Quick – unique opportunity for slow art!

A person goes online all innocent, just curious to find out if there’s a quick statistic somewhere for numbers of cars in Helsinki in the 1980s. There were a lot, but certainly a lot fewer than today.

So I found a recent issue of Suomen Kuvalehti which wonders why Finland is being so slow to fall out of love with the motor car.

Apparently in the USA and the UK car buying peaked some years ago. Alas, Finland’s administrators and ministry-level people believe there is no alternative to expanding car use and ownership. So says the article. It also notes that the decline of the car has been dramatic even in America’s car-dependent suburbs. Actually, so says Fred Pearce on whose article in the New Scientist that one was based.

Still, there is an undeniably vast amount of rock being blasted from underneath Helsinki to make way for places for all these cars to hide (sleep?). Which brings me back to this post’s opening line.

Which is to say that there I was, all keen to blog about something positive (read on) when I bumped into yet more incomprehensible prose from an old city document.

Here, in Finnish the offending paragraph from a municipal document from 2004:

Uusimpien selvitysten pohjalta on osoittautunut, että kantakaupungin  uudet merenrantaiset asuntoalueet, on syytä erottaa omaksi  alueekseen, jossa autopaikkatarve on jonkin verran suurempi kuin  vanhassa kantakaupungissa.

or in translation

Evidence from the most recent studies has shown that the new waterfront neighbourhoods in the central part of the city should be treated as special cases where the need for parking is somewhat higher than in the older parts of the centre.

(For those interested in this, ehem, it appears that the current parking norms are from the early 1960s and have been tweaked a bit since then. Still – in many cases they were tweaked upwards!!) Anyway, the text then goes on to note that the current (2004) density of 350 cars per 1000 inhabitants is expected to rise to 410 by 2025.

It’s not that increase that caused the blood to boil but the idea that there could be a “need” for more motorcars. As I understand it, the Eira neighbourhood is among the densest for car ownership although it clearly has vastly more shops and services close by than most Finns can even dream of. So why all the 4x4s? Need?

So it’s great that we also have artists who take such great pains to produce delightful commentaries on all this stuff.

If you have time go to Taidehalli/Kunsthalle before the SLOW show closes on 20.11.2011. Exceptionally beautifully curated but thought-provoking too and in such a beautiful building.

If you go don’t miss the piece on the ground floor: a story as told by Hannu Karjalainen for any architect to tremble over!

And Ilkka Halso’s digitally manipulated photos of the Museum of Nature are a must. His English is a bit ropey but the man’s photographs of the repository of all that’s being either denigrated or fetishised by contemporary society are fantastic. Then there’s “House with garden – unique opportunity”. Brilliant!

Whether you’re into ideas about voyeurism and escapism or just appreciate a finely crafted picture that conveys more than words, I recommend it. Along with the rest of the exhibition.

And what’s so fabulous about Halso’s pictures is that he doesn’t limit himself to soft and obviously organic stuff. One of his best repositories is of rocks and boulders. Presumably they’re ones saved from the surface of the earth before they were turned into rubble by the blasting going on everywhere in Helsinki.

I just wish Halso made smaller versions of his pictures too. Being the sizes they are, they’d fit just perfectly into a big home, one of those where they also need big cars.

Metal cows and f*** idiots

Everybody likes to hate an expert, especially a planning expert.

Sadly.

And yet.

Experts have been hated at least since Jane Jacobs became Saint Jane by suggesting that New York City could be made nicer by sacking its planners. She figured that nice self-organizing people are the best guarantee of a nice environment. (You can see why she’s popular these days.)

In Finland we slag off experts by calling them fakki-idiots (Fachdiot which is German for Subject Idiot – someone who is challenged by the idea of a wider context, of all other things not being equal. The English idea of a silo-mentality comes close.)

We here at JHJ actually believe in expertise, but we are beginning to suspect that at least when it comes to Helsinki’s transport planning, f*** idiots are solidly in charge.

Why? Because of the cars. The weird situation in Jätkäsaari that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago isn’t an isolated case. It’s official, Helsinki MUST HAVE MORE CARS!

And so it’s been wonderful to see some critiques. Even The Usual is reporting that one parking space costs 40K euro and asking who should pay (10.9.2011 if you have a subscription). Now Hesari readers at least realize that those of us who prefer life without a car are subsidizing the very thing we most hate and suffer from: other people’s excess metal cows and the s**t that’s farted out through their quaintly named “exhausts”. (On the left, metal cows parodied by Miina Äkkijyrkkä – more about her and her “sacred” cows on Hellosinki).

So, on 10.09.2011  Hesari got a lefty Green and a Conservative (Kokoomus) chap to explain why a driver should pay his own way and why society should subsidize a driver, respectively.

A week later the paper reported on another aspect of Helsinki’s love-affair with cars: this business about blasting into the granite on which our fair city is mostly built, in order to stuff cars into them and off the streets. (Will a similar solution be suggested for anti-social behaviour soon?) Unlike our lefty Green friend, JHJ does not endorse this practice.

As you may know, JHJ’s editorial offices have from time to time been affected by the scary and perverse sounds of underground dynamiting too. Now as OP Pohjola expands its premises, Hesari reports that the old wooden buildings of Vallila are to be put at risk to make room for the growing backsides metal cows of workers at Pohjola. According to the interviewed rep from Pohjola, employees are simply not always able to use public transport.

Might these be the same people who were clogging up Tuusulantie (in both directions) the other day when we were on the bus going to the airport?

Back in Boomtown

I know I’m back in Helsinki, crane-filled boom-town. I woke up to a god-awful explosion that took place some dozens of metres below my bed – BOOOM!!! At some minutes past nine in the evening (listening to the storm brewing outside) I hear what I hope is the last blast of the day. BOOOMM!! I am wrong. Another dose of the dynamite sends shudders through the granite at a few minutes before ten. BOOOMMMM!!!!

A letter from the building manager is among the less boring bits and pieces that I gather up from between the outer and inner front doors as I return. (This being Helsinki, my post doesn’t drop into some tin box by the sidewalk or flop onto a cutesy doormat, it gets wedged ever deeper and thicker between two extremely functional doors, one that opens in, the other that opens out. In the absence of a picture of a door to the stairs, here’s a pic of a Helsinki double-glazed window, circa 1902).

The letter informs us politely that residents are to ensure compliance with legal requirements by installing one smoke alarm per 60 square metres of living space.

It goes on:

In the Töölö area each day one can hear series of explosions. These emanate from the tunnelling works for the car parking being constructed underneath the Music Centre [I still think it should be called Music House] and the Finlandia Hall. … we recommend residents keep an eye on the walls and ceilings of their properties for possible cracking. Any cracks should be reported … and compensation …

Yes, a little money to shut up the old ladies from Töölö might be forthcoming. But, I ask, what about stopping the cancerous “growth machine” or the “boomtown” phenomenon that’s at the core of this car-friendly excavatory madness? The battle between jobs and resources/environment about which Americans write so much and with such eloquent anger?

Not likely in Helsinki as the new Pasila is being planned with its new multi-lane highway, while underground parking caves are being dynamited into existence throughout the Helsinki peninsula.

Note to self, blog about the odd coincidence of having just finished Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, the one with mountain-top-removal (I still struggle with the idea that that is an intelligible concept!) at the heart of its plot (kind of) and flying back to Finland only to read that some people think that its future landscape will be one great, f***ing moonscape of an open-cast mine, by 2020. (To explain, from living off the forest to living off Nokia, it’s not a mad idea to suggest that Finland may soon be living off its minerals…)

Mining for space – or generalised acupuncture

It can be a long way down once you’ve been digging for long enough. Or with sufficient energy. (I assume they still use dynamite, but I haven’t found out). In Helsinki, the stairs are there for some folks to use.

This week the world turned its attention – and its hunger for good news – towards a mine called San Jose in Chile.

The week before (or maybe before that) in Helsinki, Töölöläinen, the free local paper in this hallowed haven of bourgeois bohemianism, ran a tongue-in-cheek story about digging for gold in central Helsinki (well, Meilahti).

Hiding cars under the ground is, indeed, a figurative gold mine in this city. Or at least, like so many phenomena that attach to capitalism, digging underground is one of those activities that can be described as a rush, a frenzy, a kind of collective madness. A boom, in fact. (And there was one!)

But Finns have a preoccupation with innovating, i.e doing new stuff. And so their version of digging isn’t so much about seeking out shiny, precious stuff from out of the ground, like diamonds, but about producing something that you wouldn’t have thought was in short supply in this country: space!!!!!

One neighbour noted that working in his office near Temppeliaukio Church is like getting acupuncture on your feet. I think he meant reflexology. One keeps wanting to post about something else – and then there’s a great, big, annoying and, possibly, structurally damaging explosion! And one has simply no choice.

On which note, Finns do also dig for precious stuff. The environment minister‘s husband is one of several who expects wealth to flow from a newly opened mine in Sotkamo. Wonder what the public debate was like around that one.

Tram jam

Cars in recent decades have reproduced as societies have acquired more money. No wonder Helsinki’s traffic jams just get worse and worse. And that’s despite all the effort that goes into shoving cars underground in this fair city.

For at least ten years the occasional solitary online commentator has quipped on the holey-cheesey nature of subterranean Helsinki. Meanwhile even reddish Greens like Osmo Soininvaara have advocated more underground parking while sustainable transport campaigners observe in bewilderment as the city throws vast amounts of money not just into holes in the ground, but into building them. However, only a more patient googler than yours truly has time to find the recent ones, not to mention to draw a straightforward and punchy blog post on the topic.

The most recent hit was not about Helsinki but about Tampere, that former-industrial city with the two lakes and quite a nice music scene, where construction for “massive” new underground car parking has caused some protected industrial heritage (now used as a music venue) to crack horribly. A facebook group was even set up to “monitor” the situation. (Back to Helsinki. Ed.)

The author of the book The Ethics of Metropolitan Growth, Robert Kirkman, who also calls himself an ‘environmental ethicist’ writes about the really intractable problem of cars and space. Average driving slownesses on urban streets differ little from those of 100 years ago. Kirkman also makes the painfully obvious point that driving is “bounded by physical limitations that cannot be negotiated. In this case, there are upper and lower limits to the size and agility of a private automobile that can safely transport a small number of passengers, and it will always be physically impossible to put more than one car in the same space at the same time. The only way to avoid this limitation and the storage problems it entails would be to reject the automobile altogether, a take-it-or-leave-it choice even for those included in the automotive frame.”

Well, Kirkman is no moralising git trying to offer one-size-suits-all remedies and hair-shirt lives to save the planet, so he spends a good part of the book trying to figure out how society might learn to talk about the damage it does to our environment whilst working out how to live together, sharing the same spaces and not stepping too heavily on others’ toes. He is very thoughtful about not slagging off America’s drivers who, thanks to their urban planners of yore, mostly have little option. And anyway, even Americans may be falling out of love with the automobile. (Oh, yeah. Ed.) Oh yeah, see this.

Maybe more on Kirkman later – Helsinki certainly has plenty of folks in high places for whom metropolitan growth is an unequivocal good along with plenty of other dubious ambitions to forget Helsinki’s geography, history and its cultural heritage. (Stop moaning. Ed.)

That heritage includes the slowest trams around. According to Muukalaisia Vesirajassa, a delightful blog (Finnish readers wanting to keep up with confidently flowing geekiness will find a link on the right), that Helsinki’s average speed is 14.3 km/h compared to a similar system in Paris doing 19km/h, and that a main culprit is too much standing at lights. I’ve heard others comment not just on the annoying slowness (and not just when something’s broken down as above, a couple of days ago on Mannerheimintie) but on the probability that trams would offer the restructured HSL (Helsinki METROPOLITAN Transport, or something [Region. Ed]) a chance to make money as well as save time, but for some reason they don’t.