Since 1990s, Helsinki region has been the second fastest growing EU metropolitan area after Dublin. Its annual growth has been in average 1.4 percent 1991 - 2000 (PKS 2025). The present sizes of its four core cities are: Helsinki 560,000, Espoo 210,000, Vantaa 180,000, and Kauniainen 8,500. The functional region has 1.2 million inhabitants, with the surrounding municipalities growing at the same pace as the core cities. Recently OECD published its "Territorial Review of Helsinki", which defines the metropolitan area more inclusively . According to the review, also Hämeenlinna, Lahti, and Porvoo with their counties would belong to the Helsinki region. This definition follows roughly the present commuting pattern. Inside these boundaries, there are 1,8 million inhabitants.
Besides the population growth, main factors of structural change in the region have been the IT sector, increased focus on "planning for the know-how" materialising in new university campuses, infrastructure investments both in roads and air travel, and new retail patterns. A big single shift is that in 2008 the Helsinki harbour will be relocated to Vuosaari in Eastern Helsinki, vacating over 3 sq. km of buildable inner city land.
In this paper, I ask what are the ways of thinking and conceptualising the region and its constituent cities, and how those conceptual approaches relate to the tools employed in planning. I discuss two scales, that of the Helsinki Metropolitan Area Council (YTV) and the city of Helsinki. I will not describe the planning system per se, but rather point to a set of problems and possibilities.
Traditionally, the Helsinki region has been conceptualised as the radial or "finger" model. According to that model, the urban structure follows big traffic arteries, expanding radially from the city centre. A hierarchical system of centres and subcentres organises the services, and there are regional green corridors between the built fingers. This model is idealised, but it still afffects planning decisions. The project to build a new metro line to Santahamina in the archipelago South-East of the centre, is a logical consequence of the finger model (Helsingin yleiskaava 2002).
In reality the region is structured in a more complex way. One possible conceptualisation is the "palm model". It acknowledges the relative weight of the area inside ring road I, which has even increased during the 1990s IT-boom. A third model proposed is the "grid" or "network". Besides centres and their connections, network may refer to the interlacing units of government or to the network-centre model of urbanising suburbs (Schulman 1993, 53).
The differences and similarities of these three subsequent conceptualisations open a point of view to the present problems of regional planning in Helsinki. The three models are increasingly unclear, less illustrative, and more difficult to grasp. The finger model is strongly idealised but it also does offer a quideline for action. The Martinlaakso rail line of 1970s is an example of that, and so are the rather successful "regional centres" (Malmi, Leppävaara, Itäkeskus). The grid model may well be the most realistic of these three, but for planner it offers little help. If anything, it provides an excuse to build any new centres and any new connections.
Secondly, the substance of regional planning has remained the same since the post-war founding father O. I. Meurman. Regional planning concerns itself with coordinating traffic and land use. This is a necessary task, but very limited. In Espoo, the fastest growing municipality, even this narrow substance has been non-existent. In its newest traffic system plan YTV ranks the Espoo metro a primary project, but it has no tools to guarantee that the City of Espoo would redraw its plans to facilitate its construction.
To enhance its poor understanding of the region's present gestalt and its development dynamics, YTV started in 2000 a project to find new ways to describe the regional structure (Seuturakenteen kuvaustavat, YTV 2002). The idea was to use the newest GIS techniques to produce an easily understandable picture about the regional pattern. The data analysis used a selection of registers and statistics, many of those very fine grained, even personal. The resulting image was supposed to show region's physical pattern, functional nodes, relative importance and quality of centres, as well as the major traffic flows.
The effort to make a new regional description is ambitious, but its theory is not sound. Handling statistical and register data always involves a chain of decisions: which data is used in the first place and how the data sets are classified and subdivided. Such decisions were not thoroughly discussed. So there is a risk that the GIS analysis makes visible arbitrary classifications or weighting coefficients, and that with different choices the hierarchy of centres, for example, might have been different.
Secondly, the description confuses the functioning of the city, eg. traffic flows or relations between centres, and its physical structure. As each communicative field of planning has its own ontology and epistemology, these analytic categories should be kept separate. It seems that GIS works in operative planning with its reliance on absolute notion of space, but helps little in strategic planning, interested in evaluating probabilities of certain processes and integrating differing views. Even less GIS can be used in aiding value-based choices, an area which should be the core of planning debate and participation (cf. Schulman 1990, 206; Vuolteenaho 2002, 12-13).
The new description of the region seems to suffer from a generic problem of GIS applications: the equipment and the available data resources define too much both the aim and the results. The description of the present situation only was so heavy to make that history and future dynamics were left out. The project helps little in making planning decisions and communicating them. It follows the paradoxical process of conceptualisations becoming simultaneously more accurate and more unclear.
| Approach | Space concept | Communicative field |
|---|---|---|
| Material | Absolute | Operative planning |
| Functional | Relative | Strategic policy |
| Valuative | Relational | Normative politics |
The complementary dimensions of regionality of city planning. After Schulman 1990.
To replace or complement the problematic GIS-based representations as the new way to make sense of urban patterns, a symbolic "infography" has been proposed. This refers to transforming a certain idea or point of view to a clear, easy-to-read form. City diagrams are of course not a new thing. In the Helsinki region, for example, the various "axis" (science and art, IT, logistics) proposed in the 1992 general master plan, might be seeds of this approach. In his book Helsingin kauneuden logiikat Kai Wartiainen (1996) sketched possible diagrams or urban icons, such as "dominating donut" and "braces of history".
The problem here is that the analysis behind the diagram must not be simple. A diagram must be able to communicate a complex cultural, economical, functional, and morphological situation in a creative, performative way. This is an interesting field of research and experimentation, as the Helsinki City Planning Office and regional authorities have recognised (cf. the Baltic Palette project, Uudenmaan liitto 2001). In Helsinki this question has a political dimension, as several evaluations of the regional planning have strongly stated that to perform, the region must have much better cooperation and formulate a clear vision of its aims and future (eg. Schulman et al. 1996; OECD 2002). A good symbolic/ semiotic representation is necessary in both formulating and communicating a vision. The tricky question is who does it.
Because the regional visions are unclear and the municipalities compete rather than cooperate, commercial actors have occupied the field. According to Timo Vuolanto, researcher in the Helsinki City Planning, a more economically oriented planning style emerged already in the early 1980s. A turning point would have been the study on the land use of Helsinki's harbours (RAMA-selvitys). Harry Schulman states that in the latter stage of the modern project in planning, money became the language unifying urban development (Schulman 1993, 35).
The plans of both cities and private developers are aimed at increasing land values and attracting investors' attention. A good example is the so called K2 plan, which was drafted in cooperation between City of Vantaa and SRV Viitoset, a big developer behind the High Tech Centre concept. The City of Espoo, too, develops Suurpelto on ring road II with a substantial public-private advisory board. In Helsinki, the entrepreneurial approach has become concrete in detail plans customised for firms and in the official effort to plan and produce very high end housing to attract "good" tax payers.
What is interesting for my question in this paper, is that the new gestalt of the region is indeed emerging through these seemingly unrelated, private-led schemes, and behind the back of the planners. Physically and functionally the Helsinki region is dispersing, but its functions also reconcentrate in new, specialised nodes along the ever expanding traffic infrastructure. Mark Gottdiener uses the term "deconcentration" of this dual movement, producing the new settlement space he calls "the multi-centered metropolitan region" (Gottdiener 1994 [1985], x; 2002, 142-6). In the Helsinki region, the new nodes, "axis of development" or "pools of attraction" (cf. Schulman 1993, 56) include the still very important old city centre, the "city of knowledge" mostly in Espoo around the University of Technology, and the "Aviapolis" in Vantaa next to the airport and the central section of the ring road III.
These specialised centres are not illusions, but clearly visible both in statistics on employment and new construction, as well as tangible urban environments. A more clearly planned intervention is the new harbour in Vuosaari. The ring road III will be continued there, and the now peripheral zone may become a fourth regional node. There are already plans to continue the metro line to the harbour and construct an office park of 4000 jobs, a hotel and leisure centre, a huge zone of logistics and warehousing, a golf course, and a new eco-park . Housing is not included because of environmental nuisances, but on the same peninsula is already the Vuosaari area of 30,000 inhabitants.
If regional planning is in turbulence, so is the hierarchical planning system of cities. Especially the general master plan has become an increasingly obscure document. In interview Timo Vuolanto states that "general master plan is only rhetoric". A planner complains that "no-one is drawing anymore".
In my opinion, the general master plan should not be thought of in terms of an image about a finalised state of urban development. General planning is rather an activity, which formulates and presents for public discussion few questions which are decided to be the most important at the given time. In this focussing, there may be a relation to the above discussion on the urban diagram. In the 1992 general master plan, the question was the Helsinki's position in the fast changing Baltic and European context. In the draft of the 2002 plan, the question is how to squeeze a big portion of the population growth of the region to the city of Helsinki itself.
There has been criticism against the reality, pace, and continuance of the growth, but the main problem of the current planning process is not the growth itself but its position in the process. Because an empirical fact (growth) is the main question of the plan, there is not much left open for discussion. In this sense the 2002 plan proposal really is "rhetoric": it entails manipulative rhetoric of growth.
However, rhetoric is a chiefly positive term. Among other connotations, it refers to "good practice in argument" and "art of using language" (cf. Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy). Could the art of large scale planning concern publicly articulating the alternative solutions to the formulated question? Could it be about planners' "degrees of liberty"? In Helsinki, the only vision of the plan, the new metro line and urban finger towards the archipelago has been badly compromised because the resulting landfills and destruction of natural shoreline has bumped to a heavy criticism. If the plan would have had several alternative scenarios, the vision might have been more robust. It also would have been easier to discuss about the vision.
There is one very interesting theme, though, in the plan proposal: that of reurbanising the unconnected neighbourhood units built from 1950s to 1970s. Their new, qualitative urbanisation can be seen as part of the process of deconcentration: areas which used to be dependent on the central city reorient themselves and become parts of the newly dynamic urban amalgam. If cleverly managed, population growth could be the motor of a big urban renewal in Helsinki. The challenge is in the methods.
Every architect knows how difficult it is to densify existing urban areas. We thumble in "NIMBY" and are beaten by the even worse "BANANA". I believe that we should approach differently, and set up a process in each area or neighbourhood which would valorise the pressures and possibilities on one hand and the views and knowledge of local actors on the other. I in purpose talk about actors here, as also entrepreneurs and representatives of institutions should have a voice, not only permanent residents. The professionals can in such process offer various frames, and the local actors may fill those frames with their hopes, desires, and proposals, and also criticise the professionals' projections. Even more rewarding such a process might be if organised around new "identity nodes" or "icons", which may reach beyond single neighbourhood and even municipality (Lehtovuori 2001; Chora 2001).
Such a process could become internationally interesting, following the pattern of the famous park and square project of the 1980s Barcelona. In Helsinki the tools would of course be different. Wide participation, educated people as a resource, and international charettes might be parts of the programme. Furthermore, this process could produce an alternative vision for the commercially produced metropolitan space. It would be much more rich and varied map, and also strongly anchored in the social space of the everyday.
The last question I would like to touch is the conceptualisation of the inner city or Helsinki peninsula. The relocation of the harbour leaves 80 hectares in Jätkäsaari, 130 hectares in Sörnäinen and at least 100 hectares in Central Pasila for other uses. By combining all developments, it becomes possible to draft a scenario where there are three new, large urban districts in the peninsula, which are similar in size with the three existing districts, Kallio, Töölö, and the Southern districts which include the CBD. It would be the task of the general master plan to study what such a scenario would mean for the structure of the whole region and for routing and schedules of new rail and metro lines. Even more: what it would mean for the urban ambiance of Helsinki? The City Planning Office itself admits that the extensions of old inner city in Katajanokka (1970s and 1980s) and in Ruoholahti (1990s) are "suburban" in character even though thre planners conceived them as "urban". The reasons of the failure are analysed (Helsingin kaupunkisuunnitteluvirasto 2001, 1; 41), but still the planning machine treats the harbour areas with old principles, as smallish, semi-dense extensions of the old built structure. Why?
I find that the challenge of the biggest restructuration since industrialisation is not taken. What if all the 3 sq. km would be built with the densities of the 19th and early 20th century inner city? The street network would be dense and robust, the many different industrial zones and inlets would be united to permeable districts with several easy connections to the neighbouring urban areas. In this way, the new districts would have historic depth, morphological and stylistic variation, several alternative traffic routes and modes, as well as complex urban rhythms - a whole set of urban characteristics which all lack from the current production of neat and clean inner city suburbs. And if so much new construction would turn to be impossible technically or economically, why not seriously study the possibilities of low but dense areas?
What we have is planning by default. In the city of Helsinki there is similar lack of vision and will to study possibilities, also radical ones, as is in the region as a whole. No-one is interested or capable of conceptualising all aspects of the change. This most likely leads to lost opportunities. Where planning should create opportunities it closes them.
Referring to the examples in the Helsinki region, large scale planning seems to have lost its grip on development. There is a risk that it loses its visionary, proactive potential and turns to a dry activity of legitimating others' decisions, often those made be the so called strong interests. However, also preconditions for truly creative planning are unusually favourable. There is much information available and also tools to handle it. The quality of the environment is acknowledged as an important factor in international competition: the city where skilled people choose to live, succeeds also economically. Thirdly, urban citizens are increasingly reflexive. This does not directly result in an interest in planning, but certainly an interest in their environment and the possibilities to manage their everyday life.
Despite problems, I believe that we are entering the "fourth wave" of planning, a new paradigm after Haussmannian urban surgery, Howardian exurbanism, and Corbuserian modernism (cf. Schulman 1990). The innovative phase is right now, and I do think that many issues discussed above will play a role in the future. It is an interesting coincidence that in Finland the Land Use and Building Act came to force in 2000. The new law stresses participation, but I do not believe that participation as such would be the core of the new paradigm. Rather, the new planning should be human-centered and culturally oriented. It should concentrate in the social space, rather than in visual/physical only. It should be about values and cultural resources more than cars or concrete. Most importantly, it should not master the city but love it!
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Schulman, Harry (1993). Todellisuudet ja mielikuvat Helsingin kaupunkiseudun kehityksessä. Ympäristöministeriö, Tutkimusraportti 2 1993.
Schulman, Harry & al. (1996). Helsingin seudullisen suunnittelun arviointi. YTK B 72. Espoo: Teknillinen korkeakoulu.
Uudenmaan liitto (2001). Kaupunkijärjestelmät. Työryhmäraportti. Uudenmaan liiton julkaisuja C 37.
Vuolteenaho, Jani (2002). "Geoinformatiikan visiot ja maantieteilijän työvälineet." Prosum 1/2002, pp. 12-13.
Wartiainen, Kai (1996). Helsingin kauneuden logiikat. Kulttuurisesti moniulotteinen kaupunkirakenne. Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus.
Interviews
Jan Olin, Helsinki City Planning Office
Antti Viren, Helsinki Metropolitan Area Council
Timo Vuolanto, Helsinki City Planning Office