In Helsinki you can trust so-called classical music

If we can’t trust bankers, economists or debtors anywhere, at least in Helsinki there are still quite a few things you can trust. You can trust

… that Stokkers will go mad  twice a year.

… that it’ll be rainy and cold in late October.

… cold and rainy enough to need lots of firewood and other warm stuff for the Occupy Helsinki Camp/real democracy activists who have set up tents behind Sanomatalo. They are camped (quite legally) in the area that some call Kansalaistori (Citizens’ Square) (though for some users it’ll cost ya, a snip at the citizenly price of 49 000 Euros…)

You can trust the city and Helsingin Leijona to make a hash of the “regeneration” of the area around Helsinki’s Senate Square like the old Kiseleff Bazaar (where Stokkers once was, by the way). And don’t even mention their English language web pages!

You can also trust Finns in service professions to respond to shortcomings with an appeal to technology (“our computer system doesn’t…”) rather than an apology and a smile.

But above all trust this city to offer up good classical music.

That is how JHJ got to see those world-changers’ tents in the first place. An aged relative offered a ticket at very short notice for today’s early evening concert.

So who cares if Helsinki’s new Music Building/Centre reminds some people of a business park and infuriates others with its crush to get coats. (LPR Architects – what happened there?)

To others the building pulses with rhythm and emotion, and with perfection that’s rare in these untrusting, impatient, times.

Today’s concert by the Helsinki Philharmonic featured a melodious new work by veteran composer Aulis Sallinen. Nice enough as it was, and impressive as Okko Kamu’s conducting looked, it seems the audience were there to celebrate and lap up the warmth and virtuosity of Aale Lindgren.

Lindgren wasn’t just the day’s soloist, he is “orchestra member of the month” according to the programme. Which is worth translating and quoting at length.

I am Aale Asser Armas Lindgren, I was born 17.11.1951 in Kemi. I guess I spent my first year in Haukiputaa old people’s home, apparently happyfying its elderly residents. For a few years I was fostered in the same parish after which I was moved into a large family in Sipoo.

…

Song was one of our great joys. Our teacher … founded a choir in which most of the singers must have been my dark-eyed co-residents. Often the teacher gave me solos, which I greatly enjoyed.

…

So-called classical music got a hold of me early on, but I kept my passion to myself afraid that the other children might mock me for it.

…

My real family has been the Helsinki Philharmonic, which adopted me in 1972, 1st of September at 10 in the morning. The sisters and brothers with whom I have had the pleasure to have played, are large in my heart. My fathers have been conductors … mothers I’m still in want of.

The audience I have always loved and love I’ve received in return.

Apologies to all for such a long quote. Hope you liked it.

On Helsinki’s treatment of homeless Roma

We live in an age that accepts increasing inequality and worships the wealthy. As a result “our moral sentiments have … been corrupted”. All this and much more uplifting if challenging wisdom can be found in Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land (available also in Finnish!). The economic historian (and they should have some perspective!) wrote it practically on his death bed for young people in particular. I’m not young, but I cannot recommend highly enough a book that takes seriously the gnawing but justifiable sensation that something is profoundly wrong with the way we live.

Like in most of the rest of the West (for yes Finland is, for all its monopolies, its love of the backwoods, its short, shallow and therefore often changeable urban history, part of the West or the North) Finland has been building growing inequality into its architecture and landscape. Corporate glass and caffeine here, prejudiced neighbourhoods there, gates and CCTVs everywhere. Lots of land, but not for everyone.

What some hopefully refer to as Metropolitan Helsinki is getting all the warts that come with a big city. Life is now spiced with the products of turn-of-the-millennium financial mismanagement-cum-dogma (on which see previous post). It’s not easy to rule all this, but the most radical/constructive that Finnish critics can come up with at the moment is to turn to social media and self-help. We can build a better future ourselves…

This fine building is where national hero and poor Finnish-speaker C.G.E. Mannerheim was born. By central European standards it’s quite small (for a home for the very rich, I mean) but in Finland it stands out for its obvious wealth and, I think, elegance.

From the moment Louhisaari was built in 1655 until, oh, about 20 years ago, the country around it was steadily progressing towards more well-being for everyone. Social distinctions became less important for how well you could live. From time to time xenophobic fear made it harder for migrants – domestic or from overseas – to make their contribution. (We gather that at present the insultingly renamed Finns-party (aaargghh – that was HARD) are quite popular around Louhisaari.)

But this blog prefers to remember that there have always been people in Finland who have thirsted for inspiration from strangers.

At the Mannerheim dinner table, according to JHJ’s tour guide in Louhisaari,  narrow-mindedness was discouraged. Multilingualism on the other hand was encouraged and, by all accounts, achieved.

Narrow mindedness and a lack of compassion are back, at least in Helsinki.

According to Free Movement, an organisation looking out for the rights of migrants in Finland, the police have finally evicted the Roma who have been using Satama social center [sic] as their base. Satama being, of course, a refreshing but very, very rare example of autonomous and bottom-up use of (otherwise underutilised) urban space in Helsinki. It’s one of the few places where you could point at action to defend a person’s (every person’s) right to the city.

According to Free Movement’s website, the police evicted all of Satama’s volunteer activity and the Roma occupants of the area. They add that:

Häätö tapahtui täysin epäinhimillisellä tavalla, sillä paikalla ei ollut romanien kielen tulkkia ja romaneille annettiin ainoastaan tunti aikaa pakata tavaransa ja poistua.

or:

The eviction was a totally inhumane procedure, since no translator was present and the Roma were given only one hour to pack up their belongings and leave.

The press release goes on to note that constant eviction just makes life more difficult for Roma, but does nothing to get rid of their camps.

They say that according to Amnesty International evictions of Roma have increased in the following countries recently: Slovakia, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Romania and Serbiea.

Nyt Helsingin kaupunki näyttää omaksuneen näiden maiden rasistisen linjan.

or in English:

It seems the City of Helsinki has adopted the same racist approach as these countries.

Then there’s some interesting info about housing conditions for Europe’s Roma – in Romania for example, 73% of Roma live without running water – and so on.

Genuine public space still exists in Helsinki. It’s not primarily designed for temporary shelter, but Helsinki’s Senate Square has always been a place for doing politics. Tonight Social Center Satama is relocating there.

An emergency shelter will be organized for the people who lost their homes in the eviction, starting from 6 pm at Senaatintori. People are asked to bring tarps, shelters, sleeping bags, tents, food, cooking equipment; in other words things that are needed in accommodation. The event will be peaceful.

Helsinki diverted

Or perhaps just going around in circles? For this city is certainly going around in the same circles that have been doodled and then set in concrete by many a wealthier city than Helsinki in the past with varied success. You know, urban policy’s regeneration, renewal, revitalisation, re-this, re-that (re-awakening even on the Finnish-language site of the Torikorttelit scheme that has so enraged JHJ). Everything except re-membering.

Apart from a few enthusiastic shopaholics, who has benefited from this global fashion for creating tourist bubbles? A few individuals and corporate winners maybe, but it’s not fattened up any city’s coffers or helped them sustain themselves. Wonder why city authorities keep doing it!

But returning to Helsinki’s trams – for it is they that are actually diverted. They are in a mess. If you tried to find your way around the peninsula by tram this week, you may well have failed. But here is a little map to help you navigate this summer.

So, our trams are diverted for the summer. And not just the fun craziness caused by transport planners a couple of years ago. Diverted from sanity more like.

Alas, this all goes back to the idiocy that involves turning Katariinankatu into a shopping heaven and messing up Helsinki’s already very slow and fragile tram-network (as reported here earlier), and widening the pavement at Senate Square to put terrace bars in a space that never gets any sunshine, and hiking up the rents in a row of unique buildings that were until very recently uniquely untainted by the deadening embrace of high-rent commercialism … all this idiocy against which we railed in anger 15 months ago, is now diverting trams.

Seems its also diverting city planning from whatever remains of sanity and common sense it used to have. Anecdotally speaking this wouldn’t be a surprise. I heard about a planner in a city not so far away who struggled with the introduction of new, mostly neo-libearalist imperatives to put a market price on everything in the city. She had found it almost impossible, apparently, to get her head around doing this as a planner. Impossible, that is, until she realised that all she had to do was to change her view of reality. Simple, huh?

(By the way, on the topic of re-things – like remembering – if you are at all academically inclined and at all annoyed with what passes for a sense of reality these days, you might get some comfort from reading Paul Connerton’s wonderful How Modernity Forgets).

Mini tattoo

It’s a tattoo.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a tattoo is:

Mil. A signal made, by beat of drum or bugle call, in the evening, for soldiers to repair to their quarters in garrison or tents in camp.

And

A military entertainment consisting of an elaboration of the tattoo by extra music and performance of exercises by troops, generally at night and by torch or other artificial light. (So G. zapfenstreich.)

Today the Hamina Tattoo arrived in Helsinki, advertising the longer event taking place in the coastal military town (which also has considerable architectural charms). The “mini-tattoo” enlivened Helsinki’s spacious Senate Square and entertained not just the thousands who listened over the hour, but quite a few others I’d guess. Hey, it’s military music after all.

On YLE’s trusty website there’s more. And You Tube is, well, awash with synchronised sward-twirling (like a (mostly) boys’ version of cheer-leading as it were…) as well as music making. This one comes courtesy of Finland’s young army conscripts.

But for me, when they started playing Andean panpipes (or whatever) like the ones that used to ring out across the road from Stockmanns, I headed for the University Library. Still, I shouldn’t judge on such subjective grounds. Combining pan-pipes and military marches is perhaps an innovation of a standard urban, port-city kind, which adopts and adapts the repertoires and skills of new arrivals to create freshness.

And great to see the Senate Square in good use and nice to see a crowd that was made up of people of all ages. (Note to self, post something about the relative absence of older people on streets – or is it just where I hang out?)

It’s doubtful anyone was there who remembers the Square as a Russian Imperial place. It is, however, quite possible that some of the folks out today once saw Mannerheim the war hero here. He paraded in the Senate Square several times after all. A few might have heard and seen the Red Army Chorus and the Leningrad Cowboys build bridges via The Total Balalaika Show in 1993. And it’s possible that many know the square as a place you can cross at any time of day or night, winter, spring and summer (maybe even autumn) feeling safe and even happy in the heart of a great city and the embrace of complex history.

Then I heard the Tattooers play some Earth Wind and Fire …

Long live the Senate Square! Long live history! Long live change!

Shocked if not surprised

I have spent the best part of today researching and writing about one of the evils of contemporary urban politics, the trend towards surveillance and enhanced security measures in the townscape. Like the infantalizing signage telling us what to do all over the place, it’s a topic you can’t avoid if you’re at all interested in planning, architecture and cities, though it’s not much fun engaging with it. (Note to self: consider retraining as a historian).

On Tuesday there was a talk on the topic at (in?) Laituri, Helsinki Planning Department’s shop window, you might say, housed in what used to be the bus station. Co-hosted by Helsinki University’s Geography Department, a talk was given by a clear, loud and utterly jovial Don Mitchell, professor of geography from Syracuse Univ. in New York State. He did a brilliant job of articulating a critique, in fact, a self-critique, of planning in the USA. Bit by bit, we learned, public space in America’s cities has been given over to the “needs” of commerce and private property. Benches removed from parks to prevent loiterers, private security guards brought in instead of police, laws altered to make it impossible for compassionate shop-keepers to allow rough-sleepers to shelter in the alcoves in front of their shop-doors at night (and this in San Francisco!), laws to get rid of the traces of homelessness, rules on where one may give out or even share food … It all sounds kinda hysterical and gross.

Meanwhile Fingerpori contiues to play with words – today, a double-entendre from the Finnish word pinkki, the cartoonist’s insensitivity to genocide victims barely remembered by anyone, the temperature drops to +11°, some political parties consider making begging illegal in Finland and sweeping it … (er, under which carpet?), whileVanhanen’s (prime minister, remember him?) ideas about how to reduce the number of Roumanian beggars (just don’t give them money) inspire novel forms of political protest: give them money – just to show you hate Vanhanen…

On this topic, at least, some people, namely the Finnish Confederation of Roma Associations (Romanifoorumi) are protesting.

But back to securitizing and cleaning up that public space. It’s a young century. Compared to 100 years ago the problems are somewhat different. But we’re witnessing similar logics of insiders vs. outsiders to what we’ve seen before. The scramble for resources, including space to live, escalates and is adjudicated on with the “help” of identity. Compared to 100 years ago, however, we have the deamons of rampant commercialism and of ecological collapse to cope with in addition to the older worries. This may take some work…

In Helsinki, a lot of work. Despite the earlier decision by the City to disallow the use of the Senate Square for a public concert, something has made them change their minds in the last couple of days. There is indeed to be a fee-paying concert, the first of its kind, in the Square in late June. Arkkivahti is among those who are not impressed. We see her point. Until now only the Red Army Choir and the Leningrad Cowboys ever performed seriously amplified music (and I’m not even sure anyone had to pay), otherwise the space has been for collective events free to the public. Unsurprisingly as society has become a “calculating machine” (as Eyal Weizman notes in a totally different context) it’s not surprising (even if it is shocking) that the Square will charge entry.

Yours angry and sad, hoping to return gradually to a more jovial tone. JHJ

Spring – that flexible Finnish concept

Bang, boom, swish, crack, thud, thuddud, whoosh. These are weak efforts to convey in writing the sounds of a Helsinki spring. In an almost record-breakingly snowy year, workmen have been kept busy clearing roofs of snow, car breakdown services called on to rescue snow-bound vehicles and ordinary citizens have alternately helped each other to push cars over banks of snow or cursed each others’ thoughtlessness in parking wherever there is almost enough space. Snow and ice are falling all over the place off rooftops and through drain pipes – it can get noisy, and dangerous if you don’t keep an eye on what’s going on overhead. Might be an idea in places to walk in the middle of the roadway.

There is a slight change in the weather now – it’s been above zero for a couple of days now. Spring?

Challenged by long, dark winters, Finns tend to try and sidestep awkward reality by using the word spring to mean anything after Christmas! But in truth, last week did already have something of a spring-like feel, and of course, tomorrow is the first day of March, a word that for mainstream cultures of the northern hemisphere does conjure up something like nature’s awakening from the slumber and rest of winter.

Obviously, however, for one who knows this country, the picture above was taken in the SPRING. This next one, taken but a minute later up the road at Taidehalli proves it. The sun was shining and it was actually warming up the earth, helping the caretaker bring forth the hard landscaping.

Meanwhile, here are some images of the roof cleaning. With excess snow a problem across the country, there have been many falls and injuries, mostly among owners of detached homes. The men dealing with Helsinki’s buildings are, according to a taxi driver, mostly professional roof builders, so have a good grasp of safety.

The buildings: Old Town Hall/Bock House by C. L. Engel from Aleksanterinkatu and then from within the courtyard. Then Innotalo or the Board of Patents and Registration, 1976 by Einari Teräsvirta.

Meanwhile, another typical Helsinki scene this winter, bikes – before the thaw.

P.s. A highly-rated education Finland may have, but much remains to be done. We cannot resist reproducing for your delectation this from today’s Usual

Senaatintorilla on Aleksanteri II:n patsas

Suomalaisia terroristeja käsitelleessä kirja-arviossa lauantaina 27. helmikuuta sivulla C 1 väitettiin, että Senaatintorilla olisi Nikolai II:n patsas. Torilla on Aleksanteri II:n patsas.

or (my translation)

The statue in the Senate Square is Alexander II

A book review about Finnish terrorists in Saturday’s paper on page C1 claimed that the statue in the Senate Square is Nicholas II. The square has a statue of Alexander II.

Street art, or should that be stair art?

Narrator: Did you do that?

Protagonist: I wish I had.

N: Who did then?

P: No idea. It was just there when I walked across the square along with other locals going home for dinner, everyone noticed it. Like they did the weird bell ringing. But hey, this gives you a chance to blog about something other than volume of snow or workmen on rooves and elsewhere trying to manage the excess amounts of it.

N: It does. Thank you. Bell ringing?

P: Some kind of noise pollution, maybe spectacle production from the same people no doubt who consider Helsinki not a city or a place but a stage set for their “cultural creativity”. You know, “Helsinki – the Venue” where soon every week and every day will be the festival of something or other, hugging week, tree hugging day, heritage season, wife-throwing competition, some anniversary or other day, turning the Senate-Square-into-a-Polo-Field day. I wish it could just be an ordinary week-day …

N: Now you’re sounding bitter again.

P: Only because I bit into something really nasty in trying to find out more about the redevelopment of the Torikorttelit or “market quarter”. Yuck, I can’t even bring myself to say that word. It’s so fake and so oozing with the rote-learned banalities peddled on tourism and planning courses for creativity consultants and eurocrats-to-be everywhere.

N: I didn’t realise you had a gripe against the EU.

P: I’m not sure I do. Do you notice, by the way, how Tsar Alexander II is standing in a pose that looks like he’s trying to reason with someone, holding his hand out like that, in a bit of a polite question mark itself?

N: Maybe.

P: And did you know that the 4 figures around him symbolise the kinds of virtues that no product of said school of “planning” would recognise as worth defending: law, light, peace and work?

N: Talking of schools of planning, what’s this Future City Game thingy you went to?

P: Ah, well that was interesting. Except I wish the British Council, who sponsored it or organised it or were somehow involved in it, wouldn’t contribute to the same cr*p by running what was actually an interesting and provocative event in a marvellous venue whose recent political history is  peculiarly Finnish…

N: You’re out of breath again. You were saying, “you wish the British Council”. That they what?

P: That they’d not join the multitudes bleating on about “creative cities“. Give us a break!

N: You’re sounding more cheerful already. But we must. Take a break, that is. More on Suvilahti soon, no?

P: S’pose so. Can I have just one more? Please?

“Aleksanterinkatu to be torn up again”

Nobody likes their street being ripped up. Nobody, except a speculative investor with a certain amount of confidence, likes renovations or maintenance to disrupt normal service.

Well – we here at JHJ don’t know if it’s good news or bad news. The Paper (new readers unfamiliar with our patois should be told that this and The Usual, Pravda and similar monikers refers to Helsingin Sanomat) in this country comes out in the wee hours and gets delivered to your doorstep. (Unless you opted for the Centre Partyist’s favoured mode of habitation in which case you have to trudge knee-deep in fresh snow to get it out of the post-box). Actually, it’s just as easy to read online if you subscribe, and even if you don’t you get some stuff.

Interestingly, this morning’s issue was able to report that

Aleksanterinkadun raiteet siirretään nykyistä hieman pohjoisemmiksi, ja pohjoinen jalkakäytävä kavennetaan 3,5 metriseksi. Käytännössä tämä tarkoittaa Aleksanterinkadun rakentamista kokonaan uudelleen katulämmityksineen, raitiovaunupysäkkeineen ja kivetyksineen.

Which is to say:

The tram lines on Aleksanterinkatu are to be moved slightly northwards and the pavement to the north of them to be narrowed to 3,5 metres. In practice this means a total rebuilding of A.katu with its street heating, tram stops and paving.

Besides noting the budgeted cost of this, 14 892 00 euros (we believe they mean to add a zero, making it 14 892 000), it says pretty much nothing – nothing about the plans to revitalise the old partly vacant buildings in the area, (and so risk killing off the remaining vestiges of small-scale or non-commercial activity) nothing about the hassle caused to the tram network of the entire city, nothing about the damage to the historic shape of the square not to mention nothing about the heavy-handed and homogenising handiwork of the brand-consultants whose gentrifying efforts were quietly and outrageously passed by the Planning Committee before Christmas.

What, you might be thinking, did we expect.

Well, we were not expecting the news to break when the meeting of the Planning Committee had not yet even taken place. That was scheduled for 15.00 today, 25.2.2010. Accessed on this same day at 22.50, we find it’s still there but of course the minutes aren’t. So we can assume that the machinations of city government and planning continue on their merry way behind closed doors in the usual cabinets. Except we have been startled by the difficulties that Helsinki seems to have in deliberating about the future of shared and valuable assets. (Oh, and by the way, the City Board is supposed to OK these kinds of things before they are considered policy. I guess it’s called rubber stamping to distinguish it from serving the citizens.)

Has Helsinki always been run like this? In the wake of not just this example of anti-democratic (as well as uncivilized – but that’s a slightly more subjective view point so we put it in brackets) decision making but with Katajanokka’s designer hotel debacle fresh in our minds, and the ugly spectre of Sipoo becoming Helsinki too, to be governed from afar. We wonder. We wonder.

Meanwhile property owners and building managers in this part of the world are having to cope with more snow than has been seen here since 1941. The media is full of pictures of snow on roofs, on trucks, cars, anything and everything, and of stories of why, how, by whom, how not and by whom not to get excess snow off your roof before it either collapses or causes damage. Drains in the mean time are being steamed off to stave off disaster, as here in Hallituskatu a few days ago.

I wish I could say my concerns about the Senate Square are just so much hot air. I fear a battle may be in the offing. Even more I fear that I will have to work out whether or not my stand on it will make me a snob. And then I’ll have to work out whether or not that bothers me. All things considered, that’s a minor concern compared to ripping up everybody’s history in the most literal possible way.

Plenty of theres there in Helsinki

If Manta (that’s Valgren’s Havis Amanda’s nickname) could turn around a little further on her pedestal, she’d be able to see the stretch of now underused waterfront that’s caused such a stir in Helsinki.

On which note Helsinkians can heave a sigh of relief over the possiblility that waterfront redevelopment of the gentrifying and/or tourist-tattifying kind will at least be slowed down if not definitely shelved. That’s to say, if some piece of starchitecture does go up on that hard-to-access plot in Katajanokka it won’t be because of an oversight but the result of a carefully pondered-over decision made by elected as well as appointed “representatives” of the citizenry. Of course, the citizenry will also have to cope with whatever the planning committee comes up with after next Thursday’s meeting at which major, major changes to the look and the transport links around the Senate Square are to be discussed. Not that details of coming decisions are available on Helsingin Leijona’s website or on the “current proposals” or even “on view now” menu of the Planning Department’s site. Watchful citizens, mindful of the possibility of megalomaniac rebranding schemes in stone, steel and glass are certainly being kept busy!

Meanwhile starchitecture is recognised as a bit of a handicap in the international architectural media – if the UK’s weekly, Building Design qualifies as such. Proving that lumpiness (as we discussed earlier) and all the over-crowding that goes with it is highly developed within the architectural profession, BD reports that when Peter Eisenman, deconstructivist theorist and architect from over the water went to Edinburgh recently to give a lecture, crash barriers were needed to control the mob… Even more eye-catching is what the great man had to say, apparently, about architecture’s role in creating zeitgeist or sense of place (genius loci):

Contemporary architecture expresses neither, he argued. Vegas — a phantasm of Parises and Hiltons conjured up in the middle of nowhere — is the quintessence of the contemporary city. It could be anyplace, anytime.

Well, the designer hotel scheme that’s now temporarily on hold (as mentioned in earlier post-s) certainly had something of the iciness of an old-fashionedly cold Helsinki winter, but other than that, it looks exactly like the kind of contemporary architecture that is conceived for anyplace, anytime. So much for contemporary. It rather reminds me of Gertrude Stein’s remark about Oakland, “there’s no there there“.

And old? Architects may not like it, but the old often has a strong grip on everybody else and often helps sustain if not create the “there” that folks get attached to. If they find it hard to attach to novelties, that’s understandable (and has caused much architecture-critical ink to be spent), and sometimes architects could acknowledge their own role in making the public be so critical of their gimmickery and fashion consciousness. Architectural productions stick around for us to have to live with. Buildings that on reflection we don’t like so much after all, can’t be discarded or replaced that easily.

But here’s some we like, not perfect, not new, but definitely magical in the quiet of a Wednesday evening. Just one of the many, many “theres” that are (still) there in Helsinki.

Helsinki as St Petersburg

When Russia was still the Soviet Union and Hollywood film producers couldn’t shoot on site in Leningrad, they’d often come to Helsinki. Doctor Zhivago, Reds, Gorky Park, and many more films, were filmed in the suitably glum and Russianesque streets of Helsinki.

Certainly the architectural resemblances helped – after all, early 19th century Helsinki was specifically designed to be a small and provincial copy of the imperial splendour of St. Petersburg. But it also seems that beyond the architecture, there is often something about the atmosphere of parts of Helsinki that suggest associations with better-known places, images that “everybody” knows from the movies or ads. And if you are thinking of Helsinki, those other places are, inevitably, across the long border to the East.

Emperor Alexander II still stands in the middle of Senate Square in Helsinki, overseeing the most coherent and architecturally significant square of its time in Finland. Drafted in 1812, the year that Helsinki took over from Turku as capital city, it is the result of the labours of Johan Albrecht Ehrenström, politician (to use the language of our times) and Carl Ludvig Engel, architect, although many of the buildings predate that plan. And as occasional tourists reading guide books or plaques on the walls testify, it’s easy enough to read a lot of Finnish and even international history in this architecture. Still, on Monday when this was taken, social and political features felt rather dwarfed by the snow and the guys shovelling it off the roof of the building on the right here, part of the Leijona kortteli or Lion Block.

Sofiankatu, between the Senate Square and Esplanadi to the south, meanwhile is specifically designed to remind folks of history, for instance Helsinki’s erstwhile trilingualism. In fact, it is a museum street. In fact the area has plenty of Helsinki City Museum spaces including a shop. Which makes one think, given that we were on the topic of atmosphere, of late 20th-century urban spaces with their endless supplies of commercial opportunities. Many, many “old towns” across the world were turned into theme-parks of imagined nostalgia and belief in the ability of pedestrian zones and cappuccino culture (as considered a while back in the Architects Journal) to redeem urban life everywhere. To some, clearly this part of Helsinki is simply crying out loud for this treatment.

We await to see what will come of these plans, as the final pieces of the puzzle of Helsingin Leijona’s plans (as discussed on this blog earlier) to regenerate the area are decided on on 25.2 at the meeting of the Planning Committee. (But you’re unlikely to find this out by going on their website with its page of “current proposal”, instead, you have to send emails and phone around). These final pieces are the fate of the trams. It appears that Katariinankatu, pictured above from the south, must be pedestrianised, and this means that the tram must be moved away, and this means that new rails will have to be laid down to enable two-way traffic on Unioninkatu and this means that the entire length of Aleksanterinkatu on the Senate Square must have its rails moved a little bit. Just a little, it seems, to make the new turning technically feasible and … to make outdoor space for new cafes on the shortly-to-be revitalised edge of the Square.

But I was going to write about atmosphere. Katariinankatu, above, has something of the feel of an old St Petersburg, perhaps even the Soviet one. A bit quiet, rather dark, nothing to signal the presence of capitalism and its imperative of marketing – and that, if friends’ accounts are anything to go by, is abundant in today’s St Petersburg.

Whereas here, no neon lights, that is, no global brands, no benandjerrys and no starbucks either. Instead, offices used by city employees (more on which later) and a few small shops relocated from the Kiseleff building which has already been evacuated from under the renovations. We are not sure whether the idea to turn this street into a pedestrian zone would mean enlarging the windows so that they would be better for displaying merchandise and dispensing cappuccinos. We do think something would be lost if they were.