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.

Recycled and borrowed

Saturday, chilly as it was, proved once again that Helsinkians have become avid urban event-goers. Street parties and occupy rallies jostled in relative comfort with the city’s own recycling vans. They were dotted around the city making it easy for us lazy folks to send our e-waste and other dust-gathering junk on its way somewhere else. It was Cleaning Day.

Meanwhile JHJ is a little tired of all the bad news relating to the city’s built environment. The work of previous generations, congealed into the Helsinki we love and inhabit, still delights and inspires.

But the pipeline with its 21st-century architecture is something else entirely. Perhaps Maria Kaika is right, the best adjective to describe today’s architecture is autistic. (Though I don’t know what autistic folks would say about that).

Fortunately, however, there are others in our fair city who aren’t just trying to do their bit to ensure as good a future as possible. They are even writing about it, and sometimes in English. There is, for example, some info on Meri Rastila, another area that Helsinki’s decision makers could plan with wisdom and foresight. Alas, as Tristan Hughes of the OurCity alternative masterplan team notes, once again

the city is missing a prime opportunity to design a part of the city according to the unique needs of and in direct cooperation with the residents who live there. I also feel that once again the city is destroying one of the key elements within its borders that makes Helsinki unique, its natural green/forested areas, and instead have decided to take the easy path, of corporate profit and simple construction strategies, based on outdated ideals.

Ah yes, as with the Pasila highway or, say, with the way it’s plopping thousands of units of effectively speculative development along Helsinki’s waterfront, our city is actually recycling crappy planning ideas that less peripheral places have long been trying to fix.

Enjoy the sunshine – it’s still beautiful out there.

Worst Planning Since the 1960s

A slow Saturday has left us with a few moments to spare. This is unusual here at what was once JHJ’s bustling editorial office, but has since been turned over to better remunerated pursuits. But since the Helsinki pipeline seems to have become so full of sewage, though it’s upsetting, we thought we’d use these precious minutes to blog about it.

Pasila. Back in the 1960s this was a hilly, leafy and mainly working-class residential neighbourhood, as the YLE film maker says, “in the heart” of Helsinki. Land in “the heart” of a capital being economically interesting, the whole was creatively destroyed in the early 1970s. The extent of the demolition and the totality of the transformation of “Wood Pasila” into the “West Pasila” that we now now, has taken some getting used to.

As painful as it was, some have become used to the big boxes that we now have, both for going to work and living in. It’s a shame about the anti-human and anti-local traffic “solution” of Hakamäentie, which cuts West Pasila off from any possible links to the north, but the Keskuspuisto (Central park…) to its west is well loved and used.

Across the railway to the east there is Itä Pasila. Unkind voices have dubbed this the Croydon of Helsinki, perhaps because it does look a bit like the bastard offspring of Corbusian planning and 1980s bathroom design (turned inside out, as was the trend). Then again, over the years, the boxes that line its big roads have attracted and built up more interesting life (and activists with designerly habits).

If you look on the googmap of the area you can see that the space left by the gradually abandoned railway is a fabulous opportunity for healing. And there are residents and creative types already in the old low-rise buildings of the railway era, making a better future from the ground up through urban gardening and stuff. For these and zillions of other reasons, Pasila could become the project to stop Helsinki from wasting its effort and shoreline by building into the Baltic.

So what does the Planning Department propose? Driving a highway through it. Oh, and plonking those ten (ugly) high-rises we already knew about, around it whose chances of nurturing vibrancy are zero. No wonder, as rumour has it, the plans currently under consultation were recently described by an overseas visitor as the worst planning he’d come across since the 1960s.

Possibly good news

It may be good news, we will post it anyway.

The unseemly rush with which Helsinki’s local elected politicians had been asked to decide on whether or not a Guggenheim franchise should or should not grace the Baltic’s Daughter’s waterfront, has been somewhat calmed. Almost a whole extra month has been granted to our councillors to reassess the proposals, as YLE reports. With any luck this will help them to familiarise themselves with what they are actually deciding on.

Culture(-and-basketball) Minister Paavo Arhinmäki reminds us that no money is forthcoming from the state and tells us that he reckons the Guggenheim brand is not worth what Helsinki is being asked to pay for it. Mr Pajunen does not like all this, but unlike poor JGKS who has to run an art museum in the sweet smell of popcorn in the Tennis Palace, it’s still unclear why Pajunen should be so gung-ho about the scheme in the first place.

But some parallels do suggest themselves.

Doc Point’s documentary film festival is enlightening Helsinki audiences about the bluff and bluster of foreign investors (Trump for one), who offer to develop beautiful environments in the name of progress and er… Apologies, I digress.

More bad news, alas, related to foreign investors and really big money in urban development. A friend reports that there are many self-styled progressives (Greens to be precise) who think it would be right to build a 33-storey hotel (which was initially given planning permission at a measly 16 storeys), a new “landmark” in Jätkäsaari. The location is effectively within the little peninsula that forms the core of our elegant city. There goes our silhouette and, with it, our uniqueness.

Wonder what other dreams there are among Helsinkians other than these dreams of high buildings and, well, whatever it is that the Helsinki Guggenheim represents? A fabulously unique new public library maybe? Or one that looks like it was created on a computer like computer-generated environments everywhere else?

p.s. check out some wonderful and wonderfully subtly titled photographs at learning to see Helsinki.

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.

Exhausting and frustrating

Many of us consider tweeting and hanging out on facebook to be work, and for most Finns at least, reading a newspaper, on-line or on-paper, is second nature. (At least it was until Helsingin Sanomat began so unashamedly to do politics that many people have stopped following it).

But at times like these, a news blackout would be bliss. Keeping up is exhausting and frustrating!

The troublesome G-issue just will not go away. Until it does, anyone who cares about the future of Helsinki, particularly Katajanokka and the South Harbour, won’t sleep too soundly.

The last few days have been a circus of news, opinion pieces, letters to editors, fb-updates and spoofs that, despite their number and their often colourful language, possibly fail to do justice to what is going on.

Many a man with power really, really wants Helsinki to collaborate with the New York based Guggenheim bränd. Day by day Helsinkians become more wary, while proponents’ arguments become more pompous and over-optimistic. Alexander Stubb, the popular minister, would like to see a landmark in Helsinki to rival the Eiffel Tower… Emeritus professor Y. Sotamaa says “do not be afraid” (letter to HS editor today).

Given this I wonder how Helsinki has survived as the liveable city it has!

And I realise that were it not for active citizens, “les trente glorieuses” and the fine buildings that that period of capitalist history bequeathed to us, would long ago have been replaced by some form of neo-feudal horror. Were it not for critical thinkers, there would be urban unhappiness so startling that even the naive optimists and the cossetted rich would see it.

JHJ’s view is that unless one keeps one’s eyes closed and imagination switched off, one must know that cities are in crisis. (The brand new tome, Cities for People, Not for Profit edited by Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer looks like a good up-to-date take on this. Later…)

Selling the family jewels – e.g. handing over that plot in Katajanokka to a global franchise – is not be the answer to such crises. Besides Helsinki’s track record with making international deals is not good, as reported here, in English.

In search of alternatives, Helsinki’s Occupy camp is still there, tiny but full of sisu. When it comes to the Guggenheim, citizens are turning with anger and energy to more conventional tactics.

Using HS, a number of arts professionals have criticised the rush and warned that embracing the Guggenheim will serve neither Helsinki as a city nor Finland’s visual arts. If anyone should be a partner, why not Paris’ Louvre, asks Maritta Pitkänen 19.1.2012.

Nils Torvalds, (relation of Mr Linux) also offers sage warnings. The bafflement of the troika Rossi, Kivirinta, Johansson, arises out of impeccable (international) credentials in arts management. They note, among other things:

Museokokoelmat ovat osa kulttuurista muistia, ja on surullista huomata, miten yliolkaisesti Helsingin oman museon johto ylipäänsä suhtautuu kokoelmakysymykseen. [Museum collections are part of cultural memory, and it is sad to note how nonchalantly the leadership of Helsinki’s own museum approaches the question of collections in general.] HS 19.1.2012

If our money is spent on a Guggenheim, will cosmopolitan Finnish artists like Jorma Puranen or any of the others from the Helsinki School not face more icy prospects?

And if a global blockbuster exhibition were to come here, would it invigorate or emaciate?

But oh, if this were the only problem.

Questions about Janne Gallen-Kallela Siren’s connections to the Guggenheim’s board have been dealt with. But his leadership of the City Art Museum has taken an odd turn. According to reports he is about to go on holiday.

Also…

Before any decisions have been made in any public bodies – the Guggenheim not qualifying – the Museum’s staff have received an announcement that “yt-neuvottelut”, perhaps best translated as restructuring negotiations, are on their way. The reason given for the surprise announcement? The imminent impact of the Guggenheim!

Exhausted, frustrated – and stunned.

Visual Literacy in Helsinki’s Guggenheim project

The Guggenheim-Helsinki feasibility report and the way that Helsingin Sanomat (which this blog prefers to call The Usual and some just call Pravda) and a few other cronies have been hyping it up in the last few days has also yielded a good amount of laughs.

But presumably the Head of the Helsinki Art Museum, Janne Gallen-Kallela-Siren (JGKS), did not mean to have us all bursting at the sides when he gave yesterday’s interview to Channel 4 TV.

The interviewer asked him how he imagined the future museum. He had not, he said, thought about that.

Instead he had thought about 500 years of Gutenberg’s galaxy [sic].

The spoofs are coming thick and fast. On facebook … [but also commentary on the mainstream debate: “impossible to be critical of the G. without being written off as a pessimist … it’s promoted with the same sickly over-happy hype as innovation and the Aalto University” “is this a sick joke?”]

Many thanks to Creative Block for this visually articulate and verbally supported reaction to JGKS’s baffling show. For this weekend reality was indeed transformed, as his post notes. Apart from Creative Block’s fabulous illustration of the story, he provides a transcript.

”sitä olen ajatellut, että meillä on nyt takanamme noin 500 vuotta ns. Gutenbergin galaksia, galaksia, jossa painettu sana, kirjoitettu sana on ollut hegemoninen vallan väline. Ja me nyt tällä hetkellä seisomme visuaalisen vuosisadan kynnyksellä. Ja tämä vanha, Gutenbergin galaksi horjuu meidän ikään kuin takanamme ja jalkojemme alla … [Nyt] tarvitaan huipputoimijoita, -laitoksia, -instituutioita, -museoita, -taiteilijoita, jotka ikään kuin voivat ottaa tämän keskiön tällaisessa uudenlaisessa maailmassa, jonka me tiedämme olevan jo ympärillä, mutta jota me emme aina välttämättä osaa ikään kuin artikuloida todellisuutena.  … täytyy muistaa, että taktiikalla voitetaan taistelu, strategialla voitetaan sota. Ja strategian taustalla täytyy olla jokin päämäärä. Nyt meillä on ollut taktiikka. Meillä on strategia. Mutta meillä on ihan konkreettinen päämäärä, että jos kaikki menee kohdalleen, Suomeen, Helsinkiin nousee vuosina 2017-2018 museo, joka nousee toivottavasti maailman globaalien museoiden joukkoon.”

Basically, it’s something like that after these 500 years of the hegemony of the printed word, we’re now at the threshold of a new world. This requires new top talent, institutions, museums, artists and so on who can take centre stage in this new situation. He goes on to talk about strategy and tactics and that maybe by 2018, if all goes well, Helsinki will have a museum that will hopefully join the ranks of the globe’s finest.

Reproductions of JGKS’s own visual skills, as demonstrated last week when the report findings were presented, are also attracting a fair amount of comment.

Inspired by this story, I googled for that earlier silly picture. And found it. (Scroll down on this page for those snowball-throwing representatives of new talent.)

But I also found yet another spoof image of that attractive piece of Helsinki close to the water.

Finland’s state broadcaster, YLE, reports that there is something fishy about the way the whole feasibility study was drawn up.

JHJ asks: Should there not be transparency about who sits on what board representing whose interests, and should transparency not reach beyond Helsinki’s deputy mayor Tuula Haatainen reassuring the public that “it’s OK, we knew about it”?

Ripping off YLE’s image, we can safely conclude that in the fight between the Guggenheim and Gutenberg, all tactics are allowed and thus far there appear to be no winners.

That G-report: 200 pages of buzzwords like “deep”

The Guggenheim Foundation’s feasibility study for Helsinki is out. Its 200 pages, unsurprisingly vacuous and expensively produced as they may be, should be of interest to anyone who loves Helsinki. (Yawn – there would be better things to do…)

The G. Foundation and its Helsinki friends want the franchise here. And they have the South Harbour very much in their sights (photo below). So what are the motives, impacts and willingness to take risks (on their own behalf? on ours?) of this international institution? The report (executive summary at least) reads so much like the standard bull***t bingo that’s filled planning and urban governance bumph for 30 years, it’s hard to know.

The report’s producers apparently “worked diligently … to understand how a G Museum could benefit Finland”. There is no “center of gravity” in Helsinki’s art scene, it continues. The G thinks it can help plug this gap by offering to try to attract more tourists and expand the art market.

Ah yes. This is the world that’s been made in the last 30 years: here judgements on urban and art issues are debated in business/financial terms; the needs of tourists trump everyone else’s; luxury cars sell better than ever even as crisis reigns!

In these circumstances, perhaps it’s not that surprising that so many are so willing to sell Helsinki’s family silver (the South Harbour plus the city’s limited art funding). The Usual mostly plays cheer-leader, but the uber-respectable  Suomen Kuvalehti asked about the risks two days ago, noting that the deadline imposed on the city for deciding (February 15th!!) is far too tight. In the same rag the veteran film maker and politician Jörn Donner noted almost a year ago that the scheme is part of an unwise megalomania among decision makers.

More recently then. What are folks saying? A lot. Many are stunned (by the proposed site, the timetable, the risks, the impact on museum staff and, perhaps, visual artists). Waiting for the news to be digested, our friend Arkkivahti confines herself to very few words indeed – arrrrggggggg being the most operative one.

In a clip on YLE, artist Silja Rantanen picks up some important themes from the report. It is problematic from a moral and political point of view, she notes. It means public Finnish money bolstering US-based business.

She also does not like the way Helsinki is represented to the report’s American audience: the text is imperialist, based on a stereotype of Helsinki from the Cold War era. A G “museum” on this basis, she suggested, would turn Finnish art into an ethnographic curiosity. It might provide a set of walls for pretty random travelling artworks when what Finns deserve (our interpretation here) is stewardship, including further development, of something much more precious and locally meaningful. Rantanen sees cultural imperialism also in the way that the G offers its know-how to the Finnish (underpaid, overqualified and variously motivated) museum staff.

Indeed, although the G. report includes the deep word “deep[ly]” about twenty times, it doesn’t offer anything “solid”. Instead it promises consultation, expertise, “new ideas” [sic] …

Without the massive injection of more substantive resources, the so-called Bilbao effect that those finger-pointers above are hoping for, is never going to happen (as I noted earlier here).

Elsewhere? Angry anti-elite postings against the plans, as you’d expect, online. Interestingly, some [not “many”, Ed.] Finnish artists and gallery people (said elite?) seem quite happy with the G. concept. They talk about art as if it were for the art market.

Has neoliberalism’s love of riches sunk into those folks like a hot knife into butter? That old Fifi/Adbusters image is rather suggestive. (Helsinki slang lesson: fyrkka = money).

p.s. I muse on the possibility that living next door to the Soviet Union has left many otherwise intelligent Finns blind to salient features of left and right politics – including the possibility that the community/communism has a lot going for it, and that Finland’s proverbial equality is fast disappearing into a black hole of cosseting the already rich. Provocative thoughts from the USA 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!

But will it congeal?

This post might have been titled “becoming renderings”.

A neat play on words, we thought. “Renderings” being those shiny architectural and planning pictures spawned by entrepreneurial urban governance. And “becoming” having at least two meanings: the verb “to become” and the adjective meaning “attractive” or something. A virtual Helsinki of pretty pictures is a reality.

Many, many more of these computer-generated daydreams can be found online, particularly on the City Planning Department’s website. E.g. here on Hernesaari. (Planning for the new, massively enlarged Hernesaari, including centrally located helipad of interest to one percent of one percent (at a stretch) of Helsinki residents, is tomorrow’s show in Laituri’s busy programme of architainment. You can go and join in should you wish).

And here are the images of Kirjavasatama.fi the ideas competition for the South Harbour. Go check out the hundreds of “likes” for these, er, … please someone tell me this is all just one huge joke!!!

The Hernesaari images I’ve copied here are exceedingly subtle in comparison. And in least one of the photos of the suggested/ dreamed up new neighbourhood has some natural-looking waterfront. Well, natural, or unnatural, doesn’t really matter. Most of Hernesaari was reclaimed from the sea to start with. Complete fabrication yet solid. Part of my natural habitat when I was growing up, over time its artifice had congealed into the rest of the city easily enough.

So, a city is inevitable change. Bits of this. Bits of that. And bits of the other. Material. Cultural. Thoughts and ideas (even renderings!) Expectations and promises. Disappointments and scapegoatings. Money. Weeds and trees. Plans. People. Steel, copper and bitumen. All this comes together and sometimes congeals into a real place worth naming. Like Helsinki, Helsingfors.

But a city is really mostly qualities. Qualities that are hard to describe in words, even in pictures. People who have a choice about where to move understand about the qualities of a place. Nobody decides to live in (or falls in love with) a place for its economic figures. As this interesting (freely available) article about the USA shows.

Hope the autumn ends soon and turns to winter.

But even if it doesn’t a city seems to congeal in its habits. Helsinki, for example, leaves its shoes by the door even when it’s relatively dry and clean on the streets.