Cool and authentic

Well it finally is cool.

At the end of another ridiculously hot summer, Helsinki and its residents are beginning to return to something akin to normal. It being the second week of August, traffic jams are back and terrace bars/waterside cafes/Helsinki streets are heaving.

Helsinkians also have to learn how to share the city with those other urban residents, the dreaded and well-fed  Helsinki seagulls. It is they, by the way, who are behind such high sales of fishing line in contemporary Helsinki.

Apart from the stringing up of anti-sea-gull devices, there are many, many other recurrent events which come with the seasons. We aren’t suggesting anything to do with autumn yet, merely that the summer has reached a new phase. It’s now crayfish season, raspberry season and pull-pea season (anyone who knows where to buy “vetoherne” please let us know), and athletics season.

We are horribly aware that there is something akin to looting season going on in the UK. So-called high-street shops but also independent shops into which individual and collaborative effort has no doubt been poured over years, perhaps decades, is being smashed up in a frenzy of, well, disaffection and despair among other things.

“Get a job”, people are saying about the looters and rioters. Alas, not many jobs around (see our previous post).

Meanwhile, though storm clouds have been seen (and heard! were you here last night?!) here in Helsinki the looting is just on a screen in two (at most) dimensions. In fact, Helsinki’s enterprising types appear to have revved up the energy-levels over the summer. Everywhere you look there’s a new shop being built!

Interestingly, it’s marketing folks who seem to be behind some of this stuff, like the Aitokauppa in Ullanlinna.

Also, rumour has it, public money is involved. Sitra is actually bankrolling this future “chain”. So whereas the delightful Laivurin Valinta at the other end of the street remains a genuine independent, the idea of the good folks of Ullanlinna becoming the beneficiaries of state-supported access to good, real food as some kind of human right. Well …

How much do we care? Not sure. With such schemes at least Helsinki’s often dead streets have some hope of being brought back to a life they had in the 1960s, the glory days of Finnish retail.

The Aitokauppa is a pun. From (m)aitokauppa which people of my generation still remember, “milk shop” or ordinary shop, but Aito means authentic so it’ll be more real, say, than chain store stuff.

It was once a  Siwa. Ex-co-op movement they may be, but so ugly are they that I can’t say I’d ever miss one of them. Their branding people want the cheap look and think this is achieved by being seriously ugly. So ugly in fact that I will not have JHJ defaced with an image of them! Instead, a gratuitous if seasonally apt image of a K-shop.

(You ever tried cooking live crayfish?!)

What’s a city without shops?

The words kauppa (shop, commerce, market) and kaupunki (town, city) are of course related. Towns grew up around commerce. Then they took shape, at least in this part of Europe, very much around their shops, in Finland usually built into the stone foundations of a building, hence known affectionately as kivijalkakauppa (stone-footed shop [we invented that, by the way, hee hee]).

So now they’re in trouble, according to Helsingin Sanomat. And you’d exepct them to be. Not just because of the recession or, as so may writers and decision makers seem to make us want to believe, because we “vote with our feet/wallet” and buy cheaper elsewhere or online. Actually, they’re going because it’s so unbelievably difficult to compete against the darling of the Helsinki decision makers: BIG.

Shopping centres/malls tend to prefer to give “representation” to big brand names rather than support small traders, even if they do make a profit. (Which is an odd way of expressing it, since the word “representation” in connection with urban government used to have something to do with democracy, as in people electing a few well-informed individuals to represent them to the rest. So it goes in our topsy-turvy political world.)

Then there’s the other aspect of this thing. That you (er, the city) help build enornmous amounts of floorspace like in Kamppi, where only the big chains will be able to operate (actually, you probably stitch up a deal before hand, working together, after all, with the “stakeholders”), and you put it, for good measure, where a sizeable proportion of the public HAS to walk past (twice?) every day – the bus station. (“Convenience store” thus defined from the point of view of the commuter, the lynchpin, one supposes, of the innovation economy and who thus has to be managed with care, i.e. offered services that make work-ife easy.)

And if you forget something you were going to get from here – or if you aren’t actually a commuter after all – you might be able to get it somewhere like here. This particular example of shameful greater Helsinki retail architecture is from Mankkaa.

Of course, you can just choose to love the places that, for a short time at least, were “Finland’s/Europe’s/the world’s” largest shopping centre (Itäkeskus, below).

Which wouldn’t be a problem (maybe) for cities if it weren’t for the impact on the street. Hmm, on which note, maybe urban planners and designers should just get rid of the street altogether. As cars recede into history (as they surely won’t. Ed.) and as people retreat into anxious privacy anyway, maybe cities can grow to look like something totally different from what we’ve got used to living in and loving over the last 100 to 200 years.

Funny thing though. In Helsinki, flats located in the old fashioned urban street and particularly the street near the shops, have the biggest price tags – decade after decade (as published in this pdf by City of Helsinki Urban Facts).

Helsinki is stone-footed on shops

It’s come to our narrator’s attention that some things need to be repeated. Repetition is the mother of all learning, kertaus on oppimisen äiti or repetitio mater studiorum est, or something like that.

Regarding shops, the number of actual shops peaked in 1964 both nationally and in the capital, but since then the loss of shops has continued along with the growth in the size of shops. Think centralisation and concentration, also efficiency savings, economies of scale, those kinds of things.

Quite a few people share the view that the rapidly expanding ranks of older citizens in Helsinki will be poorly served by toothless or non-existent (in these people’s view) planning regulations around retail. What will they do when the local shop is gone or the only ones left in their neighbourhood sell ball gowns, jewelry or specialist diving equipment, they ask.

I know of course that there is a plethora of documents that show quite clearly that all decision makers are committed to ensuring that quality, choice and convenience, and profitability, can all flourish happily together.

Whereas across the UK there has been a huge growth recently in concerns about the loss of independent shops and the sad consequences of this for high street life, the Finnish debate doesn’t even have a term for such a thing.

So let’s move on to something it does have a term for. Kivijalka translates literally as stone foot but unsurprisingly its meaning in this context is foundation. The word is used metaphorically and, as you’ll see from the photos below, glaringly obviously, it’s used to talk about buildings’ foundations. A kivijalkakauppa then, is a shop built into the ground floor of a multi-storey building. Sometimes by implication this does seem to connote independence from chains, but at other times it just means small and local.

Since most of the most-loved buildings of central Helsinki date from the first half of the last century, they were also built to accommodate the foundation of city life: shops. Here for example, in the majestic Merilinna on Merikatu, overlooking the Baltic, with a serious kivijalka. It just squeezes into our most-loved classification having been completed in 1900 from drawings by Waldemar Wilenius. Still in use for retail – antiques and a patisserie/konditor.

 

 

 

 

 

Here on Tunturikatu in Töölö the foundation is rather shallower.  The shop-fronts are also a bit “mute” or, as the Brits would have it, “dead”!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or then there’s this gem of a small block of homes in leafy Munkkiniemi. From the layout of windows and door, the assumption surely isn’t unreasonable, that the section to the left was built as a retail space.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Considering what 21st century architects and planners do with a kivijalka, here is a rather typical example from the not-yet-quite-finished Arabianranta quarter, bicycle storage.