Quick – unique opportunity for slow art!

A person goes online all innocent, just curious to find out if there’s a quick statistic somewhere for numbers of cars in Helsinki in the 1980s. There were a lot, but certainly a lot fewer than today.

So I found a recent issue of Suomen Kuvalehti which wonders why Finland is being so slow to fall out of love with the motor car.

Apparently in the USA and the UK car buying peaked some years ago. Alas, Finland’s administrators and ministry-level people believe there is no alternative to expanding car use and ownership. So says the article. It also notes that the decline of the car has been dramatic even in America’s car-dependent suburbs. Actually, so says Fred Pearce on whose article in the New Scientist that one was based.

Still, there is an undeniably vast amount of rock being blasted from underneath Helsinki to make way for places for all these cars to hide (sleep?). Which brings me back to this post’s opening line.

Which is to say that there I was, all keen to blog about something positive (read on) when I bumped into yet more incomprehensible prose from an old city document.

Here, in Finnish the offending paragraph from a municipal document from 2004:

Uusimpien selvitysten pohjalta on osoittautunut, että kantakaupungin  uudet merenrantaiset asuntoalueet, on syytä erottaa omaksi  alueekseen, jossa autopaikkatarve on jonkin verran suurempi kuin  vanhassa kantakaupungissa.

or in translation

Evidence from the most recent studies has shown that the new waterfront neighbourhoods in the central part of the city should be treated as special cases where the need for parking is somewhat higher than in the older parts of the centre.

(For those interested in this, ehem, it appears that the current parking norms are from the early 1960s and have been tweaked a bit since then. Still – in many cases they were tweaked upwards!!) Anyway, the text then goes on to note that the current (2004) density of 350 cars per 1000 inhabitants is expected to rise to 410 by 2025.

It’s not that increase that caused the blood to boil but the idea that there could be a “need” for more motorcars. As I understand it, the Eira neighbourhood is among the densest for car ownership although it clearly has vastly more shops and services close by than most Finns can even dream of. So why all the 4x4s? Need?

So it’s great that we also have artists who take such great pains to produce delightful commentaries on all this stuff.

If you have time go to Taidehalli/Kunsthalle before the SLOW show closes on 20.11.2011. Exceptionally beautifully curated but thought-provoking too and in such a beautiful building.

If you go don’t miss the piece on the ground floor: a story as told by Hannu Karjalainen for any architect to tremble over!

And Ilkka Halso’s digitally manipulated photos of the Museum of Nature are a must. His English is a bit ropey but the man’s photographs of the repository of all that’s being either denigrated or fetishised by contemporary society are fantastic. Then there’s “House with garden – unique opportunity”. Brilliant!

Whether you’re into ideas about voyeurism and escapism or just appreciate a finely crafted picture that conveys more than words, I recommend it. Along with the rest of the exhibition.

And what’s so fabulous about Halso’s pictures is that he doesn’t limit himself to soft and obviously organic stuff. One of his best repositories is of rocks and boulders. Presumably they’re ones saved from the surface of the earth before they were turned into rubble by the blasting going on everywhere in Helsinki.

I just wish Halso made smaller versions of his pictures too. Being the sizes they are, they’d fit just perfectly into a big home, one of those where they also need big cars.

Car farce update

It may be due to the efforts of Deputy Mayor Hannu Penttilä. It may be a result of avid blogging and some good use of newspaper inches. But the final result is …

… that the Hem i Stan association who are building a new, green and sociable, type of residential block in Jätkäsaari are in fact allowed to pursue their effort without adding to the city’s still growing menace of motor cars.

As many a blogger and journalist is noting, Helsinki’s planning regulations are totally insane in this regard. When a centrally located development, in an area moreover that’s touted as super-green, wants to save money and the planet by building for people not cars, it gets punished. Almost.

Today, the news is that they have been “allowed” an “exception” to build only 24 parking spaces instead of the 46 that the law (!) requires. And they have to build a few more for passing trade. (And we thought this area was to be brilliant for public transport.)

Now that this controversy has opened some people’s eyes, perhaps those who make the rules will be inspired to change them. And if not, they must stop claiming that Helsinki’s policy is to reduce car use in favour of other transport modes.

Should a voter, politician, official or a generally curious Finnish reader want to know more about how much better and cheaper it would be to build cities around public transport links, they could do worse than to check out the calculations on this fun blog. Seems the pressure to build for cars comes at least partly from the way the state, rather than the city, subsidises road building.

We knew it was complicated.

World-model of living – with cars

Helsinki is a bit challenged when it comes to efforts to protect urban life from the motor car. Finns like their cars, most even like to think they have a natural skill as drivers. And as a nation in thrall to engineers (as much as they are ridiculed), with a political culture that eschews loud protest, plus a tendency to think everyone wants to live in a forest, Finland really is quite challenged when it comes to constructing a post-oil or post-highway urban existence.

Martti Tulenheimo, blogger, student, cycling enthusiast and consumer of culture, has produced a fascinating post today. He notes that the number of central Helsinki’s residents’ parking permits have increased from about 14 500 in 1990 to over 20 000 in 2010. Since the urban fabric – where the streets and the buildings are – hasn’t changed appreciably over that time, one assumes this accounts for some of the sense of crampdness one can sense.

More worrying to us whose tableware jumps and whose mirrors clank as the granite underneath our homes is blasted for more parking, is what Tulenheimo says about the trend underground. Currently in the pipeline are:

Töölö, on the agenda 25.11.2010 (tomorrow!) 600 spaces.
Töölönlahti, (Musiikkitalo) under construction 650 spaces.
Jätkäsaari, 900 spaces.
Katajanokka, planned 500 spaces.
Hakaniementori, development plan includes 700 spaces.
Linnanmäki, development plan includes 500 – 1000 spaces.
And a possible 400 spaces if the silly central tunnel to connect east to west by multi-lane underground highway for motorcars goes through …

As he points out, as the spaces underground are provided, the ones above ground do not appear to disappear. Instead, we get more cars, less enthusiasm for public transport. Fact. Want it as a pdf?

Perhaps the clogged up jam in the centre of the city – where apparently everyone wants to come and park their cars underground – needs a serious antidote of faaaast and empty road. Well, here is Finland’s recent contribution to the European-wide reality of attracting cars and car trips, the E18 or Turku Motorway where construction (the rape of a once-abundant landscape) eventually gave way to the moonscape that slowly, slowly, is looking less like a scar on the face of the Earth. The image is from 2009.

Meanwhile, in Built Environment Magazine (Vol. 36, 2010, the issue on Arab Mega Projects) French urbanist Agnes Deboulet has argued that the fashion for motorways may be a substitute for serious urban policy. Instead, she writes,

The pace of construction … has also recently symbolized a quest for a world model of living that seeks to satisfy both local and international elites and convince them to settle in this or that city. This competition for att racting elites has proved particularly powerful over the past ten years …

but she then goes on,

… especially within the most congested metropolises, characterized by a huge deficiency in public transport systems such as Cairo, Teheran, and to some extent a much smaller capital city as in Beirut.

It’s not often that Helsinki has been compared to cities such as these. Well, it’s kind of east of many places, on the edge, er …

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.

Blast! And winding down…

It’s a delight and a luxury to travel by sea to Helsinki (from Tallinn, this time) even if friends routinely warn me of the dangers involved. (For the uninitiated, we are talking alcohol, noise and vomit as key ingredients). But how wonderful when land comes into view, rocks, skerries and islands too, and suddenly you’re there.

Time, though, is money. Your average urban dweller isn’t going to have too much of it. And your average traveller will go by plane. I guess gradually JeesHelsinkiJees will also wind down and disappear. There is not enough time to blog.

Meanwhile, that lovely Helsinki institution, Dodo ry (the environmental organisation for townsfolk) is gearing up to celebrate urban life this Saturday with its annual Megapolis event. This year they are seeking better rhythms for the city. Any city, but Helsinki in particular. This would involve more cycling, walking, strolling, swimming, rowing and skateboarding and, perhaps, skiing. And, presumbaly, doing those things in style, with a kind of urban panache, like Copenhagen is known for.

Meanwhile, living as we do in the vicinity of the cluster of building sites near Töölö Bay, we are aware that even if Helsinki is keen to free up more space above ground for all that nice stuff, underground the city busy tunnelling. For what? To get more cars to fit into the city.

We know this because around these parts we get to hear the dulcet booms of 21st-century technology as it blasts its way through ancient granite. Two Parliament buildings’ worth (by volume) just for the parking and service tunnel for Finlandia Hall and the new Music House, according to MTV.

Enough people over about five years have had enough time to get upset about the blasts – often at night – to fill the internet with variously reliable information about it. I asked the “isännöistijä” or the guy who manages our block of flats and he told me it’s the Music building car park. I think I believe him.

P.S. How boring that they’ve decided to call Musiikkitalo Music Centre. Music House would have been so exotic!