Metropolis magazine article, 2004
ACCORDING TO PLAN
Emboldened by a unique set of cultural circumstances, Helsinki’s planning department has a measure of control unheard of in American cities.
Approach Helsinki by sea and you immediately understand why it’s called the “White City of the North.” It emerges from the archipelago as a pale sliver of buildings that hug the rocky shoreline of the Baltic See. The serene city unfolds along the Esplanadi, a leafy pedestrian thoroughfare that leads to the central business district. There you stumble onto a giant pit: Kamppi. It’s the largest construction project in Finland’s history—nearly two billion cubic feet of granite is being excavated from the site in preparation to bury the existing bus terminal and create a mixed-use urban center aboveground. This is just a taste of the building boom that’s happening in one of Europe’s fastest-growing cities, a seemingly sleepy place that may be uniquely equipped to handle the challenge.
Bound on three sides by water, Helsinki bumps into the municipalities of Espoo, Kauniainen, and Vantaa inland. Only about a million people live in the relatively small metropolitan region. The city itself is home to 560,000 residents, and as migration moves south the municipal government is planning for 40,000 more by 2020. In addition to the staggering construction at its center, there are seven residential districts in various stages of development. “Since the city owns seventy percent of the land, it is our duty to try and organize the housing possibilities,” says Annukka Lindroos, deputy director of the city planning department. “That’s the reason we’re working so hard right now.”
That ownership—largely established when the city bought up land during the 1930s depression—is one of the distinct advantages Helsinki has for managing growth. It gives the already muscular planning department a measure of control unheard of in American cities. “When the architect arrives, the materiality, height and volume of the building—these kinds of instructions already exist,” says Pentti Kareoja, a principal of the firm ARK-House Architects, which has been successful in winning commissions in Helsinki. “Because the city owns the land,” Lindroos says, “it can make regulations to produce the kind of buildings it wants.”
On top of this, Helsini’s large 300-person planning department is powerfully integrated, bringing land-use, town and traffic planning together under one roof. “I don’t know too many places, even in Europe, where traffic and land-use planning are housed in the same department,” Lindroos says. “Doing all of that at the same time gives us great possibilities.”
Taken together that sounds like an oppressive formula, but the city’s architectural community seems to harbor no resentment toward the process. No one I spoke to even suggested that interference from planners diluted the quality of design (the cry heard time and again in cities like New York, Boston and San Francisco). Rather, what emerged was a picture of a remarkably democratic dialogue, thanks in part to the country’s tradition of holding design competitions. “The competition system has been essential,” Kareoja says. “Ninety percent of Helsinki’s public buildings are the result of it. Many competitions are open, which is important for bringing up young colleagues. It’s pretty natural that for important sites in the city there will be a competition.” In addition to spreading commissions among architects, competitions are used to generate ideas so that the city’s team does not do all the planning.
Public involvement is encouraged in other ways too. A public participation law stipulates that the planning department must tell inhabitants what’s going on in their area; the city sends out an annual mailing to every resident detailing upcoming projects. Even a draft of the new master plan, adopted in 2002, was made available for public comment before it was approved.
Finns consider such procedural openness an integral part of their relatively young government, and they are recognized for it. For the past nine years, Finland has been rated as one of the least corrupt countries by Transparency International, a group that monitors corruption in organizations worldwide. Accordingly public debate can stop or stall projects. “I’ve noticed that Finnish planning seems easier to thwart than American planning,” says Robert Beauregard, a professor of urban policy at the New School University who has taught in Helsinki. “There’s more sensitivity to what the community is thinking that here in the United States. It has to do with Finland’s welfare state and its very homogenous culture. They believe in their government, believe that their government does good. And their government—including the planning department—is much more open about things. This reinforces the idea that they have the public interest at heart.”
One project that stalled was Steven Holl’s now celebrated Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 1998 and was initially an aesthetic challenge for Helsinki residents. While it makes a compelling landmark—just what the city was looking for when it launched an international competition in 1993—it is not the kind of pragmatic Modernist building typically designed by Finnish architects. “The architectural language wasn’t familiar to our colleagues,” Kareoja says. “There has been a lot of discussion about this kind of monolithic thinking in Finnish architecture. We actually wanted some fresh air.” Often called “the whale.” The building resembles a soft, silver apostrophe and funnels the eye from the central area surrounding Eliel Saarinen’s iconic railway station out over Töölönlahti Bay. Inside, the building has the same effect, gathering light and space until it culminates in the north façade overlooking the bay and the Parliament Building.
This prime location constituted much of the public’s objection to the project. The design was considered an inappropriate backdrop for the existing equestrian statue of Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, the national hero who helped lead Finland to independence in 1918. It was also the first new building to be constructed at Töölönlahti (the central park where Alvar Aalto’s Finlandia Hall sits) since the unpopular 1993 National Opera. “There were 20,000 signatures of old war veterans to stop the project before the city approved it,” Holl says. “It was one of the most controversial projects in recent history. A lot of people protested because they wanted a Finnish architect. This was the commission of the last quarter century for them. It was very important—the museum of modern art in the heart of the city. Yet this was a unanimous decision made by an anonymous jury. The legal right of that jury held even under the pressure to cave.” Though the planning department has the authority to reject the results of competitions, it rarely does so. “Competitions are a tool to improve quality,” Kareoja says. “People at every level have accepted this method.”
Holl’s experience illuminates another paradoxical fact about the Helsinki planning department. “No one in the planning department ever questioned the architectural vocabulary of Kiasma,” he adds. “In American they tend to try to crenellate the roof or make you build in brick—all these things they really have no right to tamper with. It happens in American all the time. It’s why we have such bad architecture in the public realm. The Finns are incredibly sophisticated when it comes to understanding how fragile design is. We’ll get none of that in New York at Ground Zero. Libeskind should be given the artistic intuitive license that he needs to realize his architecture. But we don’t even know what that means here.”
While the potential for stifling aesthetic control exists—the entire city is virtually treated as a preservation area, with new buildings required to be “contextual”—there is an institutional receptiveness to innovation. The Finns have a more flexible definition of contextual: though there must be material sensitivity to the surroundings, glass-and-steel buildings, for example, aren’t considered inappropriate neighbors to the city’s nineteenth-century Neoclassical and Art Nouveau structures. Ideologically this stems from the country’s unique history. “As an independent country, Finland is exactly the same age as Modernism,” architect Kareoja says. “Modernism has given us a cultural and visual national identity.” In practice it’s another function of the competition system, a culture that has faith in public process, and a more integrated design education (in Finland, architecture and planning are the same course of study, which makes practicing planners as savvy about design as architects are about urbanism).
Currently debate centers around a music hall designed by Laiho-Pulkkinen-Raunio Architects. Though the firm won the competition in 2000, the city has yet to give final approval. The Töölönlahti Bay site is occupied by two brick magazines that were once warehouses for the state railway and are now popular spots for cultural events. Many residents feel they have more civic value than the proposed music center. On my first visit to the city I agreed with them (see “Magazines or Music Halls in Helsinki?” at metropolismag. Com). However, on a return trip, I realized that the warehouses sit directly across Mannerheim Street from the Parliament Building, a fact not immediately obvious due to a roughly twenty-foot difference in elevation between the bay and the building (though they’re only 33 feet apart). The proposed design buries part of the building, turning its roof into a ramp to transport pedestrians from the street above down into the park. So the scheme stands to integrate one of the most symbolic areas of the city, where government, media and cultural buildings meet. “The winning entry helps the existing cityscape,” says juror Pekka Helin, an architect who says he preferred the more innovative second-place design. “Laiho-Pulkkinen-Raunio’s design hides the big volume, so it’s very harmonious and contextually sensitive. It’s retiring architecture.” Because its first concern is its surroundings, the winning design is distinctly Finnish. Though deputy director Lindroos insists that the Helsinki Music Centre will eventually be built, it may mean appeasing the public by salvaging some part of the warehouses and relocating them elsewhere on the bay.
While Töölönlahti Bay and the neighboring Kamppi site are Helsinki’s highest-profile projects, the new residential districts will ultimately have greater impact on the city. “Helsinki is under pressure to come up with innovative if they want to keep growing in population,” Beauregard says of its geographic constraints. The planning department’s solution combines the infill of relatively sparsely populated outlying areas with the redevelopment of brownfield sites (including some still in use).
“The biggest issue in the new master plan is how to put more people into high-density areas so they won’t need private cars,” Lindroos says. Currently 70 percent of commuters use public transportation, and only about 13 percent of residents live in single-family houses. “We consider that they only way to continue to build the city,” she says. In addition to commercial space, offices and metro-rail and other public transit connections, each residential area has a unique profile based on an existing local resource, around which development is executed. For example, Arabianranta—on the eastern edge of the inner city, where the esteemed University of Art and Design and the ceramics company Arabia are located—is getting a high-tech backbone to support its thriving design community. New residential blocks for 12,000 people will be positioned to take advantage of the views of Helsinki Bay. Homes and businesses will be connected through a fiber-optic and wireless network so advanced it spawned the alternate name Virtual Village for the community.
Ruoholahti—a maritime community created on the site of what had been until 1987 an active port on the city’s west side—is probably the single best indicator that the planning department is up to the task of handing the anticipated population explosion. Lindroos served as project manager of the district, which was completed in 2002 and is now home to 7,500 people. Popular because it actually extends the city center—as if, for example, Williamsburg or DUMBO were to abut Manhattan—the western community is oriented around the sea and an artificial canal on the south side. The five- and six-story residences open up to the canal, with a row of eight-story office buildings to the north. “We had the western freeway coming into the city there, so we needed to block the noise,” Lindroos says of the design. A metro station and two trams—operational before the first president moved in—serve the areas. Ten competitions—one for town planning, one for public art and eight for building design—were held on this 143-acre neighborhood alone. “There wasn’t anything here ten years ago,” Lindroos says. “Now it is a very popular residential area. We try to get new areas as livable as possible. That includes having these centers with all kinds of services and transportation systems. We always like to have a city-planning map that is colorful with housing, offices, public services and culture.”
Ruoholahti already feels integrated with the old center and has been so successful that the city made the commitment to redevelop the rest of the West Harbor—an additional 198 acres that will bring a total of 15,000 residents and 5,000 jobs to the area—and relocate the busy shipping terminals to an eastern suburb.
It’s a mistake to underestimate the degree to which successes like these dictate the public’s happiness with the planning process in Helsinki. “In the United States we really didn’t like the outcome of a lot of the stuff that was planned in the fifties and sixties with urban renewal, with large-scale development,” says Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association, on American resistance to city planning. “There are exceptions. Battery Park City in New York was master-planned, and people are pretty comfortable with the outcome. But for every Battery Park City there are dozens of places that we’re not happy with.”
But then Helsinki’s results are based on the planning department’s particular leverage—a combination of forces that’s absent in the United States. “Creating superagencies where environmental, transportation and economic development are consolidated into a single agency has become the way planning is done in Japan and the United Kingdom,” Yaro says. “What they’ve found in most of the industrialized world is that –believe it or not—these things are related and need to be dealt with in an integrated way. We don’t do that here—and we ought to.”
It’s a formula that promises Helsinki will remain a livable city during a time (Finnish planners already refer to it as a “golden age”) that might just as easily be called a crisis or a boondoggle in a less-equipped place. And it’s a model U.S. cities could learn from. “Architects working somewhere else may think it’s horrible to have these kinds of controls,” Lindroos says. “When you look at these areas afterwards, plenty of our architects think it’s quite a good system.”