My new studies have unfortunately limited my chances of posting during the latter half of 2012, but I hope that will change now in 2013. I’m expecting to have more time for working on my thesis and I plan to make posts connected to it during the spring semester.

A huge thank you for everyone who read, shared or linked my blog in 2012! If you’re interested in discovering some facts on who you are, the WordPress.com stats helper monkeys have prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 8,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 14 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Best wishes for 2013 dear readers!

Looking at the reform project through a world-systems approach, even if only at a glance, inspired me to see a whole new dimension to the discussion around it. I might as well share my thoughts here too since I haven’t managed to write anything since starting my studies.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Finnish municipal reform project, you can find some more information on the website of the Ministry of Finance. But in essence, it is a project that was started after Finland’s 2011 parliamentary elections when the afterwards-formed coalition government outlined the execution of a significant nation-wide municipal reform as one of their policy priorities. The last details were just very recently apparently sorted out.

The government argues that the reform addresses several threats to society which have to be confronted sooner or later: aging of the population, increasing rural to urban migration, and urban sprawl. These are all connected to a sustainability gap in public finances, which in turn poses a threat for the provision of welfare services. Furthermore, the introduction of successful economic development schemes in especially urban areas is seen as too difficult because they are fragmented into multiple municipalities with different interests. All these threats are bound to affect the municipalities in different degrees.

The message of the project ultimately is that the municipality as a spatial governance unit as we now know it is under crisis. Geographically, the reform is about restructuring the scale of local governance to larger units. It implies that the new municipalities should on one hand territorially reflect the extent of de facto urban areas (one city, one municipality), and on the other hand annex declining rural municipalities with each other to create more viable units. This scheme could shred down the number of municipalities from 336 to around 70 in its most extreme enforcement model.

The project has naturally roused a massive debate. It is mainly happening in and between the parliament and the local councils. Also citizens have to some degree commented on the reform, mainly by expressing worries about the possible loss of local services. Overall, the main issues under discussion have interestingly been the procedural and legal aspects of the reform. Far less emphasis has been invested in discussing the spatial dimension of the reform.

In this regard, there are two general lines of discussion. The publicly most visible, and the fiercest, dispute is taking place in city regions such as Helsinki, Tampere and Turku. In all of them the battle lines are the same: the core city is pro-reform and the surrounding suburban municipalities are all against it. The latter argue that they already are economically viable whereas the core cities grief that they are losing jobs and taxpayers to the outskirts while the socially more unfortunate population gathers in the cores.

The other – and more relevant when discussing the nature of the reform – debate concerns the ambiguity or lack of sufficient articulation of the role of the urban in the project. Indeed, already the general goals of the reform encompass a paradoxical message: some of them reflect the problems of rural communities while others mainly concern issues dealt with in city regions. This takes us to the source of the crisis.

The municipal system now in place is built on the pillars of uniformity of the Keynesian welfare state dating back to the mid-20^th century. The apparent crisis of this municipal system entails that fundamental changes in society have since taken place. The spatial trait of the reactions from the municipal field suggests that cities are the places to pay attention to.

What very much seems to have happened in Finland is what has gradually happened to the global system. In Saskia Sassen’s words, a “re-scaling of what are the strategic territories that articulate the system”. According to Sassen and many other academics, the world system – our society – now operates through a landscape of networks on the basis of the advent of information technology. A state typically dubbed as the era of globalization. This social order is characterized by increased mobility, transnational interaction, and detachment of capital from nation-state containers.  A space of flows as Manuel Castells calls it.

Most notably, cities have become places where the flows of global operations manifest themselves territorially. They act as nodes in the network by providing the resources that allow enterprises and markets to have global operations. But additionally, they also function reciprocally as control centers of those flows.

The implications are that different activities, functions and people wanting to take part in the global economy trend to agglomerate in these cities. Consequently, cities and city regions become hierarchically regional and global core areas towards which activities gravitate at the cost of rural areas and smaller towns.

A very illustrative way of elaborating is an analysis by Philip McCann that I became familiar with at a lecture he gave at an EGEA congress back in 2009. He showed us that in terms of these globalization-related activities, the map of the world has become increasingly three-dimensional and more specifically “spiky”.

An example of how the world is getting increasingly spiky. In this case the mapping is on population density. Source: Time Magazine.

Naturally, this kind of spatial restructuring gives all of these spiky places – cities – a very important position in whichever nation-state they are located in. Therefore it is very much arguable that cities are to be recognized as key actors in the political sphere.

In my small world-systems analysis of Finland with our municipal reform in mind, it was clear that major changes in local governance structures have historically always followed periods of economic expansion. These have been triggered by shifts in societal structures caused by introduction of economic reforms, new production models and/or technical innovation. These changes are of course not only to be seen as shifts that happened solely in Finland, but as belonging to the readjustment processes of the global system.

After the economic crisis of the early 1990’s, we saw many economic reforms, entered the European Union, invested in new kinds of areas of expertise (anyone still remember Nokia?) and so forth.

All of this led to economic recovery and as the case always is, in accelerating urbanization. But this time all of this happened only in around 10 cities and resulting in a depopulation process in just about everywhere else. More specifically, most new jobs have been created in 4 or 5 city regions since the recession. We arguably now live in an era that can be characterized by “the rise of cities”. It is for example worth noting that the OECD published their first ever Finnish edition in their series of “metropolitan review” reports focusing on Helsinki in 2003. It also is no coincidence that the three biggest urban areas, Helsinki, Tampere and Turku have their own lobby office in Brussels.

Source for maps and graphs (presentation only in Finnish unfortunately).

In this context, the current reform can definitely be seen as “due”, because so far nothing has essentially been done to adjust the Finnish municipal network to this changing societal landscape. But the relevant question is whether the substance of the suggested reform does indeed match that landscape.

Here I argue that it does not. The most fundamental shortcoming is the inadequate emphasis placed on cities. The reform as such seems to be too much of a compromise between the municipality model of the Keynesian welfare state and of one based on the recognition of the importance of city regions in today’s world. It at the moment tries to “kill two birds with one stone”, by imposing just one framework for local governance to suit two very different spatial realities.

We can clearly see that people, jobs and resources are concentrating in the bigger cities and especially in Helsinki. Following this process, they will increasingly need to deal with not only acting as the engines of the country’s well-being but also with urban problems associated with cities actively intertwined into the global network of cities.

It is in fact a very recent phenomenon in modern Finland that the city has gained ground in political development schemes. Before the Second World War, cities have enjoyed a higher hierarchical rank than rural municipalities. These were also times when the country was more openly linked to other parts of Europe. During the Cold War Finland was relatively much more a “closed system” due to its position right next to the Soviet Union and consequent policy of neutrality. Now Finland has deconstructed many of these protectionist regulation mechanisms and is again more open to the world system.

Finland’s entry to the European Union in 1995 can be seen as one important catalyst in an emerging shift towards city-emphasizing policies. To streamline its regional policies to better sync with those of the EU, Finland introduced a Centre of Expertise Programme in 1994, which also meant careful recognition of a changing societal landscape. But it was not until 2007 that cities officially got a place in the forefront of national policies. The concept of a separate metropolitan policy for the Greater Helsinki Region was then introduced in the government strategy. The implementation and definition of these urban policies is still however an ongoing process.

And it is now at this junction in time when the local government structures, municipalities, are being redefined.

In my opinion, it doesn’t make any sense to discuss urban policies and the municipality reform in separate forums. The intrinsic paradox of the reform proposal is that it imposes a one-size-fits-all model to a reality that does not operate on a single level. If we really want to solve urban problems – and thus societal problems – we need to lay out our national structures in a way that recognizes the city as the defining factor of our well-being. As long as we keep on discussing in a sense that Helsinki and a rural village somewhere in Finland are to be considered as something equal, we are not going anywhere.

We cannot escape the fact that globalization is urbanization.

Another excuse for my blog inactivity is that I’m about to begin a new interesting chapter in my life: I’ve been accepted to a one-year master’s program called European Urban Cultures (POLIS) that will be taught in four European cities during the upcoming academic year. My goal is to deepen my expertise in urban issues and do a bit of research on issues that I find interesting.

Going back to school also means that I’ll be working on a thesis throughout my study year. The rest (and the more interesting part) of this post is aimed at bringing out the general theme I’ve had in mind for my personal research project.

Here goes:

My blog has mostly focused on criticizing the outcomes of modernist urban planning and architectural design. I’ve also suggested that a better alternative would be to revive the use of time-tested interpretations of city-building. There’s not too much of this going on in Finland, but on a global scale the blog is just another outlet for anti-sprawl rhetoric. And the good thing is that to my experience, the number of like-minded urbanists around the world is all but decreasing in years to come. The message is getting louder: let’s make cities instead of sprawl.

So far, a huge chunk of the energy put into the battle against sprawl has been concentrated on specifying what sprawl exactly is, what’s wrong with it and what kind of urban elements are better alternatives. Few have gone further to discuss and draft actual proposals on how to pave the way for the much-needed change in urban policy and inspire the public to demand more from their surroundings. Here in Finland – where the discussion is minimal to begin with – concrete action plans are still especially far off.

In America however, the anti-sprawl movement has gone as far as institutionalizing itself to a certain degree. The fight against sprawl has been a lot lengthier in North America compared to much of the rest of the Western world, because that’s where sprawl to a large degree originates from. As a result, New Urbanists and their kind are much further in transforming their rhetoric into concrete action than in e.g. Europe. The most ambitious tool created so far to overcome the deficiencies of conventional zoning regulations is form-based urban planning. Or to be more precise, form-based code (FBC).

The Form-Based Codes Institute – an NGO founded to diffuse the use of FBCs in North America – gives a well-stated definition of the concept:

“Form-based codes foster predictable built results and a high-quality public realm by using physical form (rather than separation of uses) as the organizing principle for the code. They are regulations, not mere guidelines, adopted into city or county law. Form-based codes offer a powerful alternative to conventional zoning.

Form-based codes address the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the form and mass of buildings in relation to one another, and the scale and types of streets and blocks. The regulations and standards in form-based codes are presented in both words and clearly drawn diagrams and other visuals. They are keyed to a regulating plan that designates the appropriate form and scale (and therefore, character) of development, rather than only distinctions in land-use types.

This approach contrasts with conventional zoning’s focus on the micromanagement and segregation of land uses, and the control of development intensity through abstract and uncoordinated parameters (e.g., FAR, dwellings per acre, setbacks, parking ratios, traffic LOS), to the neglect of an integrated built form. Not to be confused with design guidelines or general statements of policy, form-based codes are regulatory, not advisory. They are drafted to implement a community plan. They try to achieve a community vision based on time-tested forms of urbanism. Ultimately, a form-based code is a tool; the quality of development outcomes depends on the quality and objectives of the community plan that a code implements.”

The usage of Form-based codes have steadily increased since the early 21^st century and have been adopted in forms of varying degree in over 300 communities in North America today. The most notable codes are found in Miami, Florida, and Denver, Colorado, where the cities changed from Euclidian zoning to form-based zoning in 2010 on a city-wide level.

The concept as such is of course not a new innovation at all. Codes that regulate urban forms have been around forever. The novelty comes from the ambitious effort to break away from modernist zoning practices.  You can get acquainted with the history of codes for example through Emily Talen’s The Codes Project at Arizona State University.

Because the FBC is a very new concept in urban planning, the interest it has received from the scientific community is niche. Most studies I’ve ran into describe what FBCs generally are and how they’ve come to be, but very little research has been done on experiences from communities created with FBCs.

I find form-based codes fascinating and would like to see them tested in Finland too. The preliminary idea for my thesis work is to find out on one hand what the perquisites for adopting form-based codes are in local administration and on the other how all that matches with our planning system. I am also secretly interested to learn how the Finnish planning profession/local administration/national administration feel about the general idea of applying form-based zoning to our planning system, so I will definitely still need to spend time choosing how to approach my research theme and at what scope.

I will look further into the issue during the coming weeks and months and will also be able to discuss the topic with my professors once my studies actually start. In the meantime, all comments and ideas on my preliminary research topic are very welcome and much appreciated!

PS I am not exactly sure what my regained student status will mean for the content of this blog, but my intention at this moment is to write posts related to my thesis research. I might also open a new blog about my experiences of European urban culture during the next academic year.  Stay tuned.

The public (and by this I mostly mean the planning profession) usually associates New Urbanism with a kooky and nostalgic interest in copying historical architectural styles, especially here in Europe. And this is no wonder, because Europe is home to a few intensely traditional designs such as Poundbury in England and Jakriborg in Sweden. And they’ve repeatedly hit the headlines over the years.

Jakriborg. This medieval town is built near Lund in the late 1990′s. Photo courtesy of Minerva’s blog.

But New Urbanism isn’t in fact as much about neo-traditional architecture as it is about traditional neighborhood development (TND). The goal of TND is to place special attention on the urban surroundings that we live in. Everyone with a heart for good urbanism prizes the idea of creating walkable mixed-use neighborhoods with easy access to public transportation. But typically we’ll just try to meet this with the same suburbia-embracing planning doctrines as we’ve built everything else with. The result? Denser sprawl. Sure, the neighborhood can sort of technically qualify as “urban” having a train station within walking distance, and a couple of supermarkets and an office building somewhere in the middle of it. As city dwellers we’ll think “it’s OK. Could be worse. You got to live somewhere, right?” But not in a million years would we start comparing it with the kind of urban places we spend a lot of time and money visiting and admiring around the world.

TND advocates go for the extra mile and seek to shape public spaces, streetscapes and buildings with time-tested design practices. The goal is to create places truly worth caring about as much as to foster sustainability and promote public transit. Architecture is just one dimension in the big picture, but it just happens to be so that modern architecture reflects a very different perception of the city than the traditional kind and makes it therefore difficult to fit in the equation.

Newurbanism.org puts it this way: “New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a re-ordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods – the way communities have been built for centuries around the world.”

Although New Urbanist communities are gaining ground around the globe, the Finnish planning profession is generally still very hostile towards traditional urban designs. It’s no surprise we’re still waiting for the first New Urbanist neighborhood to pop up. But it’s not entirely bad news. We do have one neighborhood that stands out with its neo-traditional architecture: Kartanonkoski. This project is quite intriguing because it visually really differs from our conventional style of urban development. The neighborhood is located in Vantaa and has been gradually built since 2000.

A nice row of townhouses in Kartanonkoski.

Many times people associate Kartanonkoski with New Urbanism because of its architecture, but I’m afraid it’s far from it. The neighborhood is more like a typical apartment building suburb in disguise. Needless to say that the neighborhood can be considered as progress in the Finnish context, but my point is to emphasize that we are not to confuse it with any notions of good urbanism.

I’ll do a quick comparison between the “traditional” design of Kartanonkoski and a real New Urbanist neighborhood by European standards to highlight my argument. I spent a weekend in Stockholm last October with a group of friends and used the opportunity to visit Sankt Erikskvarteren, a 1990′s inner-city infill project. So I’ll use it as my TND example. I highly recommend you go see it too if you ever find yourself in Stockholm.

Sankt Erikskvarteren.

On the surface level, both neighborhoods represent similar 1920s neo-classical architectural designs, but a closer look into three important concepts of urbanity reveals why Kartanonkoski is just another sprawl project – if certainly more positive than a conventional one.

Location

The first key difference between the two neighborhoods is in where they are built. Sankt Erikskvarteren is located in the inner-city borough of Kungsholmen and a direct extension of the existing urban fabric while Kartanonkoski is built in the middle of a field in the outer suburbs of Helsinki (Vantaa = suburban Helsinki), next to a strip of big-box stores. From Sankt Erikskvarteren you can basically reach anyplace in central Stockholm with your own two feet whereas in Kartanonkoski you can walk, well, around Kartanonkoski. There is little reason to walk anywhere from there, because there really isn’t any destination to walk to nor would you in any case find it convenient because the neighborhood is tucked in between two major highways and farmland. Your best choice is to hop in your car, because public transportation isn’t that good either.

From a New Urbanist perspective Kartanonkoski is not sustainable or accessible. It promotes automobile-dependency, reduces farmland and is just simply far away from everything.

Mix of uses

This second point is closely connected to the first one. In a mixed-use neighborhood residential, entertainment, commercial, employment and recreational activities are all available in the immediate vicinity — preferably in walking distance.

The inner-city location of our Swedish neighborhood already checks this box. But that’s not all. Despite being primarily a residential area and relatively small, Sankt Erikskvarteren also boasts a couple of cafés.

Kartanonkoski on the other hand doesn’t even have a corner store even though it’s home to about 3 000 people. There are schools, daycares and a library but that’s it. For everything else you’ll need to wander off (read drive) to the big-box stores close-ish by. Oh yeah, there’s one large factory-like bakery next to the neighborhood, but I’m not sure if you can actually buy anything from there. In any case it doesn’t exactly match anyone’s idea of a nice neighborhood bakery or café. It of course means jobs, but we’re still light years away from being able to call Kartanonkoski a mixed-use neighborhood.

Layout

Even if the buildings in both neighborhoods are architecturally somewhat similar, they are laid out in a very different way.

Kartanonkoski’s layout reflects a car-centric approach, the lots and yards are overly large, and most buildings and streets have no real relationship. You run into parking lots everywhere and a huge chunk of the “green” is the no-man’s-land kind. While a few streets here and there are designed nicely having buildings connect to them, many times buildings have setbacks and streets and sidewalks are separated by a planting strip. The big picture is unmistakable: Kartanonkoski is just a polished-up version of the modernist neighborhood unit.

Sankt Erikskvarteren on the other hand is so carefully integrated to the older urban fabric around it that many people wouldn’t even notice that it’s built only about 20 years ago. The neighborhood’s buildings are aligned neatly along its streets which creates clearly defined and intimate public space. There are also a couple of small parks, clearly designed as areas for public enjoyment. It’s the best example of a neo-traditional urban layout I’ve come across. You cannot mistake being anywhere but in a city.

It’s quite clear that Kartanonkoski is not built with the same kind of passion towards the urban environment as Sankt Erikskvarteren is. I don’t mean to say that the spaces between buildings in Kartanonkoski are neglected as such, because everything seems to be well taken care of. There are nice and safe pedestrian paths, a small park with a cute pond and a playground or two.

But the way things are arranged in them just doesn’t support any kind of liveliness or social interaction that cities are about. Things seem to be just randomly thrown around without any clearly noticeable attempt of creating definable urban space. And since the neighborhood layout is kind of haphazard, it is difficult to make sense of it. The vast open farmland or the big-box stores as neighboring landscapes don’t exactly help in introducing an urban atmosphere of any kind either.

I think it’s marvelous that the developers of Kartanonkoski have been brave enough to do something different. And above all, we now have a concrete example of what neo-traditional architecture could mean for Finland. Many people, especially families, find the neighborhood appealing, which we can see in skyrocketed apartment prices. Take note, city officials.

The next initiative I would like to see is adding traditional neighborhood design in the mix. Who’s got the guts?

Due to tightening carbon emission regulations, wooden construction is now being promoted as an effective measure in the battle against climate change. Not only is the carbon footprint of a wooden building a lot smaller than of a concrete one, but the material itself also ties down atmospheric carbon dioxide given that new trees will replace the ones used for construction. The Finnish government has also made it public policy to develop and support wood-based construction.

“Hallelujah!” shout the environmentalists. And for a good reason. As far as the urban-minded are concerned, the buzz on wood seems however to give little reason for celebration.

Back in the day, just about everything in Finland was constructed out of wood. Stone-built churches were basically the only exceptions. Wood was obviously the most convenient material to use thanks to its universal availability. Our ancestors evolved to master the skill of wooden construction leaving a legacy of stunningly beautiful urban habitats. The Old Town in Rauma is for example now a UNESCO world heritage site. The narrow streets of Old Porvoo have an extraordinary urban appeal. In Helsinki, I recommend taking a walk in Puu-Vallila and Käpylä for a taste of how a small-town neighborhood looked like 100 years ago. I would argue that the majority of Finns still associate wooden construction to be a part of our identity.

But regardless of the importance of wood to us, we threw it all away after WWII along with other urban traditions. And it wasn’t that we only stopped building traditional wooden neighborhoods, we also destroyed almost all the existing ones to make room for modern concrete buildings. The result is that the skills of designing great wooden cities have long ago sunk to oblivion. The modern era wooden houses mainly consist of detached homes made from prefabricated components.

A modern multistory wooden apartment building. Picture courtesy of Vuorelma Arkkitehdit Oy.

Our newly found interest in wood has no connection with an interest of changing any of this. It’s as engineer-oriented as all the post-WWII urban development. The new wooden multistory apartment buildings look just like their concrete counterparts.

And it’s not only their design. In many cases especially the interiors of buildings would be difficult to distinguish as belonging to a wooden construction. Apart from a handful of post-modern landmark buildings, there generally seems to be little interest in highlighting the construction material.

Metropol Parasol; display of Finnish wooden construction in Seville. Photo courtesy of Metsä Wood.

At one of the seminars, someone enthusiastically announced that modern wood-construction technology has now tackled the last barriers for being able to suit all needs leaving imagination as the only remaining limit. Wood is a viable option for building material what ever it is you plan to create. A number of projects from around the world truly favor the argument.

The key problem just is that our imagination is the most insurmountable barrier. If only we could design today’s wooden neighborhoods with the same passion and vision as we still did a century ago.

The car culture’s lifeline is naturally the road network that allows the four-wheeled beasts to roam our communities. We’ve spent a lot of time and money turning enormous areas of land into places that no one wants to be near unless protected with a metal box.

And in the process of doing so, we’ve simultaneously opened the Pandora’s box of auto-dependency. “If you build it, they will come” is a popular phrase to describe the reality that building more roads and lanes always generates more traffic.

When people got in their cars, it became reasonable to design everything else to accommodate the needs of the automobile as well. Think parking lots, garages, gas stations, hypermarkets, and drive-thrus. But the consequences are not only limited to ugly cityscapes. Auto-dependency has environmental,social and economic impacts too. We of course could not do without the automobile anymore, but we can choose which one is the master and which one the slave in urban development. An effective start would be to take a critical look at the roads in our cities and discuss who and what purpose do they serve?

There is a gigantic difference between a street and highway. The first one is a public arena for urban culture while the latter is supposed to connect cities with each other. Unfortunately, we’ve somehow decided in our car obsession that it would be a good idea to mix the two together. The result has been the automobile’s greatest triumph.

Charles Marohn from Strong Towns very nicely dubs these street/road hybrids as stroads: “Anytime you are driving on a street posted for travel speeds between 30 and 55 mph [translates into 50-90 kph], you are almost certainly on a STROAD”. One “functions neither as a road that moves people quickly between two places nor as a street that provides a platform for capturing value. As such, STROADs are the most financially unproductive type of transportation corridor that we can build; they cost a ton, but financially yield very little return for the governments that must pay to maintain them.”

Economics aside, stroads are also very unproductive culturally. The more “highway elements” a stroad has, the less it becomes compatible with a meaningful people habitat.  An urban street (think of cities before suburbanization) is not only limited to act as a space for movement, but also for communication, social and commercial encounter and exchange. It is a public space, a place to do business, a political space, and a symbolic and ceremonial space in the city.

In this context, I want to flag two recent stroad-related plans that bring cautious hope of a new direction for Finnish urbanites. The city of Tampere plans to bury the inner city section of a highway underground with a tunnel project. And Helsinki is investigating if Länsiväylä, the most important road to Espoo, could be transformed from a highway into an urban boulevard.

Tampere’s tunnel project is very significant in my books, because the city has a very sad history of anti-urban and pro-sprawl planning. They’ve even built a modernist satellite city, Hervanta, in the middle of nowhere to celebrate the new world order. The car is now so strongly embraced that some people I know actually consider it shameful to use public transport and/or cars play a significant role in their lives.

This lake shore will be freed for people. Photo taken from the city's website.

One of the city’s modernist projects was to build an east-west highway through the city to ease transit traffic and accommodate the needs of increased car-ownership. This four-lane road runs along the coastline of Lake Näsijärvi on the northern side of Tampere. It has not only very efficiently blocked access to the lake since the 1970’s, but diverted growth from the inner city to suburban locations. To my great surprise, a few years ago the city suggested that some of this land should be put into better use by digging a tunnel for the road. The ongoing discussion had before this been whether congestion could be relieved by adding more lanes to the road. I was sure the tunnel would never happen, but I am very happy to have been mistaken. The tunnel plans are now almost finalized and received political approval last year by the city council.

Länsiväylä now. Photo courtesy of Carlos Lamuela.

Helsinki has followed suit and gone a notch further. As I already mentioned, the plan is to get rid of a stroad once and for all by depaving Länsiväylä from a six-lane highway into an urban boulevard. This discussion has evolved in connection with the decision to extend the city’s subway line to the west. The initiative would make sure that suburbanites from Espoo would opt to take the tube instead of driving.

The urban boulevard. Picture courtesy of Carlos Lamuela.

The idea originates from an Aalto University student, Carlos Lamuela, who envisioned in his master’s thesis that the transformation would free land to accommodate about 16 000 new residents and 8 000 workplaces. And most importantly, the plan would create “a classic boulevard where all city functions happen: residential and commercial buildings, public space and all modes of transportation, i.e. pedestrians, bicycles and vehicles”.

Best of luck to both plans! These initiatives are very welcome statements for change in the conventional auto-oriented city planning attitudes. I hope we can start focusing on building streets, not stroads.

Last Thursday I attended a seminar by the City Planning Department on the subject of introducing townhouses to the city fabric in a larger scale. The seminar was based on the city’s recently published townhouse report (unfortunately only available in Finnish). The report circles – just as the seminar did – around the bureaucratic implications for introducing the townhouse as an element for city-building. It also sums up the current plans for townhouses and the areas with most potential for future development.

Townhouses in New York City.

A significant share of the future townhouses will be built in Östersundom, an unbuilt area in the eastern fringe of the city, and other suburban locations. But some townhouses will also be introduced in the inner city areas. The suburban and inner city townhouse will also be separated as two distinct types. Each will be designed with features that accommodate them in the corresponding context.

I find the city’s new plans generally very welcome! Although it’s a bit amusing that something as common as the townhouse is under discussion as an option for city building in the year 2012. But better late than never.

Even though suburban townhouses are a better option than detached single-family housing, the seminar gave me the impression that they will in fact only serve as a new way for selling suburban dreams. In other words, there is currently no attempt to use the townhouse as a tool for transforming suburban locations into more urban places.

The suburban townhouse will likely follow the examples of existing sites like Säterinmetsä (in Espoo) and Vuorenjuuri. They are among the most notorious examples of the few townhouse-like attempts that we have at the moment.

The inner city townhouses will however be more like the real thing. The ones already planned or under planning will emerge at seaside locations in the brownfield sites of Kalasatama, Jätkäsaari, Koivusaari and Kruunuvuorenranta. It is debatable if the last two of these projects are in fact inner city projects, but that’s how the city anyways sees it.

The goal is to spread townhouses amongst taller apartment buildings in the project areas and create nice streetscapes. Cars are parked underground. The city is also thinking if townhouses could be a solution for infill development on lots too small for conventional apartment buildings.

I am very pro to these plans and can also say without any further thinking that the townhouse would be a fabulous addition for infill development. Generally, I just fear that the outcomes of the big project plans will turn out to be disappointments. Non-suburban development hasn’t really been done in the city for decades so there is little know-how on placemaking among other things. Extra attention should be paid to making sure the outcome won’t look like Ruoholahti, which is a 1990’s attempt to design an urban neighborhood. Didn’t quite hit the note. It’s as if they tried to squeeze suburban designs into smaller lots.

I also took note that the city still needs to define more clearly what a Helsinki townhouse should look like. There was an idea competition for this back in 2010, but apparently more are needed. It would be optimistic to hope for anything but very modern ideas, but I want to remind that the townhouse is not completely new to Helsinki. The very first ones were built 100 years ago in Kulosaari and Munkkiniemi. The ones in Munkkiniemi are designed by Eliel Saarinen. Personally, I would take inspiration from these graceful prototypes.

Townhouse, welcome (back) to Helsinki!

Keilaniemi is a business park home to the Finnish technology industry and houses the headquarters of Nokia, Kone and Rovio (the company that created Angry Birds) to name a few. Otaniemi is where the main campus of Aalto University is situated along with other important technological research and development institutions. Tapiola equals art because it is the main cultural center in Espoo.

Espoo’s goal is to create what could be referred to as an innovation city: s place where these different areas of life collide resulting in new ideas, ways of doing things, and prosperity. Walking is encouraged, everything is bustling with life 24/7 and all solutions will be so environmentally sustainable that a global recognition is granted. The bill is at least four to five billion Euros for all investments combined. The mission for city planning is to connect the dots and turn a new page is Espoo’s history.

Sounds pretty nice, huh? Rhetorically, yes. But the first plans suggest accomplishing this with more of the same old same old. And in my opinion it would be profoundly optimistic to hope for something else. Espoo is the last place I could imagine introducing solutions that foster good urbanism. It is sprawl heartland.

Espoo is statistically the second largest city in Finland with roughly 250 000 inhabitants and more pouring in all the time. Espoo is a classic case of a community that evolves when the center city (Helsinki) spills over its limits and loses control over its suburban areas. Espoo developed along with Finland’s fast urbanization process after the Second World War. Before that there was hardly anything there beyond a cow or two.

Much like in the T3 project, the history of Espoo’s development and Finland’s sprawl “tradition” both center on Tapiola. The area can be conceived as the prototype for modernist city planning in Finland. Tapiola turned out to be a satisfying model to house the rural population flocking into Helsinki after employment (read more here).

The model’s origin is in the Garden City ideology, which suggested that the growth of larger cities should be realized through a series of compact nodes. The nodes would be connected to the center city and each other by a rail network and surrounded with a green zone. In Tapiola, however, the urban dimensions of the Garden City plan got scrapped by the modernist anti-urban thinking: people would be better off keeping a distance to the city and each other; the automobile is superior to public transport and so forth. The buildings needed to reflect the brand new architectural ideas we had adopted and already even got big names of our own in (Alvar Aalto being the most notorious).

The Tapiola model turned out to be appealing especially to the rural population and the concept has been applied over and over in every Finnish city. From the first decades after WWII suburban development has taken a turn towards detached and terraced single-family homes, but all have been completed with the Tapiola mindset. It’s fair to call Tapiola the epicenter of Finnish sprawl.

Espoo itself is a grand display of the Tapiola mindset. And in my books one of the strangest cities in Europe. It actually cannot really be described as a city. It’s one of those places where you can drive (and you will have to drive, walking is not an option) all day but will never find Espoo. I happen to work in Otaniemi at the moment, one of the T3 components and key areas of the city. From my office room window I can only admire a four-lane highway, not another building in sight. A couple of rooms down the hall you can see horse stables from the window. I hear there are cows somewhere nearby as well.

I find it difficult to see that despite the promising speeches Espoo would be able to create anything sustaining good urbanism. Tapiola was initially sold with the Garden City ideals, but realized as something completely else in comparison to the original idea. This time round, the goal on the rhetoric level is the same; a dense urban community, which will also be a source of innovation like nowhere to be seen before.

The difference between this new plan and the old one is the bigger scope with Keilaniemi and Otaniemi added into the picture. But I fear that the T3 reform is nothing short of giving the good old Tapiola model a facelift 21^st century-style.

The most amusing – yet very sad – part of the T3 plan is the idea of bringing people together. As if there was something new to building cities in a way that mixes functions. That’s how cities were built for thousands of year apart from the last 60 or so. There’s a time-tested innovation for you.

A simple description of zoning is the practice of isolating land-uses into zones of their own. Residential areas, commercial areas, industrial areas, recreational areas and so forth. Cities will typically have their own zoning policies as well. These are instructions that regulate e.g. the types of housing allowed in a residential zone.

Zoning as a comprehensive tool for land-use planning was first introduced in New York City back in 1916. It emerged at a time when the industrial city had turned out to be a failure and the modern man sought ever-increasing ways of rationalizing the society.

Sprawl critics have repeatedly pointed out that in sprawling areas zoning policies are set to favor this kind of development. Single-use zoning creates a need to move to another zone for work or shopping. And low-density zoning makes sure that you will need a car for that. But it should also be understood that separating people from land-uses and each other are also a built-in features in zoning. The very idea of zoning was to make sure that people would not have to live next to toxic factories.

As in probably every developed country, zoning is however nowadays required by law in Finland. So sticking with it is a likely scenario for the foreseeable future. Our Land-Use and Building Act lays down eleven prestigious goals and guidelines for our planning system to enable sustainable and vivid urban environments. Ironically, they could have been taken from any anti-sprawl book. What we do in practice is far from that.

When zoning, we tend to make irreversible choices that eventually sum up as sprawl. Michael Lewyn for example describes a couple of cases how these dynamics work in American zoning in an understandable way in his blog post. He also notes that the seeds of sprawl are typically put in place already during the comprehensive planning phase. My guess is that there probably are a number of regulations in our National Building Code that support sprawl as well.

Needless to say, a priority for taking back our cities is to work on our zoning policies. The main problem, however, is the mindset that guards them.

Albeit New York City gave us zoning, their work is now a case to take good example of. Change is always an option.The Wall Street Journal reports that the city’s Planning Commission promotes good urbanism through zoning amendments. According to director Amanda Burden, the aim is “to promote New York as a walkable city with active, tree-lined streets and active retail frontages.” The new approach not only shapes the blocks and writes the skyline, but also aims to curb obesity by offering incentives for fresh-food markets in low-income neighborhoods; buck up the mom-and-pop store; and promote an astonishing range of other quality-of-life benefits.

There might be no place like New York City, but I truly hope that doesn’t stop us from learning from them.

If you would tour through Finland’s towns and cities by car, you will notice that we have put a lot of effort in making your drive a pleasant one. Just about every roundabout you meet will be decorated with an installment of some sort or at least with nice plantings. Not to mention larger art installments freeway-side or on crossing bridges. In inhabited areas, we will also make sure the grass next to the roads and ramps is nice and tidy.

The Art Police in a roundabout in Espoo. Picture taken by Ari Karttunen.

While all of this is fine per se, it also reveals how far we are from a mindset that would embrace walkable neighborhoods and public transportation. The flip side is that we pay little attention to public art – or the public realm at large – in places where people generally live, walk and go about their business. Especially in smaller towns or the areas outside of the inner neighborhoods of larger cities it could be difficult find any piece of public art besides the one installed in the middle of a roundabout. Yet, these are the areas where the majority of Finns live.

In many places you will also discover that the best place to go do something that requires a larger grassy area would be the grass next to the motorway. The neighborhood park is likely to be an area that was just left unbuilt. Apart from maybe some jogging paths and a sign that claims the area as a park. The closest public planting display is at the roundabout.

Besides art, also nature can be enjoyed through a windshield. The city of Tampere is working on diverting a busy four-lane thoroughfare into a tunnel that separates the center of the city from a lake (a topic for a future post). The goal is to free land for expanding the inner city and give residents access to the lake. The initiative has however generated a lot of opposition. And of course one the fundamental arguments for opposing the project is that passing drivers would lose their view of the lake.

It seems like in Finland we consider one of the most natural ways of enjoying public art, plantings or even nature is while sitting in a car. We need to understand that the lake is not going anywhere, you just need to make the effort of getting out of your car to enjoy it.