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!

Rhythms of work

Later today Dodo.ry are organising a public discussion on the theme of the built environment and its rhythms in Helsinki, with a short but interesting-looking line-up of speakers. No doubt the benefits of ecologically sustainable construction, cycling, flexibility and a reliable and green transport infrastructure will crop up, and Vancouver will once again be used as the exemplar of a green metropolis.

But the thing that makes an urban rhythm stick, and that recent strikes have reminded urbanites of, is the routine requirement for economic activity. You’ve got to work, basically. And if you can’t find paid work that you’re qualified for or able to do, or you’re discriminated against because of a recognised, not valued identity, or because of ill health, or because you’re doing upaid work looking after someone else, or because you have a disability, well, all those things shape your urban rhythms too.

So while Dodo are, we think, interested in flexibility from the point of view of making life for ordinary people better and, in the process, of saving the planet (they are, after all, an environmental NGO) the headlines are about the cost of globalization to those needs: the employer in the food sector is requiring more flexibility from the workforce. From The Usual today:

Elintarviketeollisuuden mukaan tuonnin kasvaessa ja kauppojen aukiolon laajetessa yritykset tarvitsevat joustavuutta työaikojen järjestelyyn: työ on tehtävä silloin kun sitä on. [according to the food industry as imports grow and shop opening hours are extended, enterprises need flexibility in organising work shifts: the work has to be done when it’s available]

So, will the Dodo folks pick up on the fact that the law was changed only a few months ago to allow for longer opening hours, and thus (in)advertently supporting the big chains and weakening alternatives like market halls and small shops? The new law was bemoaned then not just by religious leaders but by shop keepers, people on low salaries being drawn into ever more anti-social working hours, and types like me who just think that non-stop consuming is bad for the soul, the planet and for a decent city life. And will they be able to talk about the negatives that come with these inherently positive-sounding things like flexibility without sounding nostalgic for times that never existed or throwing out the good with the bad? Or sounding judgemental or moralising, a HUGE problem in today’s Finland, we have to note.

But clear thinking is possible, and better understanding is possible as well as desirable. I read a great article by an ‘environmental ethicist’ on something along these lines yesterday. The American Robert Kirkman writes for a journal on technology studies (that’s about all the material, physical, technical and thus seemingly less negotiable bits of the world are actually social and cultural as well), that he is interested in what people hope for, but that to find out more, he has to work out what are the:

limits on what people can see, what they can imagine, what they can want, what they can choose

and later about the fact that in our understanding of ethnics it is:

the individual who judges and acts and the individual who is to be judged. If there is anything that ethicists should learn from social scientists who engage in technology studies, it is that the efficacy of ethical action has to be understood at least partly in social terms, not just individual terms.

(Kirkman, Robert (2009) ‘At Home in the Seamless Web: Agency, Obduracy, and the Ethics of Metropolitan Growth’, Science Technology and Human Values, 2009; 34; 234.)

I’ll leave it there except to say that Finland perhaps more than other places I know, has some very hard work to do in trying to understand that ethics and civil life are fundamentally, utterly, irreducibly social. In fact, Finland could do with a concerted effort to create something like a metropolitan ethics – in all its dimensions!

Dodo – a healthy dose of humanism

Narrator: Did you know that the Finnish Association of Architects or SAFA gave out its annual prize for commendable sustainable architecture today? It didn’t go to architects but to the “small but peppery” (pieni mutta pippurinen and that’s a quote from the press release) environmental organisation, Dodo. Gratifying to see that YLE reported it too.

Protagonist: Dodo? Those the guys who did that urban gueriilla gardening last summer?

N: The very same. The committee commended Dodo for its work

Dodo on tuonut tervehdyttävän humanistisen vireen teknisesti painottuneeseen keskusteluun ja avannut uusia näkymiä kaupunkisuunnitteluun,

or, my loose translation:

Dodo has brought a healthy dose of humanism to a debate that’s often technologially biased and it has opened new perspectives on urban planning.

P: Nice to hear architects can appreciate ordinariness too. Not that guerilla gardening and the energy needed to run an organisation like Dodo are ordinary …. I’m really pleased for Dodo and for Safa.

N: You don’t look so happy though.

P:  I’m pondering what’s going on with Architecture, capital A, in Finland. It used to be that it went with the grain, the environment. But now it’s full of this iconic stuff, being bold, and making a statement, not being content with the ordinary. The latest conversations about this are around the question of how to use up the space in Töölö Bay, where should they put a new library, one to catch the attention of the whole of Europe. Big, eye-catching and expensive, or something else? And if it’s not iconic, it doesn’t care about or recognise specifics, like the fact that Finland is in the north, the seasons are really different, and that if you have restaurant or cafe seating outside you want it in the sunshine, otherwise you need to produce the weather too.

N: Designer sunshine? You’re not talking about the plans for the Senate Square by any chance are you?

P: Among other crimes, yes. They’ll have to use those awful gas heaters at the very least. Yeuch. But hey, that’s a relatively small crime. It’s the expensive, difficult-to-manage massive and eye-catching stuff that Helsinki has so far been blessedly free from that’s the real problem.

N: As you’ve been pointing out on this blog. But hey, isn’t that the standard these days? Isn’t everyone aiming to make a grand statement with buildings now? Architecture IS starchitecture – otherwise it’s just a bicycle shed – or whatever.

P: Maybe. Still, London’s Design Museum has two great exhibitions at the moment that praise the small, respecful and still breathtakingly beautiful. They seem to start from the premise that actually we’re in an age of austerity now and better live with it. One of them is on Dieter Rams, the industrial designer whose Braun electrical goods are on show – and if like me you were a kid in the 1970s, you’ll recognise from your childhood kitchen. Seems to me he could have been a Finn. His approach chimes with what I do think is, or was, a widespread view in Finland, that design is better when it doesn’t shout. And perhaps that architecture is better when it goes about giving pleasure, shelter and form without screaming about it. And when it functions. Less is more…

N: And the other exhibition is about David Chipperfield?

P: Yes. Beautiful stuff.

N: Does it have anything to do with Helsinki?

P: Not really. It just reminded me of the potential of quiet, thoughtful  architecture, David Chipperfield, that is. Quite different from what we’ve had on earlier posts on Designer hotels in the shape of the design of the Swiss flag. More the kind of stuff that would enhance the natural cycles and human pleasures that Helsinki still has to offer. And by the way, it’s cycles and pleasures that Dodo are all about.