On confusing “is” and “is planned” – more Helsinki tunnels

Spotting the signs of ancient human settlement or, to be precice, human handiwork, in a landscape, is the work of archaeologists. They can “read” a bump in a field which looks utterly natural to most of us as the product of a particular time and culture, say early neolithic as distinct from middle neolithic. Southern England, for instance, is full of burial mounds and other archaeological sites that you could easily overlook – unless you happen to be able to tell your bell barrow from your disc barrow.

The other day I was just a little surprised to hear a rumbling and then see the bright headlights, as a lorry drove up from underneath this mound. OK, it’s got that typical Finnish/Helsinki bare rock, which tells you that as a bump in the landscape its not a burial barrow but the trace of warming climates and something called the Palaeoproterozoic age. No matter, it’s integral to modern life in Helsinki today. Integral, that is, to the city’s ongoing fascination with the underground.

It is, of course, the entrance to one of the many, many underground constructions in this holey city. Since no car park or transport connection is marked for this site on any of the maps in the Underground Development Plan, it seems likely that it’s the entrance to an underground shelter or bunker, Punanotkon puiston kalliosuoja. (Bunkers for civil defence deserve their own post, here I’ll just note how odd it was that until the rumbling lorry drew my attention to it, I’d never even noticed the tunnel.)

And of course, it did make one wonder about this mania for building underground. Though there’s all kinds of stuff underground, there are also thousands of spaces for private cars. There are 16 underground car parks in the central area alone. And a lot of the recent blasting underground has been about bringing in even more cars. Which is also odd, since central Helsinki is a small, compact peninsula with excellent public transport connections and a haf-decent cycle network. Driving in a private car and contributing to existing congestion is definitely not the smartest way to get here.

On which note, it’s also odd that the development plan writes of a Central Tunnel in the present tense. It’s been the dream of car-dependents in the Helsinki region for decades, the idea being to improve east-west traffic flow by building a tunnel from the end of the western motorway (from Espoo) or Länsiväylä all the way to Sörnäisten Rantatie in the east. With cost estimates from 340 million Euros to 750 million Euros (a couple of years ago) no wonder the scheme was put to rest by the councillors. For now.

Meanwhile, that Planning Department publication (my translation) notes that:

Keskustatunneli is a street of 4km located in a tunnel … The tunnel has several junctions linking it to the surface street grid, the city centre’s parking facilities and the central service tunnel. The tunnel is a double tunnel with a dedicated tunnel for traffic in both directions. The tunnel is not for  the use of light transport, lorries or dangerous transports. An environmental impact assessment has been made.

If you only read that part of its underground plan, you’d be forgiven for believing that said tunnel is already there.

You have to finish the paragraph to find out that writing in the present indicative tense amounts to wishful thinking on the part of some incorrigible auto-fanatic transport planner with the world-view of a 1950s North American road-engineer. Before moving on, it finally hints that the tunnel is but a plan. It has aims and objectives.

The aim of the tunnel is to improve the vitality and accessibility of the centre and facilitate east-west links, transport safety, amenity values and to enhance opportunities for pedestrianising the city centre. The objective is also to lessen noise and pollution.

Exactly how hiding cars underground out of sight, that routinely drive in from the surrounding, growing sprawl of Finland’s increasing love-affair with detached houses, furthers any other objective than traffic growth and unhealthy lifestyles (and bigger backsides) is unclear.

Well, not unclear to everyone. Besides various political parties and councillors who have resisted the tunnel idea over the years, there are a good number of active citizens around who are opposed and keeping an eye on the situation, for example, loosely translated, “let’s kick the central tunnel up its posterior”.

Then again, there are lots of things other than cars that you can put into an underground tunnel. Municipal infrastructure for example. Pipes, to you and me. This cool image is from the famed Development Plan pdf available here.

P.S. the snow has finally arrived. We will endeavour to capture its effects on camera before it melts again. Thinking of Copenhagen…

Would someone turn the lights back on!

It has been ridiculously dark in Helsinki these past weeks. The cloud cover has been thick and menacing and the mild temperatures a scary but timely reminder of the significance of Copenhagen (the meeting, of course).

Cultural convention to the rescue! Helsingin Energia have lit up the Esplanadi with seasonal lighting for the second year running. The first time we spotted them, we thought the LED-covered trees looked like mutant, giant reindeer antlers.

Although the sky is, finally, clear and there is light at 9am, given that there is no snow to cheer things up, there is perhaps an argument to be made for lighting up bits of the city that are for everyone – particularly with power from a municipal infrastructure provider that’s still municipally owned. Meanwhile, the private energy giant, Siemens, lights up this, that, and the other around the world.

By rather neat coincidence, Siemens last week proclaimed Copenhagen the Greenest city in Europe. In its European Green City Index, Helsinki was the Nordic countries’ slacker, coming in at a poor seventh! It’s unclear whether the innovation of heating up the pavement (on Esplanadi since 2001) uses up any more energy than is already produced.

What would Höijer, architect of many of the sumptuous business and retail buildings on Pohjois Eplanadi,  make of the electric glitz now decorating his 1880s facades? (That’s all that’s in any sense original, most of the insides were totally rebuilt in the late 20th century.)

P.S. for a far, far better photo, see PPusa‘s daily pic!

Listen out for noise near Hanasaari CHP station!

In winter obviously we need to worry about warmth. Hanasaari power station, owned by Helsingin Energia/Helen, is starting up new machines this week. This requires some cleaning operations in which involve blasting steam into the air. This is apparently harmless but noisy. So in the press the company apologises in advance for any nuisance caused. Here is a picture taken before the old A-station was dismantled and, in case you overseas readers were wondering, at a time of year when the sea was iced over. It isn’t yet but hopefully we too will be able to ski around the city this year, as someone clearly has done when this was taken. Photo by BKFi here.

Hanasaari station is what greenish folks around the world have been talking about excitedly in recent years as CHP or cogeneration and as district heating. This has been built into everyday Finnish life since the 1950s, as everyone here knows, and Helen’s website tells you, and the station’s friendly boss Hannu Kepponen told me over the phone. Yes, it uses coal (and the mountain of coal always did fascinate me as a child if ever we went past) but it’s an efficient way of keeping the city going.

Here’s a pic (of the remaining part, B) taken from this year’s Flow festival in the summer. Alas, no autumn (or spring) pics are currently available.

Thanks, too, for permission to use the photo.

Municipal infrastructure

Once it was a question of access to a grave, later to a road (possibly even paved), then tap water, sewers, drains and possibly public transport. Then the infrastructure that keeps the world turning began to have more to do with communication. Even as a kid for me the collossal yellow-brick Post building next to Mannerheimin aukio was a sign that somehow roads and letters (the kind you read) were intimately linked. Photographed here 2 years ago before it got covered in scaffolding but several years after it was resized by its new neighbours, Kiasma and Sanomatalo.

This week Finland’s transport and communications ministry announced that broadband internet is to be a civic right. Even the UK’s Guardian reported this.

Municipal infrastructure is massively important if mostly unnoticed. Well, bizarrely enough, it’s in the ‘virtual’ age that it’s had more of a visible presence in the streetscape. Having said that, Finland tends to go for one-off huge masts rather than for the scattered British or French approach (though I have heard of the French tucking them away in church spires!)

The government gave advice back in 2003 on how to build masts and antennae in the landscape. Well, this one’s bizarrely aptly located behind what used to be the Telephone Association (of which earlier on this blog).

Before I start to sound like I’m sucking my teeth about how awful things are, let me remind readers that it was LESS THAN 20 YEARS ago – I’m not kidding – that the whole country had access to the electrical grid. Most people in Helsinki would probably think that was an outrageous lie, but there were one or two villages in the backwoods of Kainuu that were only linked up in 1981 if memory serves me right.

So much for all of Finland being all the same!

Disappearing act

Not only are cars and delivery vehicles to be hidden away from view in tomorrow’s Helsinki, today we learn that waste, solid waste as well as sewage, is to be whisked out of sight and out of mind on the city’s new waterfront developments (at least Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama). It will be sucked into giant vacuum tubes underground where not rats and above all no local seagulls will get at it.

Good results have already been reported in Sweden, including Stockholm’s new Hammarby Sjöstadt from where Canadians and probably others too, have been seeking inspiration.

Let this then be the inspiration for me to post some images of Jätkäsaari taken last week, including this warehouse carrying the name Sonck. Hey, he must have been a busy man.