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.

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.

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.

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.

Uses for courtyard space: parking

The history of those inner courtyards in Helsinki is full of fascinating stories of social and cultural change, oh and environmental change.

These days many of Helsinki’s courtyards are, alas, given over for car parking and, as you can see, the odd bicycle squeezed in around the edges. Oddly there seems to be too little space in many Helsinki yards for bikes, meaning that folks have to leave them on the street. Ideally of course, the courtyard buildings that were once in use as wood stores, laundries, saunas and the like, for the use of all inhabitants, should be turned into bike storage.

For those seeking to keep cities people-friendly the good news is that in fact the use of such space for parking is in fact illegal. The bad news is that the City never gets involved in this form of criminal behaviour.

At least hasn’t until now.