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.

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.

Everything is possible

There are so many ways that cities could be more constructively used than they are these days. Nobody would presumably sit down and plan for metal cows to hog as much of the eye-level, human-scale space as cars do in contemporary Helsinki. Nobody would intentionally stick long ribbons of 60 metre-wide asphalt all around our workplaces and our homes. (I would check this. Ed.)

On the other hand, there are areas that used to be parkland or field, which many consider to be in better, more constructive use, as offices, laboratories and information centres. A good case in point is Helsinki’s Viikki. Like so many of Helsinki’s older parts, it used to be a big farm with parklands of its own. Now it’s once again a “park”. A Science Park.

If it weren’t for the continued use of the area for some kind of agricultural use or research as far back as records go, a casual visitor might be a tad upset by the name “park”. Office buildings more like. And, alas, instead of a row of human-sized grocery shops for the campus’s obviously green consumers, the inevitable box for our “choice” of K-Market or S-Market.

But rather than focussing on the negative (diatribes we do not want) let’s just point out that the newest addition to Viikki’s campus area is the Helsinki Environment Centre. Designed by Oulu-based architects Kimmo Kuismanen, at well under budget (!!!!) and to require half the energy required by Finnish construction standards, and soon to be carbon neutral. Check out the pdf and try not to start worrying about how many tons of CO2 your life requires…

(Is it possible that Oulu architecture is so, well, so approachable and pleasant in scale, because the architecture department is located in the city centre and in old buildings?)

As for municipal art, Viikki can boast a few tons of used tyres in the shape of a gorilla. By the Estonian Villu Jaanisoon.

The black beast is actually called “Everything is Possible”. Which is a good thought to linger on.

Browsing for intelligent commentary on the interesting times we live in, we discovered this: What Architecture Can Do by Reinhold Martin. He praises the Occupy Wall Street folks and analyses the protest in architectural terms that don’t forget buildings’ sheltering function. And he exhorts architects to stay political this time. And not just a la Haussman or the NYPD in using “hygiene” as an excuse to ignore important demands.

Martin doesn’t quite think that everything is possible. But what he says is still pretty bold: More is possible!

Architecture is capable of mounting a profound critique of the status quo. In doing so, it can also model partial worlds and offer up these models for public discussion and disputation. Not perfect worlds, but possible ones.

Unlock! Liberate! Regenerate that shoreline!

Architecture, some folks say, is the biggest star of urban politics now. There’s some truth to this. Wherever you look, it seems, there are either thrusting cranes or brash advertising slogans proclaiming the recently-constructed, soon-to-be-opened or newly-regenerated urban experience.

Even the never-likely-to-be-built but still eye-catching schemes of computer-aided and latte-fuelled architects’ studios are also getting more and more media coverage. In Helsinki also. Who knows, Herzog and de Meuron’s ice-cube hotel might yet make a return, or ideas for a wooden skyscraper in Katajanokka…

So it is sort of refreshing (if not lacking in elements of scariness) to see the Helsinki City Planning Department start from the ground up in a new exhibition about the future of the city. This future vision is currently on display at Laituri but also in a touring version at the London Festival of Architecture and will do a stint at Helsinki Design Week at Kaapeli in late August too.

The vision in question is, of course, the waterfronts of Helsinki vacated when cargo shipping and other harbour functions were moved to the edge of town to Vuosaari. Readers of JHJ will know that many of us think this is a city of elegant and human-scale buildings that has tended to shun flamboyance yet has achieved occasional architectural brilliance. It has also long been referred to as the the Daughter of the Baltic – cue images of Engel’s masterful Senate Square with the Cathedral shining in the sun…

In 2010 though that language and those images feel old, too old. So the Planning Department uses a newer language in its new product, Tailwind: Helsinki Horizon 2030 and tells us:

Helsinki is faced with changes on a magnitude that the city has not experienced for more than a century. Vast harbour and industrial areas have been liberated in the city centre and will be developed over the coming decades into three new urban districts.

The little touring exhibition is built into a shipping container. Its packaging, if nothing else, thus recalls some uses for waterfronts that aren’t about luxury housing development. We mean waterfronts before they were “liberated” as the Planning Department has it.

At which point the cynics in JHJ’s editorial offices wish we could have in writing a promise that all waterfronts in Helsinki in 2030 really will be open to the public and not (as in much of London) locked up behind gates, security guards and offensively ugly buildings put there simply to make profit.

While it’s in London, Helsinki’s exhibition container has been set up behind the Oxo Tower, a commercially successful and iconic  success of waterfont development along the River Thames. It’s not too ugly either, though we do want to stress that the process of removing docks from London has produced some truly, horribly dynamitable architecture. The waterfront is also where you’ll find lots of the thoroughly objectionable urban design of the kind we just mentioned. We really, really want to underline the offensiveness of the locks, gates and more subtle privatisations that this regeneration or “liberation” of the waterfront brought with it in London.

But back to the promises for the future being offered by Helsinki. The container was opened by Hannu Penttila (below), one of the mayors of Helsinki and it’s going to be on show there until July 4th.

Helsinki is embarking on the process of reorganising this “liberated” land some 40-50 years later than the famous centres of colonial commodity trading like London or the former rustbelt towns like Pittsburgh.

Helsinki can benefit from hindsight then. So there is at least a theoretical chance that it will learn from the mistakes of these precursors. And since we gather Copenhagen’s waterfront is quite nice though we haven’t seen it, we expect great things. We are watching!

Waiting for the dust to settle

While Iceland comes to terms with its latest volcanic eruption and, according to the gentleman on YLE YKSI with impending floods as it melts the glacier around it, the online media’s attention is almost exclusively fixed on the dust that’s stopped air travel.

Dust, in spring, in Finland? Everywhere where those men with hoses and brushes or, more modernly, little street-sweeper trucks haven’t managed to clear away the winter’s grit.

In the background there is Katajanokka, from the other side, not the side that the tourists or even most of the angry commentators would think about. One suspects that if Herzog+deMeuron’s ice cube had been given permission, it would actually be extremely visible from quite a lot of angles – but not this one.

It seems there is a lot of dust yet to settle on this debacle, but then its dynamics were quite spectacular in running roughshod over any semblance of democractic process in urban planning, including public debate and maybe even consultation and certainly including bending an ear to the experts. Now local papers and online forums as well as face-to-face encounters, are going over what went wrong. An item in Töölöläinen, a local paper that seems to be doing regular features on architecture, headlined “Häirikkörakentamiselle piste”, or “Full Stop to ASBO Construction” (as it were). Still, the usual suspects are suggesting that nothing should prevent Norwegian inward investment from coming to the rescue of municipal finances, but perhaps they’re the same folks who’d a) sell their grandmother as well as the family jewels to stay globally competitive and b) who see the Senate Square as just a pile of old stones that aren’t being exploited to their full commercial potential.

People are saying, “never again”. Alas, it’s likely with all this waterfront land and all these non-critics of commercially driven urban development in charge of the whole thing, that we’ll be seeing loads more of this sort of thing. Already, the fact that they, experts that is (including highly respected international architects who are intimate with Helsinki), were consulted and then summarily ignored to the huge extent that they were, is possibly a new departure in Finnish political culture where, thus far, trust in the experts and the authorities has been almost moving (naive?) and ubiquitous.

Perhaps a decade and a half inside the European Union has brought Finns into line with others across the continent who are less respecting of authorities, or maybe the silliness around parliamentary expenses in recent months has raised levels of mistrust. Or, shock, horror!! Have Finnish decision makers, whether politicians, bankrollers or municipal officers, always had a tendency, as architecture writer Paula Holmila observes, to flex their muscles when they feel those around them need to be reminded who’s in charge…?

Of course, experts of various sorts have protested eloquently and loudly since the hotel scheme was first made public. And they did so again in anticipation of the vote earlier this month. Let’s just remind ourselves of one of the reasons for why the scheme had to be turned down, that is, it’s visual impact.

Suvilahti – free from…

I relied on rather out-of-season photos to share images of the now abandoned former harbour sites I blogged about last. Here’s a more recent one.

It’s taken from Kalasatama metro station looking south-west. I was on my way to Suvilahti power station, a beautiful piece of real city architecture. Selim Lindqvist designed the reinforced concrete frontage of the coal-powered facility – pioneering such construction methods in Finland. This was the rapidly expanding working class/ industrial district of Sörnäinen, or Sörkka, from where power could be transmitted both to local needs and across the city’s electricity grid. It began operations in July 1909, according to Helsinki Energy’s informative website.

Later, even more modern facilities,  (picture further down), were built alongside at Hanasaari. But still, neither the old nor the new could escape the notice of us residents, we had a daily reminder that our lifestyles are linked in with these great, fuel-hungry machines. Then in 1976 operations ceased at Suvilahti and it went for a while not really knowing what it was for.

Then came along post-industrial urban regeneration! Kaapeli, or the Cable Factory, was one of the first places in Finland that followed the trajectory of former industrial or manufacturing site converting into a culture centre.

Which explains why I was on my way to Suvilahti last week – scuppered by the snow on the capacious site where soil remediation is turning routes that were open a month earlier into smelly-looking playgrounds for vicious-looking machines. So little did they look like the kinds of things you’d want to mess with, that I didn’t even photograph them! Well no, that’s not quite the reason. I was in a hurry. So I thought I’d ‘cut through’ behind a building and up around the gasometer and up to the road and in through the advised entrance on Sörnäisen Rantatie. I saw and followed some footprints but way before reaching my destination, I was waist-deep in snow. Back I turned, around I went, briskly enough to allow a shot of how close I’d been to that potential short cut.

But I’m taking you around the houses now when I wanted to make a couple of observations about Suvilahti. It’s owned by the city but Kaapeli has been asked to manage it. It is slowly being transformed into something that feels right, a cultural centre and a place for creative people who aren’t necessarily “creatives” (you can see what I mean from an earlier post on this). Though we’ll see how it all goes, JHJ tries, after all, not to be overly gullible.

The event I went to was part of the British Council’s Future City Game tour, their way of riding the creative cities bandwagon. Joining forces with the environmental organisation Dodo, they hosted a series of events at Suvilahti itself, generating ideas for how it should/could be developed.

As is so often the case with this kind of thing, it’s all got to be fun, hence the “game” as way to get interested parties around the same table to think through real or imagined but often shared problems. There’s a video of a British Council game in Moscow here. Older versions of a probably good but much abused idea include planning-for-real, design charrettes, participatory design …

At Suvilahti the tone was set by guest speaker Paul Bogen, a cultural centre manager now involved in  Trans Europe Halles a network of European cultural centres in regenerated buildings. His opening was refreshingly sceptical. More or less, it went something like this:

we’re obsessed with turning these old factories into parts of the knowledge economy. And what happens? We get creative quarters, clusters, incubators … how does it affect people who live and work there? Then he went on to go through the usual cycle where a run down area gets taken over by arty types, becomes a cultural area and gets gentrified and cool, and thus interesting to property developers. Evenutally the rich people come and they don’t use the cultural centre. Something like that, he said (from my notes).

This, we here at JHJ felt was a particularly useful way to introduce this topic in Helsinki.

The representative from Dodo, Päivi Ravio, then told us some heart-warmin things about what the “games” held earlier in the winter had taught the organisers. It produced something like a “free from” shopping list, only here not free from allergens or toxins, but free from stifling commercialism and branding.

Participants had wanted no blocking the unique identity of the place with brand-name styling (somewhat challenging to translate the new anti-consumerist slang – I’m working on it). Regenerating to death should be avoided but lots of outdoor space and facilities should be made available. People wanted it to become a child-friendly place for adults to hang out, a playground for open, reckless culture that’s far from commercialism. The Flow Festival and other events that take place should be kept low-key enough to avoid being smothered in commercial priorities. New forms of ownership and management need to be created or unearthed. Experimentation and doing stuff is the key – there shouldn’t be an imperative to succeed.

JHJ will keep an eye on this. The politics, the place, the history, are really rather interesting. We hope the power stations, old and new, are never made over to suit designer and design boutiques, but will keep Helsinki how and where it needs to be. Grounded.

p.s. you can see Hanasaari from Kamppi too

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A real city

Though we rather liked the shiny, new harbour in Vuosaari and the coffee roastery next to it that we blogged about earlier, we are still trying to get used to the empty spaces left behind in and near central Helsinki by the former harbour functions. There is, it feels, something missing from the city.

In Vuosaari  birds lost habitats and people in the greater Helsinki region, not to mention the suburb of Vuosaari itself, lost important assets that help improve life. But it’s not a sadness for lost nature that worries us here at JHJ (though perhaps it should). Nor is it the spectre of speculators who might be expected to swoop on any recently vacated urban land, especially waterside real estate. For anywhere where homes are expensive – and in Helsinki they certainly are – they do tend to swoop. Expanses of tarmac (below) are now dotted around the landscape to the west and the east of the peninsula, leaving the Planning Department very busy.

There’ll be new things to see, new homes to buy, new wonders to behold. This kind of gratuitous repetition is mostly in aid of formatting the blog, trying to get these photos to find their correct place. As if photographs could “find their place” any better than birds could “lose a home”.

Or, hang on a minute…

Anyway, the thing that now feels a bit lacking from Helsinki is signs of manufacturing or physical work.

If, like Juhani Pallasmaa, Martin Heidegger, Richard Sennett and (ahem) me, you believe that the West’s separation of head from hand in parallel with social distinctions between head people and hand people (and a host of other reified dualisms) has had all manner of unhappy consequences, then, you might sympathise with me as I mourn the loss of those places in the city where the hand and the body did their work together with the mind. I mourn lansdscapes where work was a collaborative exercise “on the spot” as it were, rather than an isolated affair undertaken on the run, as it feels for more and more of us. I’d almost say that I’m talking about places where the machine was at the heart of work, but really if there’s a divide here to do with machines, it’s about big machines (ship building, power stations, factories, railways) versus small ones. You know the ones I mean –  one like the one that’s probably in your pocket right now, or at least at your work-station, virtually connecting you to Kuala Lumpur more closely than to the man or woman you just almost bumped into in the street/car park elevator. But in fact, it’s not the machinery even that’s the issue. It really is the loss of places where bodies as much as minds (or more than minds) got tired after a day’s work, and where our part in the rest of the metabolism that is the city – like this old grain silo in Munkkisaari – was visible. These things were accessible to the mind as well as the body of the urban dweller in a way that’s perhaps worth pondering a little, reminders of our part in a bigger whole.

Still, it’s nice to know that architecture critic Jonathan Glancey rates Helsinki well in this regard compared to his UK home. There, as ugly as some of it is even after years of efforts at urban renaissance, the service sector really has wiped out most manufacturing and where it hasn’t, the esteem granted to making things isn’t particularly high, unless you’re famous for something else first, that is. What, he asks, referring to the preferences of Britain’s political classes,

is the problem with traditional manufacturing? With making steel, ships and locomotives as well as gadgets? If you walk through Helsinki, one of the world’s most hi-tech cities, you will see huge ships under construction in yards cheek by jowl with the latest art galleries, restaurants and studios of designers and architects at the leading edge of their professions. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/21/manufacturing-industry-britain-economic-recovery

Helsinki is not the only place he rates, but it’s nice to know.

Spring – that flexible Finnish concept

Bang, boom, swish, crack, thud, thuddud, whoosh. These are weak efforts to convey in writing the sounds of a Helsinki spring. In an almost record-breakingly snowy year, workmen have been kept busy clearing roofs of snow, car breakdown services called on to rescue snow-bound vehicles and ordinary citizens have alternately helped each other to push cars over banks of snow or cursed each others’ thoughtlessness in parking wherever there is almost enough space. Snow and ice are falling all over the place off rooftops and through drain pipes – it can get noisy, and dangerous if you don’t keep an eye on what’s going on overhead. Might be an idea in places to walk in the middle of the roadway.

There is a slight change in the weather now – it’s been above zero for a couple of days now. Spring?

Challenged by long, dark winters, Finns tend to try and sidestep awkward reality by using the word spring to mean anything after Christmas! But in truth, last week did already have something of a spring-like feel, and of course, tomorrow is the first day of March, a word that for mainstream cultures of the northern hemisphere does conjure up something like nature’s awakening from the slumber and rest of winter.

Obviously, however, for one who knows this country, the picture above was taken in the SPRING. This next one, taken but a minute later up the road at Taidehalli proves it. The sun was shining and it was actually warming up the earth, helping the caretaker bring forth the hard landscaping.

Meanwhile, here are some images of the roof cleaning. With excess snow a problem across the country, there have been many falls and injuries, mostly among owners of detached homes. The men dealing with Helsinki’s buildings are, according to a taxi driver, mostly professional roof builders, so have a good grasp of safety.

The buildings: Old Town Hall/Bock House by C. L. Engel from Aleksanterinkatu and then from within the courtyard. Then Innotalo or the Board of Patents and Registration, 1976 by Einari Teräsvirta.

Meanwhile, another typical Helsinki scene this winter, bikes – before the thaw.

P.s. A highly-rated education Finland may have, but much remains to be done. We cannot resist reproducing for your delectation this from today’s Usual

Senaatintorilla on Aleksanteri II:n patsas

Suomalaisia terroristeja käsitelleessä kirja-arviossa lauantaina 27. helmikuuta sivulla C 1 väitettiin, että Senaatintorilla olisi Nikolai II:n patsas. Torilla on Aleksanteri II:n patsas.

or (my translation)

The statue in the Senate Square is Alexander II

A book review about Finnish terrorists in Saturday’s paper on page C1 claimed that the statue in the Senate Square is Nicholas II. The square has a statue of Alexander II.

Street art, or should that be stair art?

Narrator: Did you do that?

Protagonist: I wish I had.

N: Who did then?

P: No idea. It was just there when I walked across the square along with other locals going home for dinner, everyone noticed it. Like they did the weird bell ringing. But hey, this gives you a chance to blog about something other than volume of snow or workmen on rooves and elsewhere trying to manage the excess amounts of it.

N: It does. Thank you. Bell ringing?

P: Some kind of noise pollution, maybe spectacle production from the same people no doubt who consider Helsinki not a city or a place but a stage set for their “cultural creativity”. You know, “Helsinki – the Venue” where soon every week and every day will be the festival of something or other, hugging week, tree hugging day, heritage season, wife-throwing competition, some anniversary or other day, turning the Senate-Square-into-a-Polo-Field day. I wish it could just be an ordinary week-day …

N: Now you’re sounding bitter again.

P: Only because I bit into something really nasty in trying to find out more about the redevelopment of the Torikorttelit or “market quarter”. Yuck, I can’t even bring myself to say that word. It’s so fake and so oozing with the rote-learned banalities peddled on tourism and planning courses for creativity consultants and eurocrats-to-be everywhere.

N: I didn’t realise you had a gripe against the EU.

P: I’m not sure I do. Do you notice, by the way, how Tsar Alexander II is standing in a pose that looks like he’s trying to reason with someone, holding his hand out like that, in a bit of a polite question mark itself?

N: Maybe.

P: And did you know that the 4 figures around him symbolise the kinds of virtues that no product of said school of “planning” would recognise as worth defending: law, light, peace and work?

N: Talking of schools of planning, what’s this Future City Game thingy you went to?

P: Ah, well that was interesting. Except I wish the British Council, who sponsored it or organised it or were somehow involved in it, wouldn’t contribute to the same cr*p by running what was actually an interesting and provocative event in a marvellous venue whose recent political history is  peculiarly Finnish…

N: You’re out of breath again. You were saying, “you wish the British Council”. That they what?

P: That they’d not join the multitudes bleating on about “creative cities“. Give us a break!

N: You’re sounding more cheerful already. But we must. Take a break, that is. More on Suvilahti soon, no?

P: S’pose so. Can I have just one more? Please?

Thinking of the prefix ‘re’ in wonderful, beautiful, snowy Helsinki

The snow fall has been spectacular. A slight accident last Sunday involving a camera lens and ice explains why we are having to rely on old photos and therefore cannot bring to you the rows of white mounds to be found along the streets of Töölö this morning. One of last night’s more amusing pastimes was prodding them to find out whether underneath the smooth whiteness might be a car or a motorbike.

And why the accident? Because we went skating in Munkkivuori where the good locals somehow all converged on a small iced rink at the same time and found the tools with which to clear the ten or twenty centimetres of fluffy precipitation (and then the camera fell). The big freeze means we could go to a free venue rather than an organised, paying version, but we also needed to get skates from somewhere. No problem: Sportti Divari in Hermanni to the rescue!

Recycling and reusing are alive and well in this town, with or without the aid of the internet(cycling). So for some folks certainly, the old has its value.

Including old buildings. Here’s another gem from near the Senate Square. In the rear is Arppeanum, built 1869 in a somewhat neo-gothic style reminiscent of many English university facilities of its time, now the home of the University Museum and some delightful interiors as well as a decent place to have lunch (particularly since the loss of our dear Engel across the square). By the architect C.A. Edelfelt, known in Häme province for railway stations and everywhere else for his surname – the far better known Edelfelt, Albert the painter, was his son.

The building on the corner is later, 1887, architect unknown. Decent job. The lights often glowing in its windows suggest office work here too. Perhaps some part of the university has spilled out here, as it has in so much of the rest of Kruunuhaka – the academic ghetto, you might say. And below, a lecture theatre in Arppeanum – a feature of university buildings that some think is bound to disappear, others feel that if it does, one of the university’s most precious assets – live interaction – will have been lost.

But then it’s what’s being lost all over the place, not least due to misplaced urban policies that prefer to serve up nicely packaged heritage instead of supporting everyone’s right to history. Fortunately, critiques of “regeneration” are now abundant even if they’re not heard enough, perhaps because critique itself fell out of fashion some years ago. Mute Magazine in the UK still does critique – we are grateful and suggest a read here. Owen Hatherley writes about the now taken-for-granted principles of urban development, known in the UK as “urban renaissance” or rebirth, renewal, what have you:

In terms of architectural artefacts, the urban renaissance has meant … ‘centres’, entertainment venues and shopping/eating complexes, clustered around disused river-fronts (…); in housing, ‘mixed use’ blocks …, the privatisation of council estates, the reuse of old mills or factories; extensive public art, … usually symbolising an area’s phoenix-like re-emergence; districts become branded ‘quarters’; and, perhaps most curiously, piazzas (or, in the incongruously grandiose planning parlance, ‘public realm’) appear, with attendant coffee concessions, promising to bring European sophistication to [anywhere].

Helsinki even. Except, oops, Finland always had a coffee and a cafe culture – just not the kind that everyone recognised.