Propaganda or magic – what the Guggenheim can do for Helsinki’s South Harbour

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_Hotel,_Helsinki#/media/File:HelsinkiPanorama_rocco.jpg

Today The Usual (Helsingin Sanomat) waxes excited and naive about the power of the Guggenheim Foundation’s winning competition entry for improving [sic] Helsinki’s South Harbour.

Ankeasta satama-alueesta on nyt mahdollisuus loihtia ainutlaatuinen, kuhiseva satama, joka houkuttelee niin kaupunkilaisia kuin turisteja. Siksi Helsingin ja valtion päättäjien kannattaa käydä läpi Guggenheim Helsinki -hankkeen taloudelliset ja kulttuuriset vaikutukset sekä uskaltaa tehdä päätöksiä.

[And our translation] The grim harbour area can now be conjured up into a unique, teeming port that attracts citizens as well as tourists. That is why Helsinki and the state would be well advised to go through the Guggenheim Helsinki’s economic and cultural impacts, as well as to dare make decisions.

Quite.

One big flaw in their argument is that the South Harbour is not broken. (See above or come and see for yourself in case it is soon broken).

The desire to “fix” this wonderful place comes from a well known source. The business-friendly ideology that produces all the rubbish novelty that has already turned our home planet into “pile of filth” (as the Pope put it last week) but calls it progress.

More like urbanicide.

The Eteläranta site temporarily set aside by the city for the Guggenheim currently works as a ferry terminal forecourt. It’s not the waterfront boulevard of which the editorial writers dream. But it is functional. Its adverse impact on traffic is manageable. Its ambiance is that of real life, real people doing real things.

OK, most of it is car park, but compared to the nuisance of the proposed winning design, it is benign in the extreme.

And yet, all we hear from the nation’s biggest newspaper and city leaders is how this all needs to be made better. The improvement rhetoric is overwhelming. It seeks to persuade us that all people want is pretty and safe custom-built spaces for standard-issue, non-stop, surprise-free (and no doubt begger-free) entertainment. For loitering suitable for homo neoliberalis.

The phrase “entertainment-security complex” comes to mind.

Well, the harbour does have a bit of a problem. Europe’s smallest and most pointless waterfront ferris-wheel went up on the Katajanokka site on the other side of the water. But theoretically it can at least be dismantled and something more appropriate built on the site.

Next to the Eteläranta site is also the old Palace hotel. This jewel of modernism was not exactly loved when it went up in 1951 to accommodate Olympics tourists. But since then, Viljo Revell’s and Keijo Petäjä’s sleek lines have housed hotel guests and business leaders not to mention fashion shows and become part of our collective memory. And since then Helsinki residents have also come to breathe easily around its restrained elegance, which adds to, rather than takes away, the richness I call my home town.

https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teollisuuskeskus#/media/File:Helsinki_2009_PD_0342.JPG

Sadly and mysteriously hotel operations in the building ceased in 2009.

Even more mysteriously, the editorial in today’s Usual ponders on how fabulous it would be if international hotel chains were to come here in the wake of the Guggenheim.

Perhaps they believe magic is better when it’s imported.

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.

Meaningful Design in Helsinki

It’s July. Juhannus a.k.a. midsummer is behind us. This is a complicated time of year. Air and water temperatures will (hopefully) rise a bit over the next few weeks. Meanwhile the days are already getting shorter.

This also means that over one half of the marketing ploy that is Helsinki’s Design Fest 2012 is over. Yet, like the middle of summer, the middle of the WDC-2012-year may be the mathematical middle of this year of design-hype but it’s not the middle in any meaningful way. The season is only just beginning!

We expect hard evidence of Finnish design excellence soon, and not just in a canyon left over by a redundant railway line turned over to cycling.

More in evidence and in the advertising has been the “heart” of Helsinki’s design festival. This is the temporary pavilion behind the Design Museum. A daily programme of events (speakers) there has been trying to enthuse people to learn about design since early May, with varying success.

Apart from the fact that it’s been incredibly cold in the space, perhaps the Helsinki public or the tourists who stray that way simply aren’t interested in being preached at. And it’s worth noting that the Finnish version of the website is a tad more heavy-handed than the English-language page about the great things design can do to make the world a better place. Perhaps the copywriters intuit that Panglossian rhetoric doesn’t sound so good translated from the Finnish into other languages.

But don’t get me wrong. We here at JHJ have admiration for beautiful design. We almost even agree with the myth that says Finnish design has grown organically out of the harsh but beautiful Finnish landscape. (And we recommend the recently published Finnish-language history of Finnish Design edited by Paula Hohti so you get the nuance too).

(We also recommend the design show at Taidehalli which, time permitting, JHJ will cover in a subsequent post, but if not, read the Helsinki Times’ inimitable prose [surely not, Ed.?] on the subject here).

But we do find the Helsinki take on design, er, just a little worthy.

There’s too much of the self-congratulatory about it all. For instance, that design is built into Finns’ lives from birth, when they receive a perfectly designed and perfectly functional maternity package to set them up with the best start in life, materially, technologically, culturally… (this is on show at the Virka gallery). And there’s far too much of design solving this, that and the other global problem.

And as if JHJ needs more grounds for scepticism about design’s (or Finland’s) capacity to fix real problems like, say, the Eurozone crisis, the Baltic or social alienation, today’s Omakaupunki publication tells us that the city can’t even get a simple traffic counter to work properly!

For months the city has been making noises about supporting cycling. To encourage us two-wheelers they have been counting our use of three popular routes.

I never was so clear on why being the two hundred and ninety-seventh cyclist to pass Helsinki Railway Station was supposed to feel encouraging, but it never bothered me either. But it turns out that the machine was so badly designed that it has left a third of us uncounted.

Apparently the counter at the Baana cycle corridor, which goes from Ruoholahti and Helsinki’s future high-rise hotel (see previous post) to the field of asphalt between Kiasma, the Sanoma  and the Music Buildings, does work. And apparently the route has been popular. (Just watch out as you spill out at the eastern end – I foresee accidents to come here.)

Still, design or not, we hope the Baana will get lots of use in the next few weeks before it gets too dark for most cyclists to venture down there.

Nature itself supports the Helsinki City Planning Department’s Visions

Today, 28.5.2012, is the last day for the public to submit comments regarding the planning proposal for a 33-storey hotel just to the west of the city centre, in Jätkäsaari. Late submissions have been known to have been accepted.

Read and acted upon?

That’s different.

According to a glossy corporate website, the Kämp Tower luxury hotel will open in November 2014.

This statement does fly in the face of the plan currently in force (allowing 16 storeys, itself pretty startling and, for architects, challenging, in the current Helsinki context). Such a prospect is also clearly devastating to many Helsinkians. Others are blissfully unaware of the plan, of course.

Future neighbours and some urban aficianados do know. After a public relations hearing in January, followed by a period of soliciting the public’s views (you know, citizen participation) the Planning Department published a robust rebuttal of the critical views. Called a review of the public consultation, you will find this if you swim around the Department’s haphazardly updated website often enough.

Alternatively, if you’re lucky, you may find it via this link to the minutes of the planning committee’s meeting held 13.3.2012. Liite (enclosure) 9 is a report outlining some of the objections to changing the currently valid development plan so that it could accommodate the 33-storey conference-centre-hotel that our Norwegian investor-friend (yes, he of the Herzog and de Meuron debacle in Katajanokka) wants.

Basically, most of the public sees the plans as inappropriate, bad and threatening Helsinki’s most cherished assets.

The Department pooh-poohs such retrograde opinions. The 33-storey hotel is appropriate to the site. It is a good thing for Helsinki and the surrounding areas. It does not in any way threaten the development of the city.

Not incidentally, the implication is that if one is against these very 33 storeys, one is against progress.

JHJ is not impressed with the way “public participation” is interpreted at the City Planning Department. Why would anyone bother to send any more comments, given that the obvious and pretty substantial comments made so far have been dismissed already?

No wonder so many people in Helsinki comment on the power of the City Planning Department. It is said that it employs well over a hundred people, maybe over 200, and operates behind closed doors. On their contacts page though it looks like it’s barely 50 folks.

Someone somewhere though is churning out one heck of a lot of strong rhetoric, verbal and visual, which appears to be paving the way to a strong change in the cityscape and atmosphere of our lovely pocket-sized capital.

A wooden monument to optimism

This post is effectively a huge thanks to Dan Hill and everyone else at Helsinki Design Lab/Sitra where they are promoting low-carbon urban planning. The freshly pressed visualizations on their blog, of the bizarreness otherwise known as parking norms in Helsinki, should make it harder than before for the peddlers of business-as-usual to argue their case. For, as JHJ has noted before, it should not be an easy case to make. (But then in Helsinki cases aren’t so much made or argued, it’s more a case of taking and sticking to positions. Read on.)

Yesterday’s post on the HDL blog compares new-build in London (the massive Shard skyscraper at London Bridge) and in Helsinki (the massive New Helsinki boom that is transforming what used to be Helsinki’s West Harbour). Note, the Helsinki project is being peddled as exquisitely green. Dan then on the HDL-blog (here’s that link again):

A typical block [in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki] will be designed to have around 7 floors and have to make space for approximately 120 parking spaces. Both cities are well-served by public transport (in fact, Helsinki has previously been voted as having the best public transport in Europe) and Helsinki being a compact city, you could walk to most bits of central Helsinki from Jätkäsaari.

But the visuals, only one of which I’m copying here because it’s worth reading the whole post (there was the link again) are really provocative:

http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/blog/week-165

On the back of this, let us pontificate: for Helsinki to stay as lovely as it is, let alone become even lovelier, its management must get rid this tendency to clog things up either with cars or sclerotic ideas. HDL’s visual will help.

What it will also require, though, is something that is in shockingly short supply here, namely self critique. In fact any kind of critique (not to be confused with dissing or haukkua in Finnish) would be a bonus.

Instead of debate and self-critique, we have something that makes me think of the allegro of Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, oddly enough: Lustiges Zusammensein der Landleute (Happy gathering of country folk).

As lovely as Helsinki is, endless self-congratulation is tiresome. The UK’s The Independent newspaper is the latest to pour heaps of dubiously argued (argued?!) praise on the whole country. Sure, it was once a fabulous place, and still is. But it sure is at risk of being messed up by amateurish and selfish decision-making, as any regular readers of our rants must know. Helsinki’s media (social and journalist-produced) is in danger of turning into a wooden monument to (misplaced) optimism. (The phrase borrowed with a twist from that excellent blog post. Did I already give the link?)

Helsinki optimism is really getting to us actually. Perhaps a short trip to smelly London is called for. It’s not as nice as Helsinki, but one knows that it will give one an injection of critical thinking. For instance the politically engaged Planners Network UK who know that now is not the time to foist solutions on others as much as to ask questions (Disorientation-guide pdf). Healthy disorientation in a time of obvious crisis (obvious outside Finland) can also be achieved through urban gardening in London. Looking forward.

Physical infrastructural preconditions for growth (edited with afterthought)

Form once followed function. Now form follows mostly finance. And sometimes it follows fashions.

An elected few in the City’s Planning Commmittee debated tall buildings last night. They made few decisions, it seems. Today Helsingin Sanomat contributes to this public debate on a controversial and difficult issue by noting as much. It helpfully adds that tower blocks are inhabited by satisfied people.

Since there are 50 tall buildings (over 16 storeys high) in the pipeline in Helsinki, the Planning Department was commissioned to report on this and to  give guidance.

So, the researchers did as they were bid. The free bit of online HS produces some of the visuals here. The paper also provides a lot in the way of short, sharp and depressingly familiarly hollow commentary.

It’s undeniable that Helsinki is incredibly sparsely populated and thus inefficient. All too often it feels empty of people.

But it’s not clear that building up is an answer. Particularly not when building up is seen to be most cost-effective in central locations. For background the report looks at the other Nordic cities and its own research. E.g. as published in Kvartti. But what does the graph above, about office rents in Stockholm and Helsinki, prove?

JHJ is more persuaded by the view that the arguments for so-called agglomeration benefits are looking a bit thin these days. Do cities really need physical infrastructural preconditions for economic growth as growth machinists used to think? Does Helsinki?

JHJ is inclined to think that speculating on public wealth – a shared city loved by so many – is a bit passe in these striking days.

But for the powers that be, the idea seems to be to turn Helsinki into a kind of bowl. Tall buildings will be allowed at the “gateways” to the city, east and west (Kalastama at Itäväylä, Jätkäsaari at Länsiväylä). Central Pasila will provide the co-ordinate to the north.

Which co-ordinate, for the record, JHJ wasn’t quite ready to argue against when it was consulted on (kind of) a year ago. Or even when first publicized 2 years ago.

Alas, the images being provided now make it clear that the effects of Zucchi’s cocktail of “sculptural” tallness, wide roads and probably unrealistic promises of street-level “vibrancy” will make JHJ’s nostalgia much, much worse. (If you didn’t spot them on the photo above, take another look.)

Meanwhile, though at street-level, Töölö’s own gem and super-agglomerator, Arkadia books, appears to be campaigning for lovely bicycles.

For another item of news that enervtated Helsinkians interested in their environment was namely that parking in central Helsinki is to become more expensive.

Amazing how many people seemed to feel sorry for folks in Töölö, even though they have the best possible public transport.

It is true that the area is losing more and more of its useful shops each year as retailers offload the cost of transport onto the car-owners. But you still can acquire most things necessary for a good life within a few blocks. Who needs a car?!

Weird.

An afterthought to this post on the prospect of tall buildings in Helsinki:

In case anyone wasn’t aware, many in Helsinki are rather proud of the city’s horizontal skyline. I’m not sure Finnish architects actually turn their noses up at “wow” architecture, but it is certainly true that Helsinki fans, from home and away, are quick to praise the way the city has retained its low-rise silhuette. Many of us are also grateful for the city’s sense of human scale. And for the way Helsinki’s light (or lack of it!) looks so stunning in the low-rise environment.

So, to the architects and engineers out there, is there really no way of making Helsinki more dense without dotting it with high-rise “teeth” (as we Finns say)?

He(a)rd this Saturday

Before we offer up a few tweet-like snippets of Helsinki-themed conversation, let’s just note with gratitude the legacy given to our fair city by the old co-operative movement, Elanto.

The bee-logoed co-op didn’t serve just the workers who shopped or worked there or who lived in its blocks of marvellous flats. Every shopper who sauntered down busy, busy (honest) Aleksanterinkatu in the 1950s would have passed by its gleaming new department store. More than likely they’d have seen (if not noticed) the relief by artist Aimo Tukiainen now sadly (almost) covered over.

Yesterday the old building was restored to a new sense of life. We hope.

The Kluuvi shopping mall (we think mall is a more apt word than centre, or even center) reopened. This time it also hosts an interesting riposte to Finland’s disastrous food retail duopoly. In the basement is a  new local/organic food market run by the team behind Eat & Joy Maatilatori. Bizarrely little about this fascinating venture online, so here’s just one of several not-brilliant pics taken yesterday.

Divided up between local-ish producers, and boasting cheese counters, fish, veg, probably overpriced stuff in jars and beautiful bread, oh, and fish smokery and bread oven built in, the place is rather a delight.

Elsewhere in/on Helsinki yesterday:

“I love this city.”

“God it’s cold” (in various languages).

“Things are getting ugly now in Helsinki, I’m sorry to say” – Helsinki resident Carlos Lamuela speaking about plans to cover even more of Espoo and Helsinki with asphalt at Dodo’s annual Megapolis event.

“Some impolite urban planning, here by Le Corbusier” – someone talking about an image of the insane Paris Plan Voisin.

“Please do something before it’s too late”, Lamuela again.

“We’re fed up with the same shit in our food shops”, someone about Kluuvi.

“People are more difficult than buildings”, someone talking about New Helsinki.