It ain’t easy in these days of transparent decision making to cut through the thickening informational fog on and offline to find what the planning committee has decided about Vartiosaari. Have they decided it’s just a bit of white (as in the pic below, also online) on a map, waiting for “development”? Or do they have the senses and the imagination to appreciate what I do, that to turn it into a suburb would be the dumbest thing ever?
You can email the committee members before 12.5.2015 (presumably they understand English too). Here: risto.rautava@elisanet.fi; osmo@soininvaara.fi; hennariikka.andersson@kokoomus.fi; eija.loukoila@gmail.com; jape.loven@gmail.com; elina.moisio@iki.fi; tom.packalen@eduskunta.fi; heta.valimaki@helsinki.fi
Some excellent “material considerations” as they say, from the capital city region’s conservation types (in Finnish).
Whether facts, rants or imploring will have much effect we can’t know. The imperative of squeezing as much profit out of anything you can point at (Vartiosaari qualifies) is party line here as in most places. Certainly in the administration of the city of Helsinki the idea of values other than commercial ones seems increasingly hard to imagine.
Some people do though. Here’s one heartfelt and pithy facebook post on the topic. Wish I could write so well!
So it is possible to imagine alternatives to speculative suburb-building. Many of us live by more ordinary and human dreams every day. In fact, some people are so outraged and upset by the idea of sacrificing Vartiosaari and its many delights that they are already agitating for something else.
For JHJ it seems to mean being hooked again into a time-consuming and dubiously productive blogging habit. We shall see.
Someone’s got to!
Jees Helsinki Jees 