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.

 

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.

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.

Vertical in Helsinki take 2 – or planning Pasila

A successful businessman and a dabbler in Helsinki’s/Helsingfors’s local politics, Julius Tallberg was keen to get the best creative types to give shape to his dream of a seriously thrusting metropolitan cityscape. Or, put another way, Julius Tallberg bankrolled a planning scheme, Pro Helsingfors, also Suur Helsinki or Great Helsinki, in 1918 into which Bertel Jung, Eliel Saarinen, and Einar Sjöström, three young and very talented architects of the time, put very considerable energy. This developed the idea that Pasila, a valley towards the north of the peninsula on which Helsinki rests, would be a good place for a vibrant and easily accessible city centre, at least for a railway station. It also indulged the conceit that Helsinki could and should build big and showy to be properly progressive.

Tomorrow, on 22.10.2010, the planning process for the area to become Central Pasila area goes one notch further as … well, we’re not sure what. Tomorrow is some deadline or other imposed by the Helsinki City Planning Department. How, exactly, the public consultation is working, is not quite clear from the internet or from the four A4 pages of rhetoric and pretty pictures that one can pick up around the city’s municipal service points. Maybe I should have gone and asked the friendly staff at Laituri.

What is a little bit clearer, are the proposed locations of the skyscrapers that will form part of the early 21st century version of Tallberg’s dream of metropolis. In the image below, as produced for Helsinki by the Milanese architects Cino Zucchi, they are the black polygons sitting in a kind of jagged strip of green. If you know the area, you might be able to work out that they are to be built just south of the station and the exposed bridge that goes from East to West Pasila.

Unfortunately but predictably the plans are terribly disappointing. It’s anybody’s guess how towers of mostly offices and the big road that ploughs through them (popping out from under the proposed blue-box-shopping-centre and bringing all those cars from the road to Nurmijärvi, see our last post) are going to help the city reach its goal of creating a vibrant, cosmopolitan etc, etc, new neighbourhood to optimise the area’s rail infrastructure and excellent geographical location.

Here is some idea of what is being dreamt up currently, cut and pasted, from the Planning Department’s website.

There is certainly potential in the area. Shame that the plans seem to create more of a barrier to separate than a magnet to bring current and future locals together. Poor people, we think. Thirty years after the planning disasters that created East and West Pasila, they are actually making the best of them, creating (as JHJ has been reliably informed) pleasant and neighbourly, er, neighbourhoods.

In the valley between these two unglamorous but not-so-bad areas, tomorrow’s Central Pasila, you’ll currently find railway sidings and listed buildings (see our earlier post) from the days when the area was the heart of Helsinki’s freight railway. They’re partly being used by creative types for creative work and community gardening. How, if at all, the potential of these areas to generate an identity or contribute to an interesting urban fabric at the foot of the skyscrapers, is totally unclear.

North of Pasila station, on the other hand, there certainly is scope to build from scratch. After all, the area has been  freight containers and other bits of urban technology for decades. The architectural renderings have the area as generic and neat boxes. Residential, perhaps, but not yet on a drawing board anywhere near us.

Insult to injury: in keeping with Finland’s current planning orthodoxy, Central Pasila as a whole is to be held together with its own lynchpin, a shoebox-shaped shopping centre (the blue box in the small map, above).

Here is the link if you want to enter the competition for this next stage of the entire process.

Once was a railway

This wonderful photograph is by one of many folks who have felt the need to comment on the passing of this part of the city. “Melancholic Optimist” posted this on Flickr, along with lots of other cool stuff.

We have been mentioning Helsinki’s disappearing railways a lot recently this blog. Today in our spotlight is Pasila, what some have described as Helsinki’s Croydon …

Pasila is an area that’s been most cruelly treated – in architectural terms – in the past. It will soon also inaugurate a new era in Finnish housing with a much-discussed high rise scheme. To the parts of Pasila dissected by the railway and railway sidings for a century, East and West Pasila, this will add mid, or Keski, Pasila.

But it’s not a tabula rasa that’s being worked on here, but a fascinating layering of cultural history and surprisingly fertile nature. Here, it’s not just the late 19th century that comes to mind on the abandoned railway, but the concrete galleries of the post-war years.

Some of this area is currently something between SLOAP (space left over after planning) and extremely interesting speculative land. Some is in use by railway enthusiasts, by VR (Finnish railways), and by artists and petanque players who use the red-brick railway sheds (listed by the Board of Antiquities as cultural heritage to be protected). According to the City’s website, there are just a few enterprises here, a few dozen employees. In the City’s vision of “New Helsinki” some of these buildings will remain. Still, there’ll be thousands of jobs here, wedged between a “media cluster” in West Pasila (already there) and the spanky new residential in Central.

I even found out that turntables were part of the railways before LP records were even dreamt of. Not that I did find out what the little cabin is called. Anyway, all in aid of getting railway carriages and locomotives facing the right direction!

From Pasila there’s a newer harbour railway, or rather there was, to Kalasatama, which was built in 1965 and dismantled at some point after the harbour left Sompasaari (of which today’s Kalasatama was a part) and opened up for business in the new harbour in Vuosaari. The intrepid can still walk the length of this route. They can wonder at the strange beauty (captured in that first pic and, perhaps, my efforts below) of the 1960s concrete originally put there to help stuff reach us all faster.

Monopolies and wooden sky-scrapers: comments from a small country

Opinions are divided on the City’s plans to build 10 tower blocks in Pasila near where some SLOAP (space left over after planning) currently offers urban farming, petanque and antique railway enthusiasts space to flourish. The towers are said to promote dense and therefore sustainable urban living, Pasila is the right place for la-defense-like towers, Helsinki needs some pizzazz in its architecture – such are the views in favour. But then again such tall buildings won’t work at this latitude, nobody really likes high-rise living, quality of workmanship and building is unlikely to be good enough to keep the area pleasant (contra). Right, renderings from Cino Zucchi Architetti, more here.

Perhaps inspired by the news, one tongue-in-cheek (or not) letter to the editor in The Usual suggests that on Katajanokka instead of the gigantic ice-cube-like hotel designed by Swiss architects, Helsinki should erect a monument to Finland and its modern spirit: a wooden skyscraper. That would convey all the right messages.

Related, or not, to questions of urban form and ideas about concentration (people, power, buildings) elsewhere talk turns to a feature of Finnish society which even many social critics prefer to ignore, namely continuing support for corporatism and monopolies. On 18.11 in HS a Canadian journalist living in Helsinki, Brett Young, writes:

Suomi on pieni maa, jota hallitsevat dynaamiset monopolit. [Finland is a small country dominated by dynamic monopolies.]

and

[… a country that produces high-quality products for global markets and remains internationally competitive despite its small size and the semi-monopolies that force their way everywhere.]

In the same issue author Kjell Westö notes how often it’s commented on in Finland that in a small country power becomes concentrated, this is apparently totally natural. Secretly Finland is perhaps a little smaller than other countries with an equally small population, he muses, since power has the habit of concentrating just that little bit more here.