Mini tattoo

It’s a tattoo.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a tattoo is:

Mil. A signal made, by beat of drum or bugle call, in the evening, for soldiers to repair to their quarters in garrison or tents in camp.

And

A military entertainment consisting of an elaboration of the tattoo by extra music and performance of exercises by troops, generally at night and by torch or other artificial light. (So G. zapfenstreich.)

Today the Hamina Tattoo arrived in Helsinki, advertising the longer event taking place in the coastal military town (which also has considerable architectural charms). The “mini-tattoo” enlivened Helsinki’s spacious Senate Square and entertained not just the thousands who listened over the hour, but quite a few others I’d guess. Hey, it’s military music after all.

On YLE’s trusty website there’s more. And You Tube is, well, awash with synchronised sward-twirling (like a (mostly) boys’ version of cheer-leading as it were…) as well as music making. This one comes courtesy of Finland’s young army conscripts.

But for me, when they started playing Andean panpipes (or whatever) like the ones that used to ring out across the road from Stockmanns, I headed for the University Library. Still, I shouldn’t judge on such subjective grounds. Combining pan-pipes and military marches is perhaps an innovation of a standard urban, port-city kind, which adopts and adapts the repertoires and skills of new arrivals to create freshness.

And great to see the Senate Square in good use and nice to see a crowd that was made up of people of all ages. (Note to self, post something about the relative absence of older people on streets – or is it just where I hang out?)

It’s doubtful anyone was there who remembers the Square as a Russian Imperial place. It is, however, quite possible that some of the folks out today once saw Mannerheim the war hero here. He paraded in the Senate Square several times after all. A few might have heard and seen the Red Army Chorus and the Leningrad Cowboys build bridges via The Total Balalaika Show in 1993. And it’s possible that many know the square as a place you can cross at any time of day or night, winter, spring and summer (maybe even autumn) feeling safe and even happy in the heart of a great city and the embrace of complex history.

Then I heard the Tattooers play some Earth Wind and Fire …

Long live the Senate Square! Long live history! Long live change!

“Aleksanterinkatu to be torn up again”

Nobody likes their street being ripped up. Nobody, except a speculative investor with a certain amount of confidence, likes renovations or maintenance to disrupt normal service.

Well – we here at JHJ don’t know if it’s good news or bad news. The Paper (new readers unfamiliar with our patois should be told that this and The Usual, Pravda and similar monikers refers to Helsingin Sanomat) in this country comes out in the wee hours and gets delivered to your doorstep. (Unless you opted for the Centre Partyist’s favoured mode of habitation in which case you have to trudge knee-deep in fresh snow to get it out of the post-box). Actually, it’s just as easy to read online if you subscribe, and even if you don’t you get some stuff.

Interestingly, this morning’s issue was able to report that

Aleksanterinkadun raiteet siirretään nykyistä hieman pohjoisemmiksi, ja pohjoinen jalkakäytävä kavennetaan 3,5 metriseksi. Käytännössä tämä tarkoittaa Aleksanterinkadun rakentamista kokonaan uudelleen katulämmityksineen, raitiovaunupysäkkeineen ja kivetyksineen.

Which is to say:

The tram lines on Aleksanterinkatu are to be moved slightly northwards and the pavement to the north of them to be narrowed to 3,5 metres. In practice this means a total rebuilding of A.katu with its street heating, tram stops and paving.

Besides noting the budgeted cost of this, 14 892 00 euros (we believe they mean to add a zero, making it 14 892 000), it says pretty much nothing – nothing about the plans to revitalise the old partly vacant buildings in the area, (and so risk killing off the remaining vestiges of small-scale or non-commercial activity) nothing about the hassle caused to the tram network of the entire city, nothing about the damage to the historic shape of the square not to mention nothing about the heavy-handed and homogenising handiwork of the brand-consultants whose gentrifying efforts were quietly and outrageously passed by the Planning Committee before Christmas.

What, you might be thinking, did we expect.

Well, we were not expecting the news to break when the meeting of the Planning Committee had not yet even taken place. That was scheduled for 15.00 today, 25.2.2010. Accessed on this same day at 22.50, we find it’s still there but of course the minutes aren’t. So we can assume that the machinations of city government and planning continue on their merry way behind closed doors in the usual cabinets. Except we have been startled by the difficulties that Helsinki seems to have in deliberating about the future of shared and valuable assets. (Oh, and by the way, the City Board is supposed to OK these kinds of things before they are considered policy. I guess it’s called rubber stamping to distinguish it from serving the citizens.)

Has Helsinki always been run like this? In the wake of not just this example of anti-democratic (as well as uncivilized – but that’s a slightly more subjective view point so we put it in brackets) decision making but with Katajanokka’s designer hotel debacle fresh in our minds, and the ugly spectre of Sipoo becoming Helsinki too, to be governed from afar. We wonder. We wonder.

Meanwhile property owners and building managers in this part of the world are having to cope with more snow than has been seen here since 1941. The media is full of pictures of snow on roofs, on trucks, cars, anything and everything, and of stories of why, how, by whom, how not and by whom not to get excess snow off your roof before it either collapses or causes damage. Drains in the mean time are being steamed off to stave off disaster, as here in Hallituskatu a few days ago.

I wish I could say my concerns about the Senate Square are just so much hot air. I fear a battle may be in the offing. Even more I fear that I will have to work out whether or not my stand on it will make me a snob. And then I’ll have to work out whether or not that bothers me. All things considered, that’s a minor concern compared to ripping up everybody’s history in the most literal possible way.

Desktop post on national symbols

Monday was the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s attack on Finland which precicipated the hugely significant Winter War. In honour of it we are getting Mannerheim tat – in shops, from chuggers, all over the media. Here’s a photo of the war hero. He was born into a Swedish speaking family, became an officer in the Tsar’s army and, in the impressive list of his linguistic competencies, Finnish came very low indeed.

At the time of the Winter War Helsinki wasn’t the capital of a Nokia-land and it didn’t have an NIS (National Innovation System). It was a Forest State under the presidentship of Kyösti Kallio, an agrarian liberal centrist (as I understand). Finland was a rural country then, Helsinki was small, but the Forest Building (Unioninkatu 40 B) was large. In those days it was definitely not painted white.

Since we cannot bring ourselves to photograph the shop displays groaning under blue and white tat in anticipation of Independence Day (people would think I was being a snob doing that), here’s a shot of another way of showing you’re a patriot.

The thing in relation to planning and architecture is that it matters what kind of political regime the city is built by. Helsinki reflects a history that’s quite easy to live with. A few images of cities, past and present, come to mind that are in stark contrast to Helsinki: mad townscapes built either by totalitarian regimes or out-of-control numbers of hopeful land-grabbers. Symbolic that too.

Does Helsinki’s Sanomat make Helsinki’s Public?

People I know boycott Helsingin Sanomat for all sorts of reasons. But it’s been the mouthpiece of the mainstream for 120 years, even back when Uusi Suomi came out in print and other papers were still going strong. Because it’s big it’s bound to be in the firing line, but its current editorial don’t mind. The flak comes indiscriminately from all directions. But HS certainly has power and one has to approach it with due caution (not least its infuriating habit of gratuitous if apparently well-meaning racial and ethnic stereotyping) but the writing is quality stuff.

Now, the anthropological point: it’s created a public, a Finnish public, or a Finnish-reading public. Benedict Anderson launched this idea in a book published in 1983, The Imagined Community. The argument is more or less that newspapers and novels (literacy) brought people together from widely dispersed areas and made them feel part of a larger whole than had ever previously been possible. By reading, people participated in an imagined or virtual community that went far beyond their village and even beyond the regional baron who taxed them. Writing also standardised the way people spoke and fostered homogeneity across space. Gradually this product of imagination, the nation, became hugely important even though individuals would never, ever be able to meet most of their compatriots. Of course, nations were also made concrete in things like Parliament buildings or National Banks (above right).

But who could deny that HS helped create Finland’s “imagined community” as it still does? Today this (right) popped onto our doormats, with invented headlines such as “Electric Light”, “Narinkka Square’s outlaws: do civic rights extend to Jews?” and other thoughts pertinent to 2009’s readership.

Back then to Helsinki. A homogenous town? Not in 1870 when 1/5 of its population spoke something other than Finnish as their first language.

So who Helsinki’s public might be has changed over the decades. In the 19^th century it included people who spoke Russian, Swedish, German and Yiddish, Roma and Tatar etc. Under Russification policies (late 19th century) Helsinki started to notice language more, and speaking Finnish, and to some extent Swedish, became a way to make a political point. Before and after independence, it seems Helsinki’s residents were comfortable with what today we’d call multiple identities. Speaking one language at work, another in bed, or praising God on a Friday, a Saturday or a Sunday. To be able to continue to do that in Finland, Jewish Finns fought alongside (and in command of) German soldiers in the second world war.

One can’t help thinking that a city’s cemeteries say something about its cosmpolitanism. Here, Russian orthodox graves in Hietaniemi.

But after the war cultural difference gradually became less apparent and less tolerated. Some say Finland became the most ethnically homogenous country in Europe after Albania. And yet, as singer and author M.A. Numminen has written, in the 1960s it went without saying in some Finnish circles that one spoke at least Swedish, English and German. Maybe French and Spanish too.

But undeniably sameness became a virtue in the post-war decades. With the IT revolution, publics fragmented again, geographic and virtual communities regrouped and Helsinki’s 2 Chinese restaurants became hundreds of “ethnic” eateries. Not everyone liked this. By the end of the twentieth century there were those, especially in rural areas, who felt that Helsinki had gone off on its own route, leaving the rest of the country behind. Some people even talked as if Helsinki were literally moving “into Europe”. As this week’s pilot strike demonstrated, it’s still up here on its old co-ordinates.

What could be changing is that tolerance will have to go back on the menu. Cultural difference and racism are routinely debated on the pages of HS. Another change is that the bulk of Helsinki’s population feels thoroughly at home here. In 1900 the city was cosmopolitan but it was tiny, and the group of people whose families went back generations was even tinier. In 2009 “barefoot” (born and raised here) Helsinkians are a bigger proportion of its residents and, I hope, for that more at home with strangers.