Baltic Relations

I took overland transport all the way from Helsinki to London so I had quite a lot of time for reading and, thanks to wi-fi, even spent time online. So many different worlds to choose from. Very 21st century you might say, very globalization, this being online.

Setting off from the Olympic Terminal (so named because it was built for Helsinki’s 1952 Olympics)  I travelled Helsinki-Stockholm-Köbenhavn-Köln-Bruxelles-London. On the way I was reminded of how much there is here in this relatively small part of a very, very small continent.

It all made me think a lot about the invention of the nation-state, the short history of the passport, national styles of music, languages, local foods and propensities to say ‘var så god’, ‘danke’ and ‘pardon’ [no stereotypes, please, Ed.]. I kept coming back to the fact that mixtures and rubbings of shoulders and exchanges have been the order of the day for one heck of a long time around the Baltic and, of course, in Helsinki itself, which was a multilingual, cosmopolitan, outward-looking harbour town 100 years ago if not earlier. According to Kjell Westö’s fiction, the area around Malminkatu was even called Babel for the mix of languages heard there.

My grandmother (born 1903) spoke Finnish but also Russian, Swedish and English, the last three very badly. But she did use them all in her own way. Then there have been all those people for whom Tatar, Romani, Yiddish and possibly other langauges are the most fluent. My grandmother seemed quite nostalgic, I thought, for the days of many languages and the exoticism it suggested to her (she wasn’t PC!).

Then at some point Helsinki perhaps turned away from the sea, and away from the places and people it had always connected it to (had other stuff to worry about, I suppose). And then Finns became famously similar to each other, most homogeneous country in Europe, sort of thing. For my father, the aforementioned Olympics meant seeing for the first time ever, a) black man and b) a full beard on a young man, and his first taste of Coca Cola, but I think he too assumed that multilingualism and different religions in a city were normal, even desirable qualities, and he was certainly keen on cultural exchange even through the darkest days of Finnish consensus politics.

Back to now or the week-end. On the boat, as I enjoyed a dinner of fish washed down with a glass of wine and the only time I saw the entertainment venue was early evening before it filled with its drag show.

And with nobody to talk to (the waiter seemed a bit surly, surprisingly) I read that marvellous free rag, Voima. An article on migrant workers at the EU HQ in Brussels asked why eurocrats don’t find it uncomfortable to have their needs catered to by an almost uniformly non-white catering staff and went on to a damning critique of migration policies and the European blue card, a vehicle for poaching highly qualified people to work underpaid in Europe.

When I got back online I discovered that the mainstream in Finland has waffled stupid about restricting immigrants, as if that “conversation” wasn’t already far enough gone. Facebook has groups trying to fight back with Finnish varieties of anti-racism and cosmpolitanism (and probably with less charitable groups too along with the cowardly and bilious racist parts of the blogosphere). Interestingly, the Finnish-language HS.fi article on the SDP spokesman’s wishes to keep out migrant labour, was illustrated with a picture of a building site. (English article here).

Depressing! But to stop this post getting too worthy or too long, and to try and loop things back somehow to the built environment, I’ll just add a couple of links to other news stories, about Britain and Dubai, which demonstrate that the mainstream is happy with racist commentary here too, and that cheap labour and double-standards are a widespread contemporary phenomenon. Not, I hasten to add, that this makes the Finnish gits’ comments any less worrying.

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.

Multiculture in the news

Because yesterday’s copy of The Usual reported (but only to those who subscribe, it seems) on the opening of the Punavuori Reception Centre for asylum seekers with a picture that included the Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral on Katajanokka I thought I’d share the link. (Or should that be in Katajanokka? Comp. Katajanokalla).

The very last line of the article draws attention to the religious/ethnic difference of those seeking asylum and so to Finns’ current preoccupation with questions of difference/multiculturalism. Meanwhile the Italians are having to digest the news that crucifixes will no longer be allowed in school classrooms, the result of a court case pitting Italy vs. a Finn with Italian citizenship. And a columnist berates the True Finns/Basic Finnish far-right party and others for debasing the quality of debate over the country’s language politics. It makes one wonder how much of the views around the HDHD have to do with the Swissness of the starchitects.

Of course the HDHD could just be about love for an area by both ordinary citizens and experts. About a built environment that serves a range of people and businesses and gives locals and visitors alike a rare sense of being embedded in a solid, even comforting history?

Here Katajanokka Customs Building from 1901, protected in a masterplan/zoning ordinance (sorry, this isn’t precise, but you get the idea) from the 1980s aimed at respecting the valuable built heritage of the harbour-side architecture from the 1860. Not my favourite building by a long shot, but fit for purpose (as renovated) and rather unusual in Helsinki’s streetscape which is predominantly classical even in its modernism.

Vanhanen to Swedish-speaking minority: “Your grievance against the Finnish mainstream isn’t justified”

Sitting on airplanes is a time to catch up on news. Not much on architecture this time or even planning.

Instead there was some concern in Huvfudstadsbladet (Finland’s Swedish-speaking daily, “Capital city paper”) about a sense that the status of Swedish-speakers in this country is under veiled threat. Veiled? Well, perhaps in the polite language of The Usual’s leader from Sunday under the headline “Swedish speakers’ concerns over their rights are totally justified” to which HBL was referring. Well, the prime minister promptly, predictably and sadly judged that these concerns are not justified.

We Finns are all, Vanhanen says, one nation, speaking two languages but united in all other things. Perhaps, I muse, things like our common fight against the onslaught of the seagulls, or equally plausibly our inalienable right to consider our innovativeness somehow unique.

Getting back to the question of the mainstream and the other streams, there are the Sami who live in the Arctic parts of the country whose language is also recognised as a Finnish language [sic] and who are increasingly able to be educated in their own language. One official blurb puts it thus:

Lisäksi laissa on turvattu saamelaisten sekä romaanien ja muiden ryhmien oikeus ylläpitää ja kehittää omaa kieltään ja kulttuuriaan. Saamelaisilla on oikeus lain mukaan käyttää saamen kieltä tietyissä viranomaisissa.

[In addition the law secures the rights of the Sami, Roma and other groups to sustain and develop their own language and culture. Sami also have the legal right to use the Sami language in certain dealings with the authorities.]

This is something people have fought hard for. In Lapland, anecdotally at least (and from online research), bringing back the Sami language has substantially improved the psychological well-being of pupils in Utsjoki, Finland’s most northern municipality. Not that far from there, in Tornio, language politics of another kind once put Finnish-speaking children under severe strain. The moving 2003 film Elina (Invisible Elina, in the Finnish) by director Klaus Häro (with no less of a star than Bibi Andersson playing the harsh school teacher) captures not just the injustices perpetrated by adults against children but those of majority language-speakers against minorities.

It makes me wish more of us were minorities. It seems to me that many minority groups are multilingual and that in many cases this begets both tolerance and lasting contributions to mainstream culture. On which note, I wish I read Swedish well enough to contemplate reading Kjell Westö in the original.

For more on this story, see Svenskfinland’s extensive comment.