Helsinki as commons 19 April 2015 – election day

Commons? Urban space? These days? With these election prognoses?

But, to more hopeful things. This afternoon a packed seminar room at Kiasma museum of contemporary art heard three excellent presentations and discussion that exploded many a myth about the benefits of cultural projects like the Guggenheim Foundation’s/franchise’s efforts to woo Helsinki’s leadership and public to let it come here and play. While we, of course, pay.

Michael Sorkin, Andrew Ross, Miguel Robles-Duràn and Mabel O. Wilson had come from New York invited by Checkpoint Helsinki to share with us their experiences and analyses. As they spoke, the idea of a Guggenheim museum in Helsinki benefiting anyone in Helsinki started to sound even crazier than it had previously. Such a project would draw us into an international urban renewal circus in which there are no winners, only exhausted competitors. I’d note that the madness of “titanium-clad-starship-cruiser-museums” (I think that was Andrew Ross) as serious municipal endeavours, hasn’t yet – thankfully – quite engulfed us because we are a little behind in so many policy fashions. It also need not cheapen our city or diminish its charms if, as Juhani Pallasmaa put it, we (or our city managers, whoever they are) learn to be a bit less naive than hitherto.

Alas, Helsinki’s public is not known for its critical sensibilities, at least not when it comes to the kind of free-market, free-world, free-everything rhetoric peddled as standard across (still) wealthy European cities (not to mention elsewhere).

As the speakers all pointed out, if city making in general continues on what is now its “normal” trajectory, the homogenisation even of European cities brimming with heritage and sense of place as they are, will be inevitable. (It’s not that I don’t like Marks & Spencers, I just don’t like a political system based on the big swallowing or shoving aside the small, in this case similarly priced Finnish garment manufacturers and retailers. Star*ucks, now that’s another thing altogether. I like Finnish coffee).

Opening Helsinki up to the Guggenheim would mean that our lives, our streets and our most creative impulses would mingle with the evils [sic] of the global construction industry and its truly appalling discounting of human lives. As we heard today, the Guggenheim is among several institutions blithely ignoring yet massively benefiting from the subhuman conditions in which construction workers (and others) in the United Arab Emirates have to live.

So, no longer is one’s ire just (?) a result of confusing cities with theme parks. It’s about just how entangled one wants to become in the global intensification of a totally crazy and utopian set of values and aspirations that passes for mainstream and wreaks so much destruction, throughout the production chain. And yet which, in shy little Finland, only a few dare question.

And so it was with sadness that I was reminded of how earlier commentators on Helsinki’s urban changes have identified a problem here that goes deeper than arguments over costs and benefits.

In a short film by Marja Heikkilä & Martti Saarikivi about the old picture house, Kino Palatsi (1911-1965), the narrator notes “the city may not be that old, but it is full of memories. People shape their environment and the environment shapes them”.

I was born after Kino Palatsi was torn down, but vicariously its memory has shaped a small part of my life too.

Later in the film, he goes on: “a last-minute public debate failed to yield fruit before the hasty implementation of a demolition order meant that the sounds of debate were drowned out by the noise of machinery. Seeking explanations for this frenzy of tearing down buildings, one usually hears arguments about the economics. The reason lies deeper, however. Our towns are young and most of their inhabitants recent arrivals. That is why we lack urban tradition, and why the majority of people do not feel the kind love for their hometowns that would be expressed by respecting tradition (heritage).”*

Well, I don’t buy that, quite. I don’t believe people are that uncaring, and besides, that documentary was shot in 1968.

Helsinki has grown a lot since then and urbanization around the world keeps accelerating. The throughput of stuff and life and rural land required to service all this urban change has taken on such unfathomable dimensions that er, words fail.

So what I’m getting at is that in a way we are all – at least anyone for instance who might stumble on this blog post – living urban lives. And whether it’s in Helsinki or Hong Kong or Hamburg, surely the chances of good urban futures are better without the cheapening and democracy-weakening antics of global brands and global privatisers of all kinds.

Tomorrow, when we know who will represent the people of Finland for the next four years, there will also be excitement as the public gets to see the results of the Next Helsinki Competition tomorrow.

(And I don’t think the fear and parochialism I read into the election results is unrelated to the embrace of these shiny and placeless vehicles of spectacle captured to serve new urban, though not always civilized, ideals).

http://www.nexthelsinki.org/#about

* Viime hetkessä herännyt julkinen keskustelu ei ehtinyt vielä kantaa hedelmää kun jo purkupäätöksen nopea toimeenpano hukutti virinneen keskustelun kiviporien meluun. Kysyttäessä syytä … purkuvimmaan viitataan yleensä taloustekijöihin. Syy on kuitenkin syvemmällä. Kaupunkimme ovat nuoria ja suurin osa asukkaista on tulokkaita. Siksi meillä ei ole kaupunkitraditioita eikä asukkaiden enemmistö tunne kotipaikkarakkautta, mikä kuvastuisi perinteiden kunnioittamisessa.

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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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?

Life and death in the city – a slight disagreement

I try to get my head around the idea that people I respect think it’s a good idea to spend millions of euros (with the quoted figure rising by the month, see here, under LIIKENNESUUNNITTELUPAALLIKKO) on rearranging Aleksanterinkatu at the Senate Square.

But I stumble over the vocabulary. What to me is black to others is white. I love the square and feel it just needs a bit of maintenance and necessary repair, for others it is dead and in need of “renewal”.

To me their vision of renewal looks a lot like “killing off”. Moving tram routes so that passengers have to make awkward loops in their travels, and allowing for restaurants to spill out into the open (shady side of the buildings, see photo) on the Senate Square is to kill off something precious, let’s call it ordinary life, and to replace it with something expensive. I’d call that pseudo life or, if you want specifics, high-end commercial ventures even if the hope is that in their wake will come the “opening up” of the area. The assumption underlying that, is that  city-centre office space is somehow wasted space and that working in them is less lively an act than, say, drinking bubbly or beer.

For me the Senate Square in its current evening glow is a marvel. Others think that it is dead. No bars. No shops. No signs of life, apparently. Deceased, a late square, it has ceased to be …

But obviously a square cannot be dead – it is made of stones, metal and memories, rhythms and meanings and importantly, of livelihoods and mundane routine. This square is not even scary let alone dangerous, even in the middle of the night. But because it does not, it seems, cater enough to the consuming classes and because the small shops that have been there for years, seem not to suffice, the whole now needs heavy-handed altering.

Of course commerce is a big part of cities, always has been. But to confuse showy consumption with life is a mistake and also the result of 100 years of extremely consumerist culture. (The recent Worldwatch Report makes the case v. well). It’s also the achievement (fault) of all those who read and believed in the creative-classes (reg. trademark!) thesis embroidered by one Richard Florida. Despite repeated, heavy (this in Finnish), not to say devastating criticism, the banalities he has so successfully packaged and peddled now routinely pass for good political sense. Florida’s thesis is summed up in the idea that the post-industrial new economy needs new behaviours and new places for its elite, the creative class as he calls them. Cities will prosper if these people find them attractive, because then they will move and invest there, and contribute to city coffers by creating wealth.

The old is valued by the creatives too – it’s bohemian and attracts creative talent after all – but it must be adapted to suit the needs of the 21st century, of course, according to the creative city hype.

Creatives work in marketing, product development and the financial services that sustain them, or they design and entertain for a living. They’re hard to please, but they enjoy considerable status, comforts and, undoubtedly, intellectual rewards. They are lucky indeed, cities everywhere have been falling over their own feet seeking to accommodate their imagined needs – cafes and bars, wired and wireless instant connections and trendiness. Enthusiasm for the creative cities thesis has also allowed people to forget that anybody grows older than, say, 35 years old. Enthusiasm for the thesis has also led to the odd belief that using beautiful spaces to house the office workers is somehow a “waste”. Here is a 1970s annex to the City Hall by Aarno Ruusuvuori. When it was built it was much maligned, but it’s hardly an eyesore.

What is an eyesore are the efforts to turn all that is beautiful into a backdrop for consumption or spectacle. You also end up with homogenous places because you just can’t reproduce the bohemian chic of a seattle or a san francicso everywhere. Instead you get blandness and  inauthenticity. The architecture blogger Tarja Nurmi writes about this in Finnish, notes that even in wonderful Italy places that have been “regenerated” to suit expensive tastes are actually rather, well, dead.

The creative class thesis has supported arguments to “regenerate” a lot that never needed regenerating. But as critic after critic has pointed out, the results often diminish the public realm and reduce opportunities for genuine urban encounters. They even risk turning the most intriguing and layered places into theme parks and disney-esque rubbish.

Helsinki’ Senate Square may be less noisy and less showy than what commercial regeneration and spectacle production likes to call “lively” or “vibrant”, but it’s also less exhausting and probably a good bit more sustainable.

Gradually the creative cities missionaries have woken up to the reality that life isn’t just consumption and spectacle – even in a city. Unfortunatly, cities all over the world meanwhile believed that by following the Florida-recipy, they could avoid thinking too hard about economic or sociopolitical realities. As Prospect Magazine reported last month, this is what one town in New York State is now grappling with:

Inspired, Elmira’s newly elected mayor, John Tonello … oversaw the redevelopment of several buildings downtown. “The grand hope was to create retail spaces that would enable people to make money and serve the creative class Florida talks about,” Tonello says. The new market-rate apartments filled up quickly, but the bohemian coffee shops the mayor fantasizes about have yet to materialize.

It would be so much easir and livelier not to stifle real life by plonking down great, big “renewal” schemes in the first place!