem of cars and space. Average driving slownesses on urban streets differ little from those of 100 years ago. Kirkman also makes the painfully obvious point that driving is “bounded by physical limitations that cannot be negotiated. In this case, there are upper and lower limits to the size and agility of a private automobile that can safely transport a small number of passengers, and it will always be physically impossible to put more than one car in the same space at the same time. The only way to avoid this limitation and the storage problems it entails would be to reject the automobile altogether, a take-it-or-leave-it choice even for those included in the automotive frame.”

Well, Kirkman is no moralising git trying to offer one-size-suits-all remedies and hair-shirt lives to save the planet, so he spends a good part of the book trying to figure out how society might learn to talk about the damage it does to our environment whilst working out how to live together, sharing the same spaces and not stepping too heavily on others’ toes. He is very thoughtful about not slagging off America’s drivers who, thanks to their urban planners of yore, mostly have little option. And anyway, even Americans may be falling out of love with the automobile. (Oh, yeah. Ed.) Oh yeah, see this.

Maybe more on Kirkman later – Helsinki certainly has plenty of folks in high places for whom metropolitan growth is an unequivocal good along with plenty of other dubious ambitions to forget Helsinki’s geography, history and its cultural heritage. (Stop moaning. Ed.)

That heritage includes the slowest trams around. According to Muukalaisia Vesirajassa, a delightful blog (Finnish readers wanting to keep up with confidently flowing geekiness will find a link on the right), that Helsinki’s average speed is 14.3 km/h compared to a similar system in Paris doing 19km/h, and that a main culprit is too much standing at lights. I’ve heard others comment not just on the annoying slowness (and not just when something’s broken down as above, a couple of days ago on Mannerheimintie) but on the probability that trams would offer the restructured HSL (Helsinki METROPOLITAN Transport, or something [Region. Ed]) a chance to make money as well as save time, but for some reason they don’t.