Mad, bad, and sad – just a road in Pasila

Dear reader,

Do you recall JHJ getting rather hot under the collar about the comprehension-defying prospect of a new major road flooding Helsinki’s lovely peninsula with ever more cars? About a year ago on this very blog?

Driving a massive road through an as-yet-unbuilt residential area is crazy on any number of grounds. Articulate critical voices in the blogosphere and even, amazingly, on the letters page of Helsingin Sanomat on 16.4.2013 have made that much clear.

Blog posts today, e.g. here and here, indicate that friends of progressive transport planning in Helsinki are simply dumbfounded.

Trailing behind everyone else once again, Helsinki is about to build a brand new road including an enormous underpass. Nothing of this scale exists here yet.

Where such massive underpasses for cars do exist, they tend to be liked by drivers (from other places) in a hurry. Most other people fear and loathe them. Some cities are turning them back into useful spaces for real people, reconnecting neighbourhoods that were earlier disconnected by … er… roads like the proposed Veturitie.

And this also feels like a grim day for democracy in Helsinki. As massive a road as this in this place, with its patchwork of land ownership, and with the superlative-defying monetary, spatial and human resources that are being poured into the vast “regeneration exercise” of which it is a part, must have been pushed through the system (even in as complacent a city as Helsinki) by dedicated and big-stakes behind-the-scenes horsetrading.

Unfortunately, unlike at, say King’s Cross in London, where local residents took up arms and waged battles for years and years, here Helsinki’s planners and politicians are in the fortunate position (disastrous for future generations as it may be) of working in an area that is almost tabula rasa.

Mad, bad and sad.

 

Day days

“Dayday is a day when anyone can create a day for a day”.

It was only a matter of time before some joker posted this one on facebook. Not least because last weekend’s effort at another “day” in Helsinki, certainly in Töölö, felt a bit contrived. Cleaning day is nice but it’s nice too to walk in the park, take the boat out, head out to the mökki.

Seems some Helsinkians are exhausted after a summer of running from one pop-up event to another. Perhaps they’re even wondering why they’ve turned into producers as well as consumers, prosumers, of urban culture.

We now create our own “content”, we even take part in  planning [can we check this? Ed], and we are told to set up our own businesses rather than relax lazily into lifetime jobs.

Yet it’s a stretch just to get the kids to school and find time to talk to the spouse – though Finns do work shorter hours than most. Still, we can forget the lazy Sunday afternoon – those over-equipped little leagues filled that slot long ago.

So it might be time that that the experts who get paid for their trouble took a bit more seriously their role in “content creation”.

Sure, we like public participation though it has its troubles. But we still/also have some seriously crap planning. Regular readers, and anyone with an interest in Helsinki’s construction projects, know this.

The latest bit of annoying planning in Helsinki concerns the railway warehouse in Vallila/Pasila. Though it’s nice that the interesting building is to remain intact externally.

And it’s nice that the Teollisuuskatu area – which is in danger of becoming a strip-mall-type insertion into the otherwise liveable (but only after popular struggle!) urban surroundings of wooden Vallila and properly dense Kallio – will become a place of work as well as of sleep.

It seems the “choice raisin in the bun” is to be carved out of the wider former railway lands and given (almost) away by VR in unceremonious haste, when a better negotiated and more encompassing planning deal or masterplan would surely be worth it and possible.

OK, many of us are upset because this means that the one genuinely multicultural venue near central Helsinki, Valtteri’s flea-market, will have to go. Why couldn’t the entire area be developed into a mix of homes, workplaces and a fleamarket that attracts a solid crowd three days a week?

It’s not too late to comment on the plans. (Visit the usual site and scroll down to Aleksis Kiven katu). But it would have been good to get in there earlier. Maybe we’ve just been too busy doing day-days to notice what’s being done in our name.

Pierre Huyghe. Streamside Day – One Year Celebration. Contemporary Art Collection ”la Caixa” Foundation. CaixaForum Barcelona

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.

Waiting for good news

JHJ cannot avoid adding a post-script to yesterday’s post.

Helsinkians are still mired in the good news from the Guggenheim and the City Art Museum (e.g. the foundation’s promises to offer Finnish artists access to international networks) but also the bad (e.g. that Helsinki’s art world risks being smothered in the embrace of a global franchise).

Worse still, we have stumbled upon words on the G that make the stomach churn: resentful commentary laced with the racist bile which, in today’s Finnish political discourse, is always but a few clicks away.

Facts have been one of the casualties of the week’s debate. Is JGKS to go on holiday? Or is he not? Has the announcement about staff restructuring at the Art Museum come as a surprise, or has it come too late? Yesterday the Museum published corrections to recent misinformation on its website.

So today? A suggestion in a letter to an editor somewhere near us, to increase the floorspace to be constructed at Töölönlahti on land owned by the city. This would easily give the city the millions it needs to make a Katajanokka Guggenheim happen.

Heck, there we were thinking someone was suggesting a site for an art museum by Töölönlahti, obviously one that would grow organically out of local ground. Oh well, sometimes these emeritus professors of architecture seem a bit old-fashioned…

… about as progressive as those Helsinki transport administrators looking to revamp parking norms (a pet topic here at JHJ). Gloopy globules of green rhetoric notwithstanding, the city’s proposals are not aimed at reducing overall car densities on our ever more cramped peninsula.

Rather than setting upper limits on parking, Helsinki continues the trend it set in the 1960s of setting a lower limit. Marvellous. (Decisions deferred to the end of this month).

Next time I post it’ll be good news.

In anticipation, here’s a picture of a forest. Remember, Sibelius himself said that a person should live either in a big city or in the forest.

Changing tempos

Latin languages treat time and weather as the same thing. At least they are given the same word (temps, tempo). Such usage presumably once captured a sense of cosmic order as reflected in a cyclical pattern of weather. Much like the last couple of years of JHJ’s blogging, where, to our surprise, “weather” was a very frequently used tag.

The beautiful colours of autumn 2009, the great snow of 2010 followed by the great heat of the summer of that same year. Then there was the even greater snow of 2011 and the almost equally amazingly warm and wonderful heat of the long summer of 2011. And then, from around early November, it’s been c**p.

We do not believe in retribution by weather gods or any other kind, but this feels uncannily like payback time.

But it also makes one think back to say, 15-20 years ago. Today’s 26 metre per second (in a snowless/cheerless) December was something I imagined happening in decades to come if the political powers didn’t do something drastic. Ho, ho, ho, I’d never have believe a Durban would be possible in those youthful days.

Now I know that the closer you get the poles the more you notice the changes in the climate. Alas, proof of the matter is undoubtedly going to remain as elusive as the mystery of the Makasiinit. And so columnists and irritating people will keep bleating on about how anthropogenic climate change is just an international conspiracy.

The relevance?

Many of us Helsinkians have left the city in search of a traditional christmas (snow). Some are already heading back into town to escape the power cuts, fallen trees and other emergency situations that the miserable mostly snowless weather conditions are offering.

(Below a real-time map of all the places the emergency services have been busy today. Notice the icon for a fallen spruce.)

It all seems to fit the mood this christmas. World = bad. Friends and people I know = good.

Must get out. Going stir crazy here!

Keep calm!

It matters whether a cargo ship is carrying explosive devices known as Patriot missiles or explosive devices soon to be deployed at a party near you. (Just as it matters what role the Guggenheim franchise should have in our fair city’s future.)

So it’s hardly surprising that Finland’s biggest news story in the run-up to Christmas is the saga of the Thor Liberty. It features not just the longest storm in living memory to batter southern Finland, but also a heroic pilot-boat crew and a cargo-full of misnamed explosives. It appears that the story pivots around the difficulty of translating the Finnish word “räjähde”.

But we here at JHJ are minded to spread cheer, peace and calm. And so we’ll skip the never-ending bad news and note instead the unselfish behaviour of said pilot-boat crew and various other folks minded to help the distressed vessel (sailing, by the way, under a Manx-flag, whatever that might be).

And lest anyone should think that we here at JHJ have gone soppy (or had a bit too much glögi) we’ll share two more quick stories of goodwill from last week.

First, JHJ found herself pressed for time in this busy yet important season of loose-ends-up-tying and found herself in a taxi instead of a tram, on her way to meet aged relatives.

To her distress, after saying her goodbyes, she noticed her woolly hat was nowhere to be found. (And this after losing another one and then finding out about the 4.50€ it costs to track it down via HSL lost property.)

Heading out into the black, wet night of this December, JHJ remembered that unusually, she had taken the credit-card receipt on exiting the cab. Perhaps her dear beanie was on the floor of the taxi! With a quick phone call, she tracked down the owner of the taxi company. Her beanie was alive and no longer on the floor of the taxi.

The owner of the taxi (not the same guy as the driver, interestingly) volunteered to drop off the hat then and there. Alas at this point, JHJ was almost at the tram heading in a not-so-mutually-convenient direction. OK, we agreed, we have each other’s phone numbers, we’ll sort something out within Helsinki’s centre a.k.a. Kantakaupunki over the next few days.

To cut a long story short, the taxi driver – a funny man with a sideline in theatre and a nice wife – sent me a text message with the wife’s phone number and… four days later I got my hat back together with a nice smile and wishes for a good holiday season.

The story had a little bonus too. The couple live in Kallio where, as I am beginning to discover, a Helsinkian can find a number of good things, like garam masala, much more easily than in many other parts of our dear city.

Fast forward to the JHJ not-quite-annual Christmas trip to somewhere with snow almost guaranteed.

This is not that easy when one relies on public transport. But it can be done.

On picking up the keys to our cabin for the week we discover with Mr JHJ that we still, after a long day’s train and coach journey, have 500m to walk up hill. This means pulling heavy suitcases behind us. On wheels.

Now the invention of the wheel obviously did great things for (wo)mankind, but up here in the north the runner must have been just as important. What bliss to pull the cases up on a toboggan!

Until – crash! One bag fell off in the curve just as… a pair of headlights loomed up towards up from up the hill. Yikes!!! And it stopped – no doubt to hurl abuse at us for cluttering the roadway with our bags!

But no. Yet another good-hearted soul. It was driving the “courtesy car” (van) of the small company that runs this cabin. “You the folks who emailed about where the coach stop is?” he asked. And he gave us a lift (it was only another 300m but it was worth it!).

So, while all around is madness, people are still lovely.

Happy Christmas.

Or whatever your tipple might be!

Stains on Public Space

The text is just a fragment, but is it a stain on public space? Is its author perhaps achieving something by making us think again about the (missing) text? (more than who…?)

It made us smile at least.

And last summer there was a whole poem of similar texts sprayed on the asphalt paths around Töölö Bay and over the railway to Kallio.

Young author (that’s official) Alexandra Salmela contemplates what really should constitute rubbish in a city centre.

We doubt she has ever stumbled on the diatribes on Kamppi or other rants on this blog. But her short column in today’s paper the pay-to-view version of the Usual  is enough to make one curious about what other intelligent things she might have to say. More books for the pile, alas.

She starts by noting how ugly is the painted white smear on a wall near her home (in Helsinki, presumably). Until recently the wall had a bit of text, graffiti left there by someone. Now silenced by an ugly block of paint.

Salmela then goes on to note that today’s urbanites have an odd sense of perception and an even odder sense of moral indignation.

Kadulla kulkija ei enää edes huomaa rakennuksen kokoista mainosta, mutta pieni kirjoitus harmaassa muurissa tai maalaus sillan alla aiheuttaa hänelle mielipahaa.

which is to say:

Someone walking on the street no longer even registers an ad the size of a building, but a little text on a grey wall or a painting under a bridge causes them upset.

Unfortunately I have no pictures currently to share with you of the communications left out there by subtle poets in knitted wool. Keeping our eyes peeled while we wait for some real cold.

(A few degrees below zero with some sunshine would not go amiss in these dark days. I read a headline that said this “warm” weather is likely to go on into February. Yeuch!)

Horns in Helsinki

Miserable weather, early evenings. Bike lights, umbrellas and all manner of other prosthetic devices are required to make life palatable at these weird (p)latitudes. That’s life in Helsinki towards the end of September for you.

So it was with definite delight that JHJ’s editorial team wended its way through car-free-day, did a detour via the Gallen-Kallela exhibition just opened at Helsinki City Art Museum, talked about the live gigs by Club for Five, bemoaned that we’d not had time for Openhouse Helsinki (hölynpöly made it seem so interesting) cursed that we weren’t available for HIFF/Love & Anarchy, and generally found the day to include way too few hours …

Finally we found ourselves in the embrace of one of Helsinki’s more loveable bar chains, William K, the Lasipalatsi one to be exact, only to discover that five horns make quite a nice sound. On enquiring why we were being treated to this extention of Finland’s love-affair with classical music the answer was delivered with the usual William K smile: Oktoberfest.

Of course.

We apologise massively for the rubbish quality of the photograph and for the fact that there is barely a word relating to architecture or planning on this post.

Unless it should suffice to note that it’s rather quaint (if little more) how the old indoor tennis hall has found a new lease of life as a movie theatre (cinema if you prefer) and exhibition space.

Why not? As marvellous as functionalist architecture was (ahhh, finnish funkkis), there really is no excuse any more to use a building only for the purposes it was designed for. Tennis palace becomes art and entertainment palace.

With a similar show of funkkis that could be flexible, the Kone offices in Munkkiniemi are to become flats/apartments. And not a wink too soon! All you enthusiastic if still potential competition entrants: here’s the brief!

Past imperfect and future dogmatic

This is not a blog post about Finnish grammar.

Nor is it a post about the Guggenheim feasibility study which is drawing such impassioned commentary in the blogosphere. It is also not a post about the rather ignorable building pictured below. (The photo is from 2009, when the potential costs of archictectural globalization first really got to us here on this blog).

It is a blog post about words and how they are used.

As Arkkivahti notes, there are many people who are sceptical but not against the Guggenheim scheme. JHJ would like to add that though Helsinki has a glorious past it was never perfect – it can always do with some additional beauty!

The odd thing now is that we know very little about the Guggenheim scheme feasibility study. Nevertheless, there are plenty of words in circulation that might make you think that a branch of the Guggenheim’s expanding family of art museums was about to open in Helsinki.

Recently we were surprised to read an article about the feasibility study in The Usual. Baffled, rather. We had, of course, noted that the Foundation have been positive about the idea of gracing Helsinki with their brand. But JHJ had not however been aware that a decision to build had been made. And so it was that this kind of language in the paper sparked a double-take:

Guggenheimin museon voi hyvin rakentaa Katajanokalle

Rakennuksen alle tehdään vesitiivis patoseinä, joka ankkuroidaan peruskallioon 15 metrin syvyyteen. Suurilta lisäkustannuksilta vältytään.

Or, as is customary on this blog, in our own translation:

The Guggenheim museum can easily be built in Katajanokka

A water-tight barrier wall will be constructed below the building and anchored in the rock at 15 metre’s depth. This will avoid substantial extra costs.

We were not aware that a decision had yet been made to bring the G. to Helsinki, that a preferred location had been chosen by the G. and ratified by Helsinki. Nor had we kept abreast of the “debate” of which the peculiar-looking headline was a small part. Hence the raised eyebrow.

But then The Usual frequently reports stories as if they had happened already (in some cases just cutting and pasting the press release as is…). One day it reported that Mayor Jussi Pajunen was confident that the G. would come and would bring megabucks in its wake. Once this had been reported, this reporting itself became news. A careless reader might have suspected that national broadcaster YLE were saying that the G would come and it would be ready in 2018.

This kind of language is not quite the same thing as another interesting feature of contemporary political rhetoric, what Stefan Collini calls the “dogmatic future” tense. His wonderfully fluent, perceptive and empirically supported essay in the London Review of Books Vol.33(16) he considers the prose that makes it appear as if consumerist metrics were the best way to assess everything.

… official discourse has become increasingly colonised by an economistic idiom, which is derived not strictly from economic theory proper, but rahter fromthe language of management schools, business consultants and financial journalism. British society has been subject to a deliberate campaign, initiated in free-market think tanks in the 1960s and 1970s and pushed strongly by business leaders and right-wing commentators ever since, to elevate the status of business and commerce and to make ‘contributing to economic growth’ the overriding goal of a whole swathe of social, cultural and intellectual activities which had previously been understood and valued in other terms

Effectively, we end up (and not just in Britain) with a kind of consumerist relativism. What is not, however, relative, is the injunction to imagine everything as part of a ‘market’ transaction.

Collini also mentions the ‘mission-statement present’ as another aspect of this already killing Newspeak. The mission-statement present disguises “implausible non sequiturs as universally acknowledged general truths” (Collini’s words) such as “if you pay for it you value it”, “choice is an obvious good”, “privatising businesses enhances everything” (examples by JHJ).

So back to Finland. Beware, users of the rather lovely but increasingly erratically performing national rail service, VR!

Future dogma = privative, privatise, privatise!

The Usual (not the online version) reports that Tatu Rauhamaki, the conservative politician at the helm of Helsinki’s regional transport, believes that simply privatising the railways would fix the ongoing problems. This, as anyone with a smidgen of critical acumen, is the most elementary form of the future dogmatic. But he backs it up with a bit of comparative pseudo-economese:

Siitä on hyviä kokemuksia esimerkiksi Ruotsista ja Britanniasta: vuorotarjontaa ja sitä mukaa matkustajia on tullut lisää.

or:

For instance Sweden and Britain have had good experiences of this: more choice of routes and with it more passengers.

Er … has he actually used Swedish or British trains recently? Or followed the news about them? Then he’d know that they are extraordinarily expensive to run compared to ones that are state-owned.

Alas, we Finns are terribly susceptible to international fashions. Particularly if they have a whiff of the anti-communist about them.

Let’s not worry, it’s just a protest

If you’ve not heard yet, the political landscape of Finland changed a couple of days ago. The streetscape is bound to follow. But rather than dwell on this, we’ll bring you tales of other protests. You see, the far-right populists, the Basic Finns, may not be much more than a bunch of discontents with a mix of socialist and nationalist policies who aren’t happy with globalisation. Many commentators hope the whole result will just implode into its own pointlessness. For thoughtful commentary here’s a link to an insider’s view and here’s one to a sympathetic outsider’s view.

The Basics didn’t win that many of their landslide seats in Helsinki anyway. The protest was based elsewhere. But folks in Helsinki are also ready and willing to protest.

Over this (pictured last June).

First, someone tripped over a hose pipe and insisted that this non-architecture, non-consensus, non-Finnish piece of urban life be put down. Well, before that, on Monday, someone else had insisted that mobile cafes are not for Helsinki. Still, high-profile proponents came to the rescue and helped Finns Protest against the silly decision. Perhaps protest, one way or another (against the hose? against zealous building-regs administrators?) will keep things in Helsinki going in interesting directions.

Meanwhile, a lovely blog about a lovely gem near cafe Tyyni which, hopefully, will be saved by an online petition. It’s in a park considered by the City to require desperate and extensive upgrading, I could protest about that too.