Mad, bad, and sad – just a road in Pasila

Dear reader,

Do you recall JHJ getting rather hot under the collar about the comprehension-defying prospect of a new major road flooding Helsinki’s lovely peninsula with ever more cars? About a year ago on this very blog?

Driving a massive road through an as-yet-unbuilt residential area is crazy on any number of grounds. Articulate critical voices in the blogosphere and even, amazingly, on the letters page of Helsingin Sanomat on 16.4.2013 have made that much clear.

Blog posts today, e.g. here and here, indicate that friends of progressive transport planning in Helsinki are simply dumbfounded.

Trailing behind everyone else once again, Helsinki is about to build a brand new road including an enormous underpass. Nothing of this scale exists here yet.

Where such massive underpasses for cars do exist, they tend to be liked by drivers (from other places) in a hurry. Most other people fear and loathe them. Some cities are turning them back into useful spaces for real people, reconnecting neighbourhoods that were earlier disconnected by … er… roads like the proposed Veturitie.

And this also feels like a grim day for democracy in Helsinki. As massive a road as this in this place, with its patchwork of land ownership, and with the superlative-defying monetary, spatial and human resources that are being poured into the vast “regeneration exercise” of which it is a part, must have been pushed through the system (even in as complacent a city as Helsinki) by dedicated and big-stakes behind-the-scenes horsetrading.

Unfortunately, unlike at, say King’s Cross in London, where local residents took up arms and waged battles for years and years, here Helsinki’s planners and politicians are in the fortunate position (disastrous for future generations as it may be) of working in an area that is almost tabula rasa.

Mad, bad and sad.

 

Sceneries of Helsinki – Adieu on this snowy Independence Day

If you are interested in how ideals congeal into matter, and if you appreciate that a seven-storey building can be “human-sized”, do come and visit Helsinki.

But whether you’re here or just planning a visit, make sure to enjoy it before it’s too late. The “pressure” to build (particularly on the water) is producing a stunning list of new and attractive opportunities for the building sector. The Planning Department’s webpage contains so much architectural and planning dross it makes me weep.

From redesigning the rural idylls of Östersundom and the fast-growing suburbs to the east, to the bombastic dullness of the other so-called New Helsinki zones, up the high-rise-hotel (a new symbol for Helsinki?!) on the western edge of the peninsula, and down to the wrangle over a helicopter pad in Hernesaari … our enormous Planning Department must be a hive of activity.

Presumably everywhere architecture and construction have sped up through computer-aided technology and politics-to-suit-the-rich. The craze for big and showy in Helsinki is also capitalizing on the genuine problem that Helsinki’s land-use is wasteful by European standards (as even Wikipedia will tell you). So as they turn over more and more of the city to speculative building, the usual suspects (Kokoomus politicians like young Mr Männistö who heads the planning committee, for example) have at their disposal a machine more powerful than ever with which to smother the city with monuments to today’s impatient capitalism, but also a vaguely green-sounding argument for building high.

Can protesters and activists keep up? They are beginning to try. Some have stepped up their campaigns with letters to the planning department and to editors (if you have access to Helsingin Sanomat you can follow an interesting exchange here), and with new websites and blogs.

Perhaps the new little exhibition at the Architecture Museum, Unbuilt Helsinki, is also a kind of protest. Maybe. I’d describe it as difficult art. But it is based on a larger, longer project that might yield some stories yet, about how the choices were once made that created the city we  still love.

Is there any point in trying to resist? Haven’t the rich always shaped the city?

Probably. But I can’t believe the rich have always been this stupid or careless. In this little gem of a city we appear to have rich folks who can’t distinguish a fine skyscraper from an a architectural erectile dysfunction.

And, to give me the excuse to share this bit of silliness (below), Helsinki’s rich presumably also think a good evening’s eating out might have some connection to forest sceneries. I think, Helsinki, we have a massive problem on our hands.

If, dear reader, you have any thoughts on the design of future Helsinki that haven’t been taken up on this blog, or that should be taken in new directions, I’d love to know. The thing is, I’m not going away, but I think this blog should now wind up. It’s time for something more serious.

Thank you so much for reading. JHJ.

The Great Transformation

So long, summer. Hello electioneering. We hope.

Municipal elections are on 28 October and, gratefully, the Great Transformation is at least somewhere on the agenda.

By Great Transformation I’m not talking about the shift from a kind of all-round existence to the market fundamentalism most of us now take for granted. (See Karl Polanyi’s great book of that name for that story.)

Nor am I talking about the great climate transformation that this blind fundamentalism has brought with it. (Check out George Monbiot’s text about that here).

I am of course talking about New Helsinki and all the stray bits and pieces of urban development going on around it.

Did I say development? Slip of the keys.

At the small scale Helsinki is, and is likely to remain, wonderful. At the bigger scale, well, watch out and invite your friends to visit soon. Something big and ugly is expected near here soon.

Almost whichever way you look, the Helsinki Planning Department is getting a lot wrong. It makes room for cars not people, that is, for cars, not people. It plans to chop down forests where it doesn’t need to. It drives big roads into the city centre. It plans for megamalls instead of local shops. Perhaps it’s even opening the door to mediocre and anti-social architecture. (Surely not!)

It wants to build high and although plenty of people and quite a few bloggers are aghast, I have yet to find anyone who believes the madness could actually be stopped.

Saying “no” or looking for alternatives to “the authorities” perhaps doesn’t come naturally to Finns. (See here for a relevant and nice Finnish piece on the topic).

New Yorkers had been saying “no” with a vengeance since the 1960s and the prickly, saintly Jane Jacobs. Even in Stockholm there must have been critical voices over the years, since nothing like the high-going hubris of Sergels Torg has ever been allowed (at least near the centre) since that went up in the 1950s.

JHJ and friends are grateful to those who are doing something to be constructively critical, e.g. here, here and here. (This last link gets in because before the Töölönlahti moonlight swim of a few nights ago – where ordinary folks protested/rejoiced in the bay with their bodies – Peltsi Peltonen made an impassioned speech on behalf of the sea and against business-as-usual that was music to JHJ’s critique-starved ears.)

Looking forward then to urban planning inching its way onto the political agenda.

Going high

It’s been a wonderful summer and August is shaping up to be just as happy and as busy as it always is.

You know, in Helsinki the weather matters, the length of the days matter. Life is lived in pulses and rather precise rhythms. For instance the whole country has been on holiday for all of July. Not for Finland the “constant er*ction” that early 21st-century global business expects of its workers, (that naughty phrase is borrowed – from memory – from the shockingly lazy Corinne Maier).

Maybe.

Like so many other Helsinkians in August, JHJ has taken overseas visitors to the top of Torni. As seen from here, a phone mast, an old fire station punctuate the pleasant rhythm of Helsinki’s unique late-summer cityscape.

In Helsinki’s August this year the world design capital machinery is ratcheting up its programme a notch. Many of us are waiting for (or preparing for) the Helsinki Festival. And many, many lovely, quirky, late-summer-happy Helsinkians who like doing things in town (read all about it here) are taking advantage of the still-gorgeous weather to DIWO (do it with others).

JHJ is loving it and the visitors are suitably, slightly, pleasantly awed as they point their cameras to horizons still visible over Helsinki’s rooftops.

But while the thousands of Helsinkians just mentioned are busy “unlocking” shared energies, there are those who are quietly planning to lock up much more. I refer to the craze in the Planning Department for tall buildings. (JHJ wrote an earlier rant here, Lewism wrote sensibly about this last year.)

The grapevine tells JHJ that many, many built environment professionals are aghast at what’s in the pipeline. Similarly, the grapevine tells JHJ that younger built environment professionals in a relatively small job market are afraid to pronounce in public that they too are dubious about the radical – really radical – proposed increase in the height of Helsinki buildings.

In a city where the sun is such a precious thing that an entire month (and countless evenings of terassis before and after) must be devoted to it, what a topsy-turvy idea from the Planning Department to block it out.

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.

Helsinki car farce

If anyone can shed light on this weird story, do please let us know.

There have been a few news items recently (here in pay-to-read HS) about a spat in the City Council over parking spaces. Representatives of Kokoomus (whose supporters generally like big cars) are unhappy that representatives of the Greens (whose supporters profess to dislike all cars) appear to be gaining unfair advantage in Jätkäsaari. Bizarrely enough, we know now what cars they all drive (or don’t)!

Jätkäsaari is one of New Helsinki’s building sites now. It used to be a place folks went to swim and hang out. Then it became harbour. Then it became container harbour. Then it became a field of concrete before the builders arrived.

The City is plugging the reasonable idea that Jätkäsaari lends itself to particularly environment-friendly living. One of the buildings will be Sitra’s Low2No project. Another is a communal block being built by the Hem i Stan association for their own needs. As the article in Helsingin Energia’s recent newsletter pdf put it:

Rakentamisen periaatteina ovat yhteisöllisyys, ekologisuus
ja esteettömyys. Yhteisiä tiloja rakennetaan tuplasti sen
verran kuin kerrostaloihin yleensä.
– Kattoterassi ja sauna, pesula, juhlasali ja suurtalouskeittiö
astioineen asukkaiden yhteisiä tai kunkin omia tilaisuuksia
varten, yhteinen olohuone…

or

The principles of the building are community, environmentalism and access. There’ll be twice as many communal spaces as in an ordinary block of flats.

– A roofterrace, sauna, laundry room, banquet room [juhlasali, anyone?] with a large kitchen so residents can organise shared or even private parties, shared living room…

Sounds great! And since these people have taken on board the hype about green Jätkäsaari being near public transport links, they feel they can survive with fewer cars.

And how this pisses others off!! And the others may yet force the builders to add a million Euro to the budget and remove 22 parking spaces worth of scarce resource to meet Helsinki’s building standards. Legally.

What we don’t understand is how this became a party-political thing. Except that, unsurprisingly, some of the folks involved and due to own property here, happen to be Green politicians. Good for them, say we.

Besides, we had always thought that parking standards are about reducing car-dependency, as it puts a strain on shared resources. But it seems in Helsinki parking standards don’t set maximums but minimums.

The only legal or regulatory info we found was  from Finlex, Finnish law. The statutes, from 1958, stipulates that enough (not specified) space must be provided for private vehicles.

Ice pea

Zillions of people seemed to be out walking on the ice in front of our fair city on this sunny Sunday. But one poor b*****d in a boat has been going around in circles for hours preventing ice from forming so that more lorry-loads of snow can be dumped into the Baltic.

Anyone wanting to go there, take the 14B or 16 to the end stop, tip of Hernesaari, and be mesmerised.

Besides the zillions on the ice quite a few people were hanging out in Hernesaari. Part of New Helsinki (which is to say where Helsinki used to go to work when work was physical and manipulated stuff directly), Hernesaari is a strange thing. Largely landfill, the jobs still being done there will have to go in 2012 after which it will be liberated for uses with better price-quality ratios (as we Finns say).

Currently there are some sizeable harbour buildings and facilities. Loads of boaty things, helicoptery things, a place to get the statutory check up of your car sorted, and somewhere to arrive by cruise ship and buy souvenirs (at the back of the line of cars), and to park cars. Presumably they were mostly there to chauffeur kids to and from ice hockey or figure skating training.

My young ice-hockey playing friend was taken by public transport. He told me and the parent about how much he likes ice hockey. He also told us about the painting or mural on the wall of the cafe in the ice rink. Cafe Jääherne, Ice Pea. (Yes, Herne does mean pea). I’d already spotted the mural on the corrugated iron wall. And I’d photographed it (small people in vastly expensive sports gear whizzing around an ice rink is a cute thing to watch but it didn’t really sustain my interest very long).

So my friend told me that the people who run the cafe are going to build a new one when the ice rink (once some industrial building) gets torn down and is replaced by all those new homes. That’s why they drew a picture of what the future will be like.

The cafe is a bit hard to see, but it’s there on the right-hand corner of the cross street, by the yellow car

My little friend’s parent started to say something along the lines of, why is Helsinki being turned into luxury homes. I’m not sure Hernesaari will be but even if it does fall victim to waterfront-development, I’d not know how to have a very constructive discussion about it.

So we began to talk about pancake. While one guy had some.

Popped up and left quickly – a culinary angle

Hel Yes! the pop-up restaurant in Kalasatama was (yes, was) excellent beyond expectations.

But we were not positive about it to start with.

Mostly that’s because some overblown idea of gourmet has done terrible things recently to Helsinki’s restaurant culture. Like many others, we here at JHJ have enjoyed the slightly retro (well, unchanged)  white-table-cloth and black-clad staff-type places that have served food, wine, beer and people-watching (and the odd bout of embarrassing bohemian over-enthusiasm) for decades. Seems mostly since the 1930s.

It’s not just baltic herring with mashed potatoes, Wiener schitzel (Finnish style made with pork), meat balls and variations on fish of all kinds. A few lovely innovations have been produced by chefs past and present. And they have been sold at reasonable prices and with no-nonsense but professional service. (Did I mention the uniforms?)

Alas, this is being sidelined if not obliterated. Every new restaurant I hear about, even from people who enthuse about down-shifting, turns out to be one of those where it’s not enough that the food and drink are good and the decor (and acoustics) pleasant. Now restaurant food has to come with a story. This is usually provided either by the waiter or the chef himself (sic) who does not care about conversations started prior to the performance.

I thought being told about the ingredients and cooking methods of a fish dish for 45 seconds was excrutiating. The 7 minutes I was told about would have been unbearable.

And I hesitate to tell you where, exactly, this happened. Yet I think people should be warned! Shouldn’t a waiter really bring the food and leave at least relatively quickly? And, if the customers are genuinely interested, take it to the next level then?

With its team of media-friendly designer producers (Hel Yes! was organised by the Finnish Institute in London to showcase Finnish talent), it had the feel of a place that might have gone for just this brand of cultural-class silliness. And they did – but only a bit. Since they only had one menu (allergies etc. could be dealt with with advance warning), it seemed sensible to have someone announce what we were about to eat. And so a young man in chef’s clothes spoke informatively but briefly into a microphone.

Mutton with Janssons’ temptation – not the culinary equivalent of, say, Ronchamp, but definitely memorable. Food critics have liked Hel Yes!

And a pop-up restaurant? Wasn’t that trying a bit hard? Well, not really. Because it worked. Full house on Wednesday – and as in a gourmet spike (where everybody goes), the table was booked weeks ago.

We’ve no idea what else that now-derelict harbour and light industrial area might yet host. This was in conjunction with the City’s promotion of New Helsinki. And a good thing too. Whoever supports it, pop-up temporary stuff is letting people do interesting things even if they haven’t got endless capital to invest. In and after (?) recession this suggests itself as a great idea, even the New York Times agrees.

So, well done Antto Melasniemi, Heikki Purhonen and the rest of the Hel Yes! team.

Post script

Culinary conventions really have passed us by! I bought the ingredients for a new recipe I found in a wine magazine hoping to have a novelty for dinner. What I hadn’t realised that it takes 3 hours plus “several” more in the marinade, to prepare.

Guess it’ll be tomorrow lunch then. Fortunately an ordinarily good purveyor of that wiener schnitzel is close by. Hel Yes! having started its final evening 15 minutes ago.

Designer designs for a design-wharf

Last year Helsinki was gripped with fear lest the main market and its environs be sacrificed to the whims of footloose capital, travelling salesmen and tourists. We were being asked to say yes to the icy design hotel by Herzog + de Meuron. The level of debate was remarkably high as we reported in earlier posts. The design(er) hotel scheme was turned down not because of a knee-jerk reaction against foreigners or glitz, but because people felt and understood that it would destroy something vital.

Since then computer-aided image mongers at the City Planning Department and the architects offices it’s commissioned, have produced a steady stream of New Helsinki bumph. They’ve been eager and able to add sun where it has no hope of shining, offer us sleek and carless roads (left), designer-designed dentists surgeries and other unlikely designs for our shared future.

Architects’ drawings are much loved by JHJ and there’s no reason why a computer-aided version should be any less valued or meaningful than a line drawing of a proposed construction by, say, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. But it just seems that almost all that we’ve seen in this department over the last year and a bit has been appalling – one way or another. It demonstrate alienation from any sense of environment and reality. Most of it presents buildings of blandness or bombast (or combinations of both). It’s the sort of stuff that inspires Britain’s excellent architecture critics, like Jonathan Glancey, Jonathan Meades or Owen Hatherley (where are the women in this list!?) to exercise their verbal virtuosity and architectural, er, nose. They would presumably see/smell these too as examples of architectural homicide and urban de-generation by the usual culprits: shopping, shopping, banks and tourist “attractions”.

Alas, Finland doesn’t really do critique about professional expertise (it’s usually said as an excuse that the pond is too small, nobody wants to or can afford to, dirty their own nest). We are, however, grateful to Arkkivahti (who is not a man). But when the Swiss duo and their peculiar hotel was presented as the obviously progressive choice against all the critics’ varied and thoughtful reservations, the local public just kept coming back with even more thoughtful and sensible objections until the Council eventually voted against.

The BIG DESIGN hotel may be off the agenda, but design-fever has displaced innovation-mania and gripped the city from Herttoniemi to Hietalahti/Punavuori. This is an area much loved for its lack of designed design. Re-branded with the offending d-word plans for its future are now being presented by the Planning Department (at Laituri and the web) to howls of derision from most of the respondents on the website.

“Design Telakka” (telakka = wharf) is the really, really old waterfront area of Helsinki, on the end of Punavuori. Only a decade ago you could see men making ships here. Here in particular Helsinkians could see and sense that their lives were connected to the world beyond the oceans, just as they could appreciate the significance of shipbuilders’ skilled efforts to make real things to a high quality. (Not, as the blurb on one of the designs being showcased, “high-class”, which makes one think of whores – though given that this was also a red-light district in the 17th century already and there is some porn for sale quite close by, it’s an association to make one smile.)

Below, for your delectation, some translated snippets from a random selection of online comments.

The proposal pretty much combines Merihaka‘s and Eiranranta’s negative aspects. (About the design called Hot Dock)

Redundant squares are the bane of Nordic towns. I’ve yet to see one that works. Could turn into car parks though I suppose, it’s what usually happens. (about NOAH)

Totally arse that Nosturi will be demolished and ELMU who do good stuff for young people will have to go to make way for the rich creamy-arses who’ll get another of their galleries into the best spot in the centre, and let young people go somewhere on the urban fringe to party, thanks again City! (about NOAH)

Very good but should be perimeter blocks. Why on earth can’t these idiot architects plan proper blocks any more? (on Living Harbour)

The modern, dark towers don’t fit the surroundings. Even uglier than the sausage building.

Aren’t we getting enough of those in Keilalahti anyway [see JHJ’s earlier post] so you’d think they didn’t need to come to spoil the city centre? (On Eighteensixtyfive)

Note, Living Harbour (below and here) seemed to get the warmest reaction (understandably), NOAH also avoided blanket condemnation.

The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth

That’s the name of an interesting new book by Robert Kirkman, subtitled, ‘the future of our built environment’. Though Kirkman is from the USA, the cover photo shows London’s M25 “ring road” with its right-hand-drive traffic bunched magesterially across five lanes going one way, a little less cosy on five lanes going the other, all amid England’s green and pleasant (as was) land.

So whilst we all love to slag off Americans-in-big-stupid cars, we might as well be a bit more ecumenical and admit that people in big-stupid-cars flourish everywhere. Even in Helsinki. Even in my beloved Eira. Especially  in Eira.

Some effort goes into working out just how many cars ARE in Helsinki and around it.

Top left, the yellow line shows trips in private cars compared to trips  by public transport in the Helsinki area. Top right, the steady reduction in the proportion of journeys made in the Helsinki region by public transport. Bottom, mode of transport crossing the boundary between Helsinki and its neighbours (top down: motor car; bus; tram; metro; train).

It was with some satisfaction then, that we found a piece of polite but firm anti-stupidity about Helsinki and cars from the environmental organisation Dodo. As part of the recently closed consultation on the first part of the Pasila redevelopment plan (the competition is open for the next bit), they wrote a thoughtful letter to the City that they also published on their website. Here a few translated snippets.

With our suggestions we would like to strengthen Mid-Pasila’s identity as a place and not just as a compulsory through-road. We believe that as central an area needs to be planned from a premise whose motto could be: “not a square metre of uninteresting space”.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. So now, let’s everyone do all we can to abolish those stupid ideas of routing a four-or-more-lane highway through the area. Let’s just remind ourselves of what we are actually talking about. At least, as it was for much of last summer.