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trente glorieuses” and the fine buildings that that period of capitalist history bequeathed to us, would long ago have been replaced by some form of neo-feudal horror.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.

Of imperatives and fantasies

How quaint to think that the idea of a jet set got its glamour from the association with travel and airlines. Today’s office types are all forced into air travel at regular intervals so it’s not like it’s a luxury. More of a drag, really.

But Finavia, the people who manage Helsinki-Vantaa airport, believe that even today’s harangued airline passenger can be dazzled into shopping for luxury perfumes, chocolates and other goodies. Once passengers have been fed through the bottleneck that is security it is but one step into shopping glitz. To the left, the new airport branch of Eat&Joy with its Finnish culinary delights. Ahead, er, stuff. And lots of exhortations to buy it.

So coming home exhausted, it was a treat to sit back and read/watch the news. Interesting storm in a teacup over Voima-magazine’s spoof-advertising or rather adbusting habit. Voima, brash, bright (in many sense of the word) and really annoyingly laid out, has been doing pretty amazing journalism and adbusting for years. They apparently have now published a book of the best spoofs.

We spotted this on tonight’s cultural news, a delightful Finnish quirk that we hope will survive the economic gloom featured in the economics bit of the same programme. They reported that Voima had approached Kiasma contemporary art museum to exhibit some of the best ads. After initial interest Kiasma declined to exhibit them. There was concern that the museum’s sponsors might not like the critique implied (!?) in art that overtly ridicules consumerism, perhaps even their products.

The book’s co-author Klaus Welp did tell the YLE interviewer that only few targets ever complain outright.

Guggenheim-foe Kantokorpi has blogged about this, and singles out Kiasma’s Director, Pirkko Siitari, for special opprobrium. Bye-bye, Art As Critique, he seems to be saying. We share his concern but hope he is wrong. But, his choice of image to illustrate his blog was fabulous. A pile of coins stacked up as a building photoshopped onto an image of “that” site: that bit of Katajanokka where the land meets the water in a commercially interesting kind of way, and where fantasies have been let loose before…

So while JHJ was settling in with the other travelling salespeople in a small town somewhere further dark, Kantokorpi and various others who have taken a critical view on the G. franchise were talking about it at Kiasma. Rumour has it that Kaarin Taipale (whose work we recommended in an earlier post) is writing a pamphlet about the G.

Architectural debate is alive and well in this city!

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.

Unlock! Liberate! Regenerate that shoreline!

Architecture, some folks say, is the biggest star of urban politics now. There’s some truth to this. Wherever you look, it seems, there are either thrusting cranes or brash advertising slogans proclaiming the recently-constructed, soon-to-be-opened or newly-regenerated urban experience.

Even the never-likely-to-be-built but still eye-catching schemes of computer-aided and latte-fuelled architects’ studios are also getting more and more media coverage. In Helsinki also. Who knows, Herzog and de Meuron’s ice-cube hotel might yet make a return, or ideas for a wooden skyscraper in Katajanokka…

So it is sort of refreshing (if not lacking in elements of scariness) to see the Helsinki City Planning Department start from the ground up in a new exhibition about the future of the city. This future vision is currently on display at Laituri but also in a touring version at the London Festival of Architecture and will do a stint at Helsinki Design Week at Kaapeli in late August too.

The vision in question is, of course, the waterfronts of Helsinki vacated when cargo shipping and other harbour functions were moved to the edge of town to Vuosaari. Readers of JHJ will know that many of us think this is a city of elegant and human-scale buildings that has tended to shun flamboyance yet has achieved occasional architectural brilliance. It has also long been referred to as the the Daughter of the Baltic – cue images of Engel’s masterful Senate Square with the Cathedral shining in the sun…

In 2010 though that language and those images feel old, too old. So the Planning Department uses a newer language in its new product, Tailwind: Helsinki Horizon 2030 and tells us:

Helsinki is faced with changes on a magnitude that the city has not experienced for more than a century. Vast harbour and industrial areas have been liberated in the city centre and will be developed over the coming decades into three new urban districts.

The little touring exhibition is built into a shipping container. Its packaging, if nothing else, thus recalls some uses for waterfronts that aren’t about luxury housing development. We mean waterfronts before they were “liberated” as the Planning Department has it.

At which point the cynics in JHJ’s editorial offices wish we could have in writing a promise that all waterfronts in Helsinki in 2030 really will be open to the public and not (as in much of London) locked up behind gates, security guards and offensively ugly buildings put there simply to make profit.

While it’s in London, Helsinki’s exhibition container has been set up behind the Oxo Tower, a commercially successful and iconic  success of waterfont development along the River Thames. It’s not too ugly either, though we do want to stress that the process of removing docks from London has produced some truly, horribly dynamitable architecture. The waterfront is also where you’ll find lots of the thoroughly objectionable urban design of the kind we just mentioned. We really, really want to underline the offensiveness of the locks, gates and more subtle privatisations that this regeneration or “liberation” of the waterfront brought with it in London.

But back to the promises for the future being offered by Helsinki. The container was opened by Hannu Penttila (below), one of the mayors of Helsinki and it’s going to be on show there until July 4th.

Helsinki is embarking on the process of reorganising this “liberated” land some 40-50 years later than the famous centres of colonial commodity trading like London or the former rustbelt towns like Pittsburgh.

Helsinki can benefit from hindsight then. So there is at least a theoretical chance that it will learn from the mistakes of these precursors. And since we gather Copenhagen’s waterfront is quite nice though we haven’t seen it, we expect great things. We are watching!

What Helsinki has time for

Marinas of all kinds and all levels of luxury pepper this city. Clearly people have time on their hands to use their boats, to sail into the sunset and, perhaps, motor their way back to port after the wind dies down. Still in the sunset, since it lasts for hours even if you don’t live facing north or where the water reflects the rays, like here, in Katajanokka (photo taken in Tervasaari).

And here’s Helsingin Moottorivenekerho with Tervasaari behind. It’s all really easy to miss if you drive along Pohjoisranta in a rush to get to the burbs or the airport.

And here’s a church boat crew training or just enjoying themselves. It’s the small thing in the water, in front of the harbour cranes.

And should you want to get involved in this pastime, we believe that Soutumiehet, located on the other side of the peninsula, on Merikannontie, across the water from the rowing stadium, have the kit and the organisational skills and what have you. Like time.

Should you not have time you might like to find our more about this lot: “Time research institute, 2nd floor. Only by securing time”. Which translates, obviously, as “by appointment only”. If anyone knows anything about them, do let us know.

Sorry folks, that’s all we have time for.

Good night.

Time and Place (or H:ki squeezes into English-language architectural press)

One of the problems with the now scuppered hotel scheme for Helsinki’s Katajanokka, was that the architects (Pierre and Jacques) didn’t demonstrate much local knowledge. Someone with local knowledge of how the area works over time, day to day, season to season, was bound to balk not just at the visual impact of the thing. They were also bound to try to get their heads around how a starchitectural hotel would effect the traffic bottlenecks on the way to what is still an island, and what it would do to the visual arc created by the buildings around the market place, and consider how the market itself would be affected and, of course, they would appreciate the length of shadows in this part of the world.

The area in question is, perhaps, a planner’s nightmare, particularly now that urban space is so definitely, so unutterably commercially, a luxury that a public can only afford, apparently, if it’s provided in partnership with a private “developer”. (I refer you to my short course on entrepreneurial urban governance a while back). In fact, the area is an “urban fragment” according to architecture writer Malcolm Quantrill that even the venerable Alvar Aalto himself struggled with (… my reading of the text finds no trace of irony in this observation by Quantrill …) when he designed the Enso-Gutzeit “palazzo” sticking out of Kanavaranta. That building (the original white [sugar] cube?) has been causing double-takes and not a little disgust at modern architecture  since 1961. Originally Aalto had envisaged – along with many others – something grander, more central to the nation’s collective memory and its future, a parliament building for the site. Alas, what resulted, in the view of many a Helsinkian, was a fragment in the sense of something violently detached from its surrounding, connected whole. In 1993 though, another government building was completed up the street, by Olli Pekka Jokela, which goes some way towards repairing the sense of brokenness (in the pic above the white facade; peeking just above the now-redundant terminal building in the pic below).

Quantrill’s otherwise intriguing text reads as if he didn’t know Helsinki too well either, since he writes that it’s a city which lacks a sense of “downtown”. Either he never made arrangements to meet under the clock at Stockmann (see picture below) or things have changed since the piece was written, one assumes either late 1970s or 1980s. As a native I can guarantee that downtown definitely is there, and it definitely reaches, if not all the way to the Kajatanokka waterfont site, at least to the tram stop at Manta (whose future is, alas, shrowded in the mysteries of the Planning Department’s illogical or at least elusive argumentation).

From his London perspective Jonathan Glancey, on the other hand, has a powerful sense of what is lost if global fashions take over and destroy the times and places that urban (and other) folks dwell in. Writing with his usual forthrightness and wit in Building Design today, he notes that Stockholm is under threat of the “world class city” treatment and adds that Helsinki is too:

This means historic buildings being vandalised to ensure they suit the needs of wilfully vulgar global “brand” shops, the rerouting of trams from the historic centre because these, apparently, aren’t best suited to tourist-oriented “pedestrianisation” schemes and the loss of a culture famous for fighting off invaders and going its own happily modest way. “World class cities” spells architectural bombast, bling and banality.

At least the Vikings look as if they’re sharpening their locally forged swords ready to fight for a true sense of place.
Read more: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=427&storycode=3162340&channel=427&c=1#ixzz0ltZOQ1Re

Well, since it’s arguable whether Finns are Vikings (Fenno-Ugric types is a more common attribution) we hope this doesn’t suggest that Finns are doing something in CONTRAST to Swedes.

Below, the Sokkers clock during that bi-annual (twice a year) bout of madness.

Waiting for the dust to settle

While Iceland comes to terms with its latest volcanic eruption and, according to the gentleman on YLE YKSI with impending floods as it melts the glacier around it, the online media’s attention is almost exclusively fixed on the dust that’s stopped air travel.

Dust, in spring, in Finland? Everywhere where those men with hoses and brushes or, more modernly, little street-sweeper trucks haven’t managed to clear away the winter’s grit.

In the background there is Katajanokka, from the other side, not the side that the tourists or even most of the angry commentators would think about. One suspects that if Herzog+deMeuron’s ice cube had been given permission, it would actually be extremely visible from quite a lot of angles – but not this one.

It seems there is a lot of dust yet to settle on this debacle, but then its dynamics were quite spectacular in running roughshod over any semblance of democractic process in urban planning, including public debate and maybe even consultation and certainly including bending an ear to the experts. Now local papers and online forums as well as face-to-face encounters, are going over what went wrong. An item in Töölöläinen, a local paper that seems to be doing regular features on architecture, headlined “Häirikkörakentamiselle piste”, or “Full Stop to ASBO Construction” (as it were). Still, the usual suspects are suggesting that nothing should prevent Norwegian inward investment from coming to the rescue of municipal finances, but perhaps they’re the same folks who’d a) sell their grandmother as well as the family jewels to stay globally competitive and b) who see the Senate Square as just a pile of old stones that aren’t being exploited to their full commercial potential.

People are saying, “never again”. Alas, it’s likely with all this waterfront land and all these non-critics of commercially driven urban development in charge of the whole thing, that we’ll be seeing loads more of this sort of thing. Already, the fact that they, experts that is (including highly respected international architects who are intimate with Helsinki), were consulted and then summarily ignored to the huge extent that they were, is possibly a new departure in Finnish political culture where, thus far, trust in the experts and the authorities has been almost moving (naive?) and ubiquitous.

Perhaps a decade and a half inside the European Union has brought Finns into line with others across the continent who are less respecting of authorities, or maybe the silliness around parliamentary expenses in recent months has raised levels of mistrust. Or, shock, horror!! Have Finnish decision makers, whether politicians, bankrollers or municipal officers, always had a tendency, as architecture writer Paula Holmila observes, to flex their muscles when they feel those around them need to be reminded who’s in charge…?

Of course, experts of various sorts have protested eloquently and loudly since the hotel scheme was first made public. And they did so again in anticipation of the vote earlier this month. Let’s just remind ourselves of one of the reasons for why the scheme had to be turned down, that is, it’s visual impact.

Relief in absentia – waterfront potential (again)

Well, we’ve been rather concentrated on other matters, other event-spaces than Helsinki. Thus the date we had once dreaded came and went without notice. Until, that is, Arkkivahti‘s feed reminded us of the issue of the month: the icy waterfront hotel scheme.

Well, on the seventh of April 2010 Herzog & deMeuron’s icy cross was turned down by the City Council. The local media – based on a v. quick internet search, i.e. Hesari and one or two others – seems to be engaged in some quasi-critical reflection in which it is suggested that the ‘antis’ were (as is usually the case in fast-capitalism), well, if not wrong, at least populist and thus discreditable. We hope there will be more sophisticated and design-savvy commentary elsewhere in time to come, as there was in November for instance, as reported via this blog.

But hey, maybe after six months, a year, three – depending on where you were in the networks of government and construction partnerships, or how keen you were to keep politicians accountable for public space – an outporing of one sort or another was to be expected.

So now, dear friends, with the demise of this bit of silliness (for that it was, however grand a design this seemed) Helsinki’s decision makers (who do, yes, still make the odd decision) have unblocked the development potential of an important and highly valued site. Put another way, just think what a sterile pursuit it is for a city in the boreal zone (cold and coniferous) to plug its waterfront with accommodation for tourists!

Eyes peeled then in months to come for Taivallahti.  Not for tourists, but not for many others either, there’s also the eastern edge of Lauttasaari (below X 3  last November, interestingly YIT the construction firm gets far more coverage than the architects). Whatever else next…

TINA or “Entrepreneurial urban governance”

Finland’s blogosphere is welling up with the energies of those again alerted to the possible arrival of an “ice-cube shaped hotel” (whether in careful appreciation or in polite disgust) in a previously taken-for-granted and hardly noticed part of Helsinki’s central waterfront. The whole area was the gateway to the country for quite some time before air travel was invented, and it is still arguably this physical approach into Helsinki that attracts a good number of returning cruise-passengers. The skyline is worth just staring at as well as photographing. On top of the purely visual, the arrival offers multisensory experiences and, unless you are totally disconnected, it’s quite easy to understand the place you’re arriving to as a living, breathing form of everyday rhythmic urban life. Besides seeing and understanding the street down towards Kaivopuisto that’s still visible (plans are to hide it underground) and the routes towards the North Harbour and Katajanokka itself, you can quickly tell whether the market is busy, quiet, strewn with debris or freshly swept, depending on the time of day or year. And you can probably tell that not just image managers but actual producers of life are at work, at least from time to time.

None of this, however, is recognised by the “entrepreneurial urban government” of which we wrote yesterday. What that means is that the commercial, which has ALWAYS been central to city life, has all but pushed aside all else, not in the city itself but in the minds of its decision makers (or governors if you like). To planners and similar types, urban government is the portfolio of activities that make the metabolism or the ecology of the city operate without too much pathology (it helps avoid piles of waste or urban riots and puts in roads, hospitals etc) is now really pretty unfashionable and certainly not high on agendas. In its entrepreneurial form it, well, its just consumerism writ urban scale.

Architecture is high on this agenda, it’s commercial, consumerist, the star of today’s cities. Alas, it’s often quite durable and consequential too. (Was it Le Corbusier who posed the question: Revolution or architecture? Wonder if this is what he had in mind…)

When, one wonders, will the revolution of the exluded ordinary citizens begin? We ask, because here’s what one self-described Finnish Green politician had to say on his blog last week:

Hotellit ovat myös avoimia tiloja verrattuna esimerkiksi yhtiöiden pääkonttoreihin.

[our translation]  hotels are also open spaces compared to, for instance, corporate headquarters

Quite. Those spaces which have meant that more and more adults across cities everywhere walk around like “key children” whose house keys hang around their necks. Still, I gather that biometrics means the posher corporate HQs now do without, either implanting employees with chips or providing doors that recognise employees fingerprints.

This blogger went on to echo the “official” view that we here at JHJ don’t like, that the plans are indeed part of the same “upgrading” of a supposedly too quiet part of the world. Bringing lots of people with lots of money into this part of the world is another thing that “entrepreneurial urban governance” does, especially if it does it by seeking out private capital with which to build so that it wouldn’t have to encroach on the spending power of the rich by actually taxing them to contribute to public goods.

Entrepreneurial urban governance starts not from the urban plan, as was, but from the plan for the economy (the debt):

Hotellihankkeen katsottiin osaltaan tukevan kaupungin elinkeinopoliittisten tavoitteiden toteutumista ja suunnitteilla olevia
Kauppatorin ympäristön ja Kaupungintalokortteleiden kehittämis- ja elävöittämishankkeita.

or: the hotel project was seen for its part to support the realisation of the city’s economic policy and the planned development and renewal projects around the market and the City Hall area.

This from last week’s agenda of the City Board’s meeting.

I wonder if what we are dealing with is the embryo of something that will put the idea of the civic out of the city of Helsinki for a long time to come. For a hotel is not for the city.

Some headlines and comments suggest that the architectural profession is once again showing its disregard for public sentiment, telling people who prefer the old that they don’t understand, or they’re cowardly or debilitatingly conservative. The profession in Finland is somewhat divided on the topic it seems, but not that much, and not that far from the broader public either. In yesterday’s internet issue of Rakennuslehti the Finnish Association for Architecture is, once again, shown as somewhat upset by the scheme. It quotes an officer as saying there should be more debate, more involvement of the Finnish architecture profession, and more alternatives.

Which kind of brings me to the heart of “entrepreneurial urban governance” which is the slogan TINA=there is no alternative. No alternative, that is, to the individualist, acquisitive, materialist and self-defeating dogmas of thatcherism and reaganism that, for the time being, have yet to be properly exploded. Still, if not in Helsinki’s political classes or even in its media, alternatives are of course being soughgt.

Architecture, global capital and really big countries

There are different ways one could look at the prospect of a two-tier-Swiss-flag-in-glass popping up on the waterfront by Helsinki’s market square. Here’s one, for example.

The port of Helsinki closed down harbour functions here some while ago and what we have left is largely disused building or car-parking space. So perhaps it is time to move on from the port’s understanding (see website) that this is just some prime-quality SLOAP (Space Left Over After Planning).

Though of course it isn’t, and never was, left over that is.The idea of getting some of that footloose and still relatively abundant global (Norwegian) capital to settle in Helsinki is never, so it would seem, far from the minds of the city’s decision makers. Will Finns soon be meekly going where many others have gone before?

Having expanded at length on the HDHD previously and since the damning views by the international commentators are available online anyway (oh, Mr Holl, Helsinki needs you now!) we’ll move on to other aspsects of the debacle. For instance, waterfront development generally. Here’s what Finnish researchers Rauno Sairinen and Satu Kumpulainen had to say about it before the money wobble:

Today, urban waterfront regeneration takes place in a societal environment of increased capital mobility and inter-urban competition (…). Because cities have to compete for investments and affluent residents, city governments cannot merely manage the development, i.e. focus on the redistribution of resources, but have to actively pursue investments and publicity … Urban governance has expanded to involve not only the government but also a range of private and semi-public actors. This approach … based on public–private partnership, flagship projects, aggressive marketing and consumption-oriented projects such as retail and tourism centres, has been labelled entrepreneurial urban governance (…), and it is often well exemplified by large-scale urban waterfront regeneration projects.

(From ‘Assessing social impacts in urban waterfront regeneration’  in Environmental Impact Assessment Review 26 (2006) 120– 135)

If you left things at that, you’d want to give up on any semblance of critical debate whatsover and of course they don’t. In fact, the authors note that

According to the Land Use and Building Act there should be adequate investigation of
a plan’s potential environmental impacts, including implications for the community
economy, social, cultural and other effects. … environmental impacts are
understood as direct and indirect effects on:
– people’s living conditions and environment;
– plants and animals, water, air and climate;
– flora and fauna, biodiversity and natural resources;
– regional and community structure, community and energy economy and traffic;
– townscape, landscape, cultural heritage and the built environment.

Well, we haven’t seen these yet for the plot in question. Nor can we find anything recent on the City Planning Department’s website (even on its sweetly titled “participate and influence” page). [Updated 24.3] Initially we found no trace of the report on the cultural and architectural values of the area that was promised by Hannu Penttila a month or so ago and cheered us up so but a polite email to the City Planning Department fixed that problem and provided the link (in Finnish).

And why are we bothered? Because Helsingin Sanomat and other media reported that the hotel scheme is back off ice again, to be voted on early next month. The City Board already decided it was in favour of Norwegian money in the shape of a luxury hotel by ueber-starchitects Herzog + de Meuron, even while tons of other folks, including the Katajanokka Seura (local amenity society) are collecting signatures to make the (horrid) thing go away. In the mean time, however, the poor old politicians appear to be more and more worried that if they don’t embrace the thing (which some admit to not liking) they feel bound to go with it just so they get their hands on that money.

Alas, to imagine politicians saving municipal budgets through savvy real estate deals is to indulge in make-believe. And we don’t just mean Helsinki – London’s own spectacular Canary Wharf had to be saved by massive, massive injections of public money and by “legal” bolsterings of private enterprise.

And yet there is a precedent in Helsinki. Not knowing what was up, I photographed these port-a-cabins which signalled the start of something new to me back in September. Another hole in the ground perhaps, for Southern Helsinki’s fecundly reproducing cars, I thought at first. I didn’t find out about that one either on the Planning Department’s media outlets but rather via The Usual. It’s the plot on Neitsytpolku, (maybe Helsink’s answer to Maiden Lane) also known (aptly? ironically?) as the Kätilöopisto (College of Midwifery or Birthing Hospital) site. It was sold off in 1990 by the city to the Soviet Union, whose embassy was next door. Sale price: a paltry 75million granny’s markkas. Over the next few years the decision was bitterly contested as some folks suggested getting the land back, others at least to insist that planning permission be conditional on an architectural competition to include Finnish entrants. Didn’t happen.

In those days the journalists at The Usual looked to typical blunders of the times to inject a tone of criticism. They considered the various embassy buildings that Helsinki had, in moments of lax judgement it suggested, sold off to sovereign foreign states who then blithely ignored architectural context if not always planning regulations. Interestingly, they saved their most venomous language for the Norwegians and how they replaced a jugend villa by Selim Lindqvist with a box of aluminium and glass (perhaps to remind them of back home in Oslo?).

This could all be quite amusing if it weren’t for the way 21st architecture is getting just SOOOO BIIIG which in little Helsinki really doesn’t appeal at all. Mr Holl, if you have any views on Katajanokka or Helsinki still, might you publish somewhere prominent quite soon?