Recycling Factory

Briefly, as one has ferries to catch and all.

Helsinki doesn’t just reuse buildings (as in Kaapelitehdas a.k.a. Cable Factory or Finland’s first culture industries venue where Nokia once turned copper into wealth – so one guesses), but locals seem keen on recycling and reusing STUFF as well. Yesterday, via Netcycler, I got rid of something nice but, to me, useless – a wicker laundry hamper. Today and tomorrow Kaapeli hosts the second exchange of surplus stuff, a true recycling fest to draw in folks of all ages, in an atmosphere bordering in places on manic and in other areas on a bit worthy.

Some pics here.

People could bring clean, intact clothes and take them away. And they did.

And there was stuff manufactured as reuse. Lamps made of medicine cups (is this just a Finnish thing or do Anglos recognise these too?) and record clocks.

Gotta run. This one was taken at least 40 minutes ago.

Thinking of the prefix ‘re’ in wonderful, beautiful, snowy Helsinki

The snow fall has been spectacular. A slight accident last Sunday involving a camera lens and ice explains why we are having to rely on old photos and therefore cannot bring to you the rows of white mounds to be found along the streets of Töölö this morning. One of last night’s more amusing pastimes was prodding them to find out whether underneath the smooth whiteness might be a car or a motorbike.

And why the accident? Because we went skating in Munkkivuori where the good locals somehow all converged on a small iced rink at the same time and found the tools with which to clear the ten or twenty centimetres of fluffy precipitation (and then the camera fell). The big freeze means we could go to a free venue rather than an organised, paying version, but we also needed to get skates from somewhere. No problem: Sportti Divari in Hermanni to the rescue!

Recycling and reusing are alive and well in this town, with or without the aid of the internet(cycling). So for some folks certainly, the old has its value.

Including old buildings. Here’s another gem from near the Senate Square. In the rear is Arppeanum, built 1869 in a somewhat neo-gothic style reminiscent of many English university facilities of its time, now the home of the University Museum and some delightful interiors as well as a decent place to have lunch (particularly since the loss of our dear Engel across the square). By the architect C.A. Edelfelt, known in Häme province for railway stations and everywhere else for his surname – the far better known Edelfelt, Albert the painter, was his son.

The building on the corner is later, 1887, architect unknown. Decent job. The lights often glowing in its windows suggest office work here too. Perhaps some part of the university has spilled out here, as it has in so much of the rest of Kruunuhaka – the academic ghetto, you might say. And below, a lecture theatre in Arppeanum – a feature of university buildings that some think is bound to disappear, others feel that if it does, one of the university’s most precious assets – live interaction – will have been lost.

But then it’s what’s being lost all over the place, not least due to misplaced urban policies that prefer to serve up nicely packaged heritage instead of supporting everyone’s right to history. Fortunately, critiques of “regeneration” are now abundant even if they’re not heard enough, perhaps because critique itself fell out of fashion some years ago. Mute Magazine in the UK still does critique – we are grateful and suggest a read here. Owen Hatherley writes about the now taken-for-granted principles of urban development, known in the UK as “urban renaissance” or rebirth, renewal, what have you:

In terms of architectural artefacts, the urban renaissance has meant … ‘centres’, entertainment venues and shopping/eating complexes, clustered around disused river-fronts (…); in housing, ‘mixed use’ blocks …, the privatisation of council estates, the reuse of old mills or factories; extensive public art, … usually symbolising an area’s phoenix-like re-emergence; districts become branded ‘quarters’; and, perhaps most curiously, piazzas (or, in the incongruously grandiose planning parlance, ‘public realm’) appear, with attendant coffee concessions, promising to bring European sophistication to [anywhere].

Helsinki even. Except, oops, Finland always had a coffee and a cafe culture – just not the kind that everyone recognised.

Recycling space

Undoubtedly there is such a thing as “space left over after planning”, or SLOAP. Some people think this is a bad thing – dereliction, lack of order or inefficient use of space. In Helsinki much of this has been around the docks or former docks, much of it is gradually being filled in with residential areas.

Some people, perhaps left over or redundant themselves (the grains of sand that yield the pearl?), make SLOAP home. In Helsinki film director Aki Kaurismäki has brought some of these spaces to the attention of those who normally wouldn’t see them or even know they exist. Many of his films are set on the edges culturally speaking as well as geographically (the more grassy shore which is now inaccessible – hence the tarmac in the pictures!). In Kaurismäki’s hands the margins have become so romantic that people have wondered if he had to create them as stage sets. No, for some decades it’s been possible to find lots of places like that in Helsinki.

Kaurismäki made nostalgia OK. It’s possible that his left-over landscapes are romantic because it’s so obvious that their existence is under threat in the super-planned, super-developmentalist city that Helsinki seems to have become. The cynic’s comfort lies in the thought that maybe one day the super-planned will have become “left over” itself.

Planners, one imagines, who have a reputation as technocrats, don’t like sloap. They prefer to have order, to have space recycled the way they want it. (On which note, it was recently reported and much bemoaned that a skateboarding park in Kallio, Wamma-park, built up over the years with only quiet and accepting disinterest from the planning department, was dismantled by the city last week. Blogs suggest that there’s a cycle here – build up, dismantle, rebuild, dismantle…)

But even the coldest, most unimaginative planner recognises that space is always also time. Layers, reuses, recyclings, reimaginings and such. They do, don’t they?

Sloap or not, here are some more images of Kyläsaari on Helsinki’s eastern flank. It still hosts a good smattering of activities. Wood working, metalwork shops, plant rental. Across the road a building and caravans parked behind it provide a home for some who are very much on the margins. (Assuming, that is, that my guess and an article in a Finnish women’s magazine [sic] is a trustworthy source).

Further up the road towards the motorway (these kinds of scenes so often occur near the beginnings of motorways!) is a place that’s more likely to draw in the average citizen. This is the recycling centre or, to give it it’s official name, Helsinki Metropolitan Area Reuse Centre Ltd. where a person with too much stuff and too little space to store it can get rid of it and still feel good. Next to it are also plenty of lively looking small industrial units and other places where the necessities of urban life are taken care of, quietly and invisibly (to most), so as not to disturb the centre. Not left over space there, but left over metal to be salvaged and reused.

And then, dear readers, we stumbled on a small-town version of something not that different. In Rantasalmi an old shop has been saved from demolition (for which it was given ‘exceptional’ permission already) by an active group of citizens who are renovating it as … a recycling centre for people interested in renovating and salvaging Finland’s more fragile architectural heritage, its wooden rural buildings. Here’s the shop’s opening times and its bin. More on this recycling space later.