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Weak places
Thoughts on strengthening soft phenomena

Panu Lehtovuori
Arabianranta, 1998 Direction . . . The motivation of this paper is my irritation at the flatness and lack of sensitivity in urban planning in Helsinki. There are two cases at hand, Arabianranta and Toolo Bay. Both are strategic developments for the city. Through the 1990s, they have been designed with a big machinery1 and by applying new tools and forms of urban development. Both areas consist of industrial landscapes, which have become gradually empty and of seminatural, wild elements. Such landscapes have a unique atmosphere and, in my opinion, a certain value. Individuals, residents organizations and conservation movements have attempted to bring some of the local characteristics into the process of design and decision-making, but with little success. The official planning process has been unable to recognize, never mind accept, these characteristics and potential values and, therefore, the planning of both Toolo Bay and Arabian ranta has become that of producing a totally new city and structures which neglect the existing, rich situation. In the spirit of high modernism, caterpillars start the work. I believe that something important, maybe even essential, slips through the net of the current urban planning and realization procedure, even when it is done well and carefully on its own terms. In the background, there are thus problems in participating and, in particular, problems in transferring knowledge and feelings about the urban environment. The problem of laymen participating in planning has often been interpreted as a

walk slowly towards the sea, wondering. The wild, flowering grassland extends hundreds of metres on both sides of the footpath. I take a deep breath. The air is filled with the scent of an unknown herb. The cranes of Sornainen Harbour loom on the horizon. The bright orange metro train runs across the Kulosaari bridge, in the distance, like an exotic worm. Now and then, my eye catches a bright flash, reflected from a distant windscreen. Its a hot day in early summer; everything is quiet, dream-like. It is quiet until I hear the birds. They fly over the grassland; they cling and dangle in the grass, strange, colourful birds. They are many and they are brave, as if they had never seen a human. Two oystercatchers strut through the water, a little farther a skylark flies up, then another, and a third! A hawk screams in the blue sky. February. The sea is frozen. Across the bay, a snowstorm has turned the other side of the islands white. The wind has packed snow inside the forest and a thick layer of snow unites the rocks and ice to a single, white form. The grassland is covered by snow as well and there are dry stalks of grass, parsley, and thistle sticking through the snow. The sky is clear and the snow and ice reflect the sunshine. I find some wild buckthorn bushes and taste their orange berries. Freezing has made them sweet. The juice bites my lips, it spills on my fingers and stains the ends of my sleeves.

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Figure 1 Skylarkss view on Arabianranta, the future Art and Design City. The Arabia factory complex with University of Art and Design is in the middle. A housing area and park will be built on the large white zone along the sea. Scale approx. 1:20,000. Source: Helsinki City Planning Office.

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CITY VOL. 4 NO. 3 across disciplinary boundaries and a relevant space notion for urban design may be found (see also Lundequist, 1999). Madanipour searches confronting uses of the concept of space. He contrasts, for example, absolute and relational space, space and mass, physical and social space, mental and real space, abstract and differential space as well as space and time. I think that these dilemmas, dual extremes of the notion of space, are problematic because they, on the one hand, cross arbitrarily over disciplines and discourses and, on the other, do not take into account the historical change of space concepts within each discipline. Sometimes dilemma takes place between two notions of the same discourse, which do not even exclude each other (e.g. space versus mass), sometimes the problem is caused by mixing totally different discourses and research interests. It is also easy to invent more dilemmas. In sociology, for example, space is often the material foundation or component of abstract phenomena or relations. Castells description of the space of flows may serve as an example:
By space of flows I refer to the system of exchanges of information, capital, and power that structures the basic processes of societies, economies, and states between different localities, regardless of localization. I call it space because it does have a spatial materiality: the directional centres located in a few selective areas of a few, selected localities; the telecommunication system, dependent upon telecommunication facilities and services that are unevenly distributed in the space. . . transportation system, that makes such nodal points dependent from major airports and airlines services, from freeway systems, from high speed trains; the security systems necessary to the protection of such directional spaces, surrounded by a potentially hostile world. . . (Castells, 1992, pp. 1516)

problem of professional language, the special terms and presentation formats: if planners only talked more clearly and drew less technical pictures, participation would be easier. Dear and H kli (1998), interestingly, a claim that there is a deeper problem. The structures of urban planning, regularities regarded as given (see also Giddens, 1994), lead to a certain, partial view of the city. Maps and statistics are the core and carrier of planning discourse. With them the planning process collects data on the city and society, making it visible in a uniform manner and controlling urban space. Modern planning has followed a logic where the visual controls the experiential, the paper projection controls what cannot be put on paper . . . From the perspective of modernistic urban planning, which aims at regulating the visible city, the lived and experienced city has become mere invisible noise, even a disturbance (Dear and H kli, 1998, p. 64, translation by a PL). In the city planning maps, Toolo Bay and Arabianranta, thus, are really treated as a patchwork of infrastructures: buildings, roads, bridges and green zones (ibid., p. 64). The only experiential dimension which is left inside the planning discoursevisual aesthetics and creation of pleasant spacesalso has its own, professional control technology and its masters, the architects, are eager to guard good taste. In Helsinkis planning and public debate, aesthetics are a legitimate theme, which provides architects with a relatively good position to defend viewing lines, or street and courtyard patterns, or ideas of free-standing monuments, depending on the situation.2 How, then, to grasp such invisible power residing in the knowledge structures and limiting both the understanding of urban qualities and the actions concerning them? In his article, Urban design and dilemmas of space (1996), Ali Madanipour looks for a solution in a more coherent use of concepts. By understanding how differently the word space is used by different people and professions and by uniting its different meanings, communication may be eased

Space is clearly asphalt, concrete, bundles of optic fibre, and everything what may move on or in those, such as aeroplanes, cars, and

LEHTOVUORI: WEAK PLACES 401 light bursts carrying data. In architecture, then, space is the most ethereal element in the discourse. Floors, walls, ceilings, doors, and windows, which Castells would have called space, are for an architect materials, structures or, at best, space dividers. Space is the emptiness between these and around these and may be described with most nonobjective epithets. Architects may talk about soft, inviting, repelling or slippery space, about the pressure or suck of space, or about dead spaces. In sociology, space is a material fact, in architecture it is individual perception, experience and interpretation. In my opinion, Madanipour does not get too far in unifying the wide and fragmented notion of space. However, because I do agree that the word space is used (individuals use both in every-day parlance and in professional contexts) in many conflicting ways, I would like to propose another way to clarify the concept. My idea is that instead of mapping dilemmas, it would be more useful (1) to find out the use of the concept of space and its historical development in each discipline, in order to make it possible to find connections and analogies instead of differences, and (2) to take seriously the idea of a pragmatic notion of space and work in relation with the immediate tasks of urban space design. Madanipour refers to such a project (1996, p. 351), but does not develop it any further.
regional framework (for example, administrative areas). . . [With the quantitative revolution in the 1950s and 1960s] absolute space received relative space as its counterpart . . . Space was no longer the stable foundation of reality, but rather its meaning depended on the object of research . . . At a general level, as a geographical umbrella concept, space described the geographical reality in which phenomena, objects, and people moved and formed various spatial patterns following certain spatial laws. Space was mostly imagined as a homogenous surface, on which different spatial systems acted and organised themselves. (H kli, 1999, pp. a 5154, translation by PL)

Furthermore, with the rise of human geography from the 1970s onwards,
. . . the interpretation of space as a relative (but basically still physical) dimension was accompanied by the notion of social space. Space is social and inseparable from society, not a mere physical structure or dimension. In philosophical debates, this notion is called relational space (ibid., pp. 8182)

Historical changes in the notion of space in geography and architecture Both in geography and architecture, the notion of space has received various interpretations, which reflect epistemology, ideologies, and the conception of the world of their time (see also Stenros, 1992). Jouni H kli chronicles the notion of space in 20th a century geography as follows:
in the era of regional geography space was conceived as absolute either as position (coordinates), distance (kilometres) or

A corresponding change in the notion of space can be seen in the field of architectural theory. Many textbooks still contain an (outdated) positivistic assumption holding that space is a homogeneous continuum, which may be modulated and articulated by architecture. Interpretations through phenomenology, semiotics and urban history have drawn in man, first as a perceiving eye and then as a thinking, feeling and reflective subject, as well as culture, that is, people as members of a certain culture and society and built artefacts as the concrete (collective) manifestations of that culture (see e.g. Rossi, 1982). I take as an example Norberg-Schulz, a phenomenologist, who presents a hierarchy of five notions of space:
. . . the pragmatic space of physical action, the perceptual space of immediate orientation, the existential space, which forms mans stable image of his

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environment, the cognitive space of the physical world and the abstract space of pure logical relations. (Norberg-Schultz, 1971, p. 11)

From the basis of this historical construction of concepts, he criticizes theoreticians, who tend to reduce architectural space to an Euclidean, mathematical space or to an individual perception only. [Bruno Zevis] space concept seems to be a combination of action space and Euclidean space, as he says: Architecture is like a large hollow structure into which man enters and around which he moves (ibid, p. 12). According to NorbergSchultz, this is not enough. It is necessary to consider space as a relatively stable and culturally constructed relationship between man and his environment (cf. relational space), as the existential dimension of Being. These short examples show that there are similarities in the developments and emphasis of the notion of space between different arts and sciences. In the course of the 20th century, both in geography and architecture, a gradual development towards a more holistic notion of space may be traced, shifting the conceptualization from absolute to relative (space-movement or space-perceiver) and to relational (space-society or space-culture). The above examples further underline the deficiencies of Madanipours dilemmas. It may not be sensible to sharply contrast notions, which are formulated in a discipline apart in time or even lessnotions of different disciplines in different times. Pragmatic notion of space the question of interest of knowledge However, most likely ideas and concepts from different periods do exist in the present day and in the minds of people active today. Another path to create a common understanding is to clarify the use of the word space in the respective situationexpressing the interest of knowledge. Based on Jurgen Habermas theory on knowledge and

human interest, Jouni Hakli (1999, pp. 2935) distinguishes three methodological lines in the social sciences: positivism, humanism and structuralism. The corresponding interests of knowledge are technical (to control nature and the social world), practical (to hold society together by ensuring a common understanding of the interpretations language and culture offer us on the world), and critical or emancipatory (to unearth power relations in society). The fourth methodological line, discussed by H kli, is constructionism, which focuses on a reality as it is conveyed through language, to the fact that many common sense truths and seemingly self-evident conditions are actually not natural or stable, but produced and sustained by men (sic), by their thinking and action. The interest of knowledge in constructionist research is to question accepted modes of analysing reality and to make the scientist aware that his concepts have societal origin and are latently political (H kli, 1999, a pp. 133141). The interest of knowledge created in the field of urban planning is technical. Its purpose is to control and regulate the city. Everything that is external to that discourse, such as urban experiences and lived city at large, form a threat to it and to the smoothness of the process it guides: the production of the built environment. I am interested in laying ground for a situation where these voices and interpretations, doomed to be outsiders, strange, and weak, would have a bigger influence on the results of urban planning and design, the production of the city and future urban life. The interest of the following conceptual developments, then, is firstly critical, to dismantle power relations, and secondly practical, to make the world better and to increase peoples mutual understanding. In the field of concepts, I will move from space to place. The notions of space and place are tightly connected (see Masseys notion of place below). Even Aristotle suggested that space is the sum of all places, a dynamic field with directions and qualitative properties.

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Figure 2. H meentie road. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori. a

Later, this interpretation was overrun by Euclidean notions (Norberg-Schulz, 1971, p. 10). Stenros also criticizes the separation of space and place into distinct categories: Place is like a poem, it is space in a condensed, simplified form. . . (Stenros, 1992, p. 315). More than anything else, place interests us here, because it is significant, meaningful, human and culturalall more clearly than space. It is in place, in discussions on place and in the sense of place and placelessness where those quiet, weak voices, the other environmental relationships I am looking for, surface.

In the field of planning praxis, I stress the importance of the production of space, the concrete process and all those who are involved in it. In the background, there is Henri Lefebvres assertion that only the concepts of production and the act of producing are really universal and, therefore, the only possible ground for a unified notion of space (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 15). Production and processes, by definition, take their time. Time must be considered to be equal to space, and space, place and the city alike must be radically conceptualized as space-time.

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CITY VOL. 4 NO. 3 relations we project on to our environment (1997, p. 231, translation by PL). Place is, thus, something significant and from looking for a single place, I could move to contemplate where the sense of the environment is. How or from what point of view does something in an environment start to mean something, to be understandable, even important? At least architects, who are educated to be interested in cities and spaces (even on a vacation trip), often say that suddenly a foreign city opened or became legible. That may be the point. Hameentie road, moving along an histor ical route, brings sense to the Arabia area. The end facade of the Arabia porcelain factory governs the road landscape. It presents the factorys traditional name and its distinctive smokestack to a pedestrianor a drivercoming from the city. (The facade used to be much more visible. It could be seen from the former city boundary and customs 1.5 kilometres away. Now apartment buildings conceal it until the city depot, as a sign of the reduced importance of industries in general and, specifically, Arabia factory itself.) The old mansions, Kumpula and Annala, open towards the road with treelined walkways and well-tended gardens; apartment buildings from the 1950s are situated a little off the road, following the design ideal of their time, and they play with the distance and direction relative to the road. A path and moving along it is one possible frame of making sense. In some rare cases, the frame may be a point or landmark (see Lynch, 1960). In Arabia, there are no clear examples of that, as even the discussed factory facade is rather a sequence in the road landscape than a point/place in its own right. I suspect Lynchs area. Isnt an area exactly the meaningless in-between, a pure distance, to which there is no relationship and which may be grasped and loaded with sense and significance by places or some other way? And node? Isnt it always in relation to a path or paths?

Hameentie road, 21 March 2000 looking for places From home, I walk along Hameentie road towards Arabia. I ponder the notion of place and I try to see, without prejudice, which of the things all around bridges, roads, planted bushes, fenced-off pieces of parkland, natural rocks and icefalls on them, old depot buildingsI could call places. I realise there are very few. There is an old mansion with its park-like courtyard (now used by the Botanical Garden) while a kilometre away stands the characteristic facade of the Arabia factory; thats about it. Of course, if one were an artist and searched, say, for a pictorial motif, almost anything would do, such as crossing of a footpath and an industrial rail track, where rusty traffic signs lean against each other, with a rough fence and a clear spring sky as their background . . . But would a framed picture, which becomes significant in an art exhibition, be a place? Maybe the effort of finding a distinct place, which you can feel and in which you can be, is fruitless. The Senate Square 3 is a place but the same can be said about the city of Helsinki and about Paris and about the Eiffel Tower there (Stenros, 1992, p. 264). But again we face a problem: if the Eiffel Tower is a place, where does that place stop? Is the intricate steel structure itself the place, or the Tower and the park and river front in the vicinity, or maybe every spot in Paris from which you can see the Tower? That would really be a complex pattern. Or is the place in all the tourists photo albums and videos and all the livingrooms in Finland and in Australia, where the albums are looked at and travel memories told? (Stenros would say that the placemyths of the Eiffel Tower and Paris are nested and structurally similar and that they intertwine and enforce each other.) Looking for a single place, a single spot, seems to be fruitless. I believe that if I skip that altogether, I can move forward quicker. According to Pauli Tapani Karjalainen, place is the meaningful totality of the

LEHTOVUORI: WEAK PLACES 405 Weak place Let us leave Lynch for now, because the central observation is the multiplicity of possible frames. Every individuals experience is unique (Karjalainen, 1997). Every person sees, feels and interprets the Arabia area as an element in his/her singular chain of experiences. It is obvious that for old residents the area is meaningful in a different way and for other reasons than for their grand-children or for international guests arriving at the University of Art and Design. For one person, the context (frame) of the place is memories from past decades, sandy roads, blossoming apple trees, or hard work in the Arabia factory; for another, the context may be the rules and characters of a Nintendo game, transferred to real games and radiating new content to the stones, bushes and forests; for a third, the context may be an air-conditioned, hermetic chain of spaces of flows, from the aeroplane to the arrivals hall in Helsinki-Vantaa, to a brand new taxi smelling of plastic and leather, to the minimalistic lobby of the Lume Media Centre, in which the sterile cocktail conversations of a scientific conference are held with the natural panoramic landscape in front, looked at through selectively glazed walls. Furthermore, shared, intersubjective elements are woven into the chain of ones own experiences. Sirpa Tani (1995, 1997) uses the notion of landscape of mind. She describes her experience in an exhibition on Paris films: I am in Paris, I am in a copy of a stage-set of a Paris-movie, I am in the landscape of Polanskis Frantic. Where am I actually? (Tani, 1997, p. 211, translation by PL). Merleau-Ponty has also referred to the imaginary content of place (or environment): . . .Our body and our perception always summon us to take as the centre of the world that environment with which they present us. But this environment is not necessarily that of our own life. I can be somewhere else while staying here (M. Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, 1962, p. 293, quoted in Norberg-Schultz, 1971, p. 16). So, place is unclear, flexible, personal, and its connection to the physical or perceived reality may be loose. Every location in the Arabia area belongs to several systems of meaning, or may be out of them altogether. In the contemporary city, it is difficult to find age-old, stable places, places with a capital P, which we, at least, believe to have existed in the cities of past societies and maybe to still exist in the countryside. In Arabia, there is no cathedral with its sharp turrets linking the mundane community to the divine world, no city wall with its gates defining who belongs to us and who is an outsider, no Bastille to be hated and destroyed in the euphoria of revolution, no archetypal farmhouse livingroom, gathering the life of successive generations, no ring of courtyard buildings and fences preventing wolves from attacking the cattle. . . This environmental relation of the global condition I call weak place. Behind the notion, there is Gianni Vattimos weak thinking.4 Ignasi de Sola-Morales quickly transferred the idea, or its aesthetic implications, to a tool for architectural criticism (Weak architecture, 1987). According to de Sola-Morales, ideas developed in the fields of philosophy and humanities, such as the archaeology of knowledge or de-construction, have a counterpart in the production and experience of form and, therefore, also in architecture. Such parallels, which are often connected to the changes in the temporality of experiences which is important, include the superimposition and juxtaposition of elements, the diffracted explosion of time, architecture conceived as an event, the meeting of the subjective and objective in the notion of fold5 and the re-interpretation of monumentality as an ephemerality, trace, residue or after taste. The core of de SolaMorales text may lie in his discussion on decoration: . . .the decorative condition [of art or architecture] is not necessarily a vulgar trivialisation but rather that it simply constitutes the recognition of the fact that in works of arteither sculptural or architecturalacceptance of a certain weakness

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Figure 3. The new media centre Lume. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori.

and, therefore, its placing in a secondary position, is possibly the condition for its greatest elegance and, at bottom, for its greatest weight (de Sola-Morales, 1987, p. 84). Weak architecture gets its power precisely from its weakness, from its (cultural) marginality and a resulting chance to influence semi-secretly, from the side. There is also a connection to Benjamins notion of disinterestedness. Doreen Massey has forcibly criticized static conceptualization of space and a connected, nostalgic notion of place. According to Massey, if space is conceived of as spacetime and as being formed out of everchanging social interrelations at all scales, then place becomes a moment or articulation of these relations and understandings. The particularity of a place is . . .constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity through counterposition to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that beyond. Places viewed this way are open and porous (Massey, 1994, p. 5, see also Madanipour,

1996, p. 348). Stenros also proposes that . . .place is not only a stable, concrete, geographically fixed location, but is rather, if conceived structurally, a flexible system of places, in which the relationship between the previous space and the next gives place its meaning (1992, p. 151, translation by PL). Taina Rajantis concept, weak experience, which is also a Vattimo-analogy, gives us a very different point of view concerning the idea of weak place. According to Rajanti, the real issue in globalization is not that others, such as Tamils or Arabs, come here, to our city, but that all people, including the seemingly secure and affluent Westerners, are forced to detach themselves from their Being. The space of global opens as a permanent state of emergency. The space of refugee (meaning everyone, PL) is a camp, a spatial dimension permanently outside normal law and order (Rajanti, 1999, p. 191, translation by PL). The state of emergency becomes a rule and a conventionality. Humanity increasingly lives outside their traditional areas in non-places, which do not lend an identity to their user, neither place them in

LEHTOVUORI: WEAK PLACES 407 any relationship to each other or to the past, the already lived. Typical non-places are spaces and landscapes for the tourist and consumer, such as high-ways, transit halls and hypermarkets, but also (real) refugee camps (ibid., p. 192) in other words, Castells space of flows. Staying in non-places is contractual. It is not possible to begin to feel at home in them, but people are in them as if at home. The skill to conduct a reasonable life in the global world of non-places requires avoiding unconditional choices and significant, total relationships to achieve an empty, open, opportunistic, weak experience. So, we meet similar themes of partiality, tangentiality and ephemerality as in de Sola-Morales thinking. Simon Hubacher has developed the idea of weakness in urban planning. The object of weak urbanism is regional structural change. At issue is not a fixed, visualizable city-object but the problem-oriented management of a process. Important tools for such work are scenarios and alternative views of the future. Crucial elements further include co-operation across municipal boundaries and governmental hierarchies and various partnerships and sponsorships with private actors. As an example, Hubacher presents the Stadtlandschaft Rheinland project, which concentrated on the landscape qualities in the zone between Cologne and Bonn, and which became a permanent workshop for architects, planners, landscape designers, as well as political and economic decision-makers (Hubacher, 1999, pp. 1617). Linguistic interpretation Before I continue to sketch the possible implications of weakness for the aims and methods of planning and urban design, I return for a while to the notion of place. I proposed earlier that it would be more useful to contemplate the significance and meaning of environment than to look for separate place-experiences. From these meanings, there is an attractive hidden door towards a metaphor of architecture/space as language (cf. Rajanti, 1999, p. 9). Now I hope that the following excursion into language will shed light on the interesting question, discussed also by Madanipour, of whether a weak place has any stability and substance, or is it totally decentred and devoid of qualities of its own. In the structuralist approach, originated by Ferdinand de Saussure, language is about giving meaning by making distinctions regarding the meaningless and unstructured continuum of reality as such. The key concepts are the sign, the arbitrariness of the sign, and the distinction between langue and parole (Culler, 1994). The world, opening up for a perceiver as environment (through seeing, hearing, touching, memorizing), could be interpreted as material, analogically to all the combinations of sounds, to which the form of language projects meanings.6 The form of the environmental language is the perceivers way to look, his frame, his chain of experiences and the shared meanings he possesses, as discussed above. In this frame, some parts of the material environment contain, are matched and made significant. Every (structural) element of a language is sign. Analogically, every element in an environment, which is made significant, is a sign. Both constituents of a sign, the signifier and the signified, are arbitrary. Both are formed through distinctions, through negative relations (this is A precisely because it is not B); both are pure form without any substance. This is meant by saying that language (its structure) constitutes the world. Earlier, we defined a location in space/environment, which is made significant, as a place, and now it would be tempting to conclude that place does not have any positive substance. A language is, however, a single system, whereas environmental language consists of many (see also Stenros, 1992, pp. 325 337). Broadbent (1996, p. 133) claims that architecture differs from language because there is no social contract in it, defining what this and

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CITY VOL. 4 NO. 3 nomic growth, increased traffic and the need to produce a new Hameentie). Similarly, natural sounds, such as birds, need another frame, for example, the rich ecosystem of the Vanhankaupunginlahti bay and its position on the main migration routes.

that means. Are the languages of architecture/space/environment totally private, autistic, then? Probably not totally, for certain characteristics of the environment, some of its material, people do interpret at least partially similarly, which is illustrated by the notion of the landscape of the mind, discussed earlier or by geographies of fear, a process where fear produced by societal power relations is projected in certain, nonaccidental, locations, such as tunnels or central city parks (see Koskela, 1999). Madanipour proposes (1996, p. 349), drawing from Lefebvre, that the question can be solved by taking into account the materiality of space and the process of its social production, by moving from abstract theorizing to the realm of real world interactions. Although that is a good point, I will stick to the abstract language metaphor still for a while. This is because it seems interesting to compare the reading of environment which extends through social interrelations at all scales, and the resulting open notion of place, to the post-structuralist conception of meaning. This conception holds that, say, a nonsense poem or Joyces neologism receive several interpretations (or countless interpretations) with relation to the words nearby in the text and to the associations and connotations these syllable chains create for different readers. The material of language can be cut in countless ways, pieces of text and masses of sound can be given weights and meanings in thousands of ways. De SolaMorales also refers to diagonal or oblique cuts through the panorama (or archaeology) of present-day architecture (1987, p. 72). In the H meentie example, much of the a visual material and many traces of history can be well interpreted through the frame of a historical road, but, for example, the sounds of the environment would need a different frame. The noise of the nearby highway is pervasive and it is inconceivable from the context of the historical H meentie road a (unless one were to imagine old, narrow H meentie with its sparse traffic, with the a new highway as a sign of post-war eco-

Operationalizationthe practice of urban planning From all that has been said so far, it is possible to derive three objectives for urban planning. (1) Planning should find, and render understandable, as many ways of seeing an environment as meaningfulas many framesas possible. (2) It should make sure that these ways of seeing, voices and points of view do not get trampled on in the further phases of design or implementation. (3) Planning should be able to find those locations, which belong to many systems of meaning, to many languages and are, therefore, public or shared. These are the weak places, open, ephemeral and tangential from several points of reference, but not owned by anyone, bounded and essential. There are several experimental examples of a planning practice with these objectives, a practice, which for want of a better name could be called open. Earlier, I referred to Rheinland, where there has been an ongoing workshop-like landscape project among 12 municipalities for five years. Let us take another, arbitrary, example from the Park van Kraal project. The future park is situated outside Utrecht as part of a new town (VINEX). As the environment in such new, instantly designed districts often becomes poor, the projects architects proposed an unusual strategy for the realization of the park:
All too often, park design is still seen as an architectural matter. The landscape architect is given a detailed description of the spatial, functional and ecological principles, and draws a design to fit the stated budget. . . It would be a missed opportunity to construct

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Figure 4. Proto-urban conditions. Chora. Source: Chora Manifesto.

Park van Kraal in the same way. For centuries, the time factor has been the landscape architects most important instrument. During the design phasewhich usually involved creating an impression of the most desirable target scenarioa management plan was drawn up that gave a description of the measures whereby that target scenario might be attained. Sufficient scope was thereby left for changes of a natural, social, cultural, or economic nature. . . Although contemporary management structures now make it difficult to accommodate such a process, we nonetheless propose a design strategy. . . that makes it possible, even during construction, for the park to respond to the ways in which people use it. The construction process is thus part of the design. . . It will be adventurous, exciting, unpredictable, and always challenging. (Karres and Brands, 2000, p. 57)

Time and a gradual process of change are central in both cases (see also de SolaMorales above). It seems that one way to challenge the virtual reality of current strong urban planning, which follows visual logic, and which is fixed by maps and statistics, is to take seriously the process of producing space itself, a situation of interactions which unfolds in time, can include many voices, and may lead to unexpected results; urban reality that is lived. Open planning is possible to achieve only by letting things truly and concretely be open and undecided. Raoul Bunschotens (Chora) method, a new practice of urban curation, is a well-

developed version of the themes of openended change and sensitive analysis on urban situations and actors involved. Bunschoten conceives the city as a life-form, having emotions. He calls the city the second skin; nature is the first skin, covering the Earth. Key concepts in his thinking are protourban condition, start or seed of urban change, caretakers, actors which take care of emergent phenomena, metaspace, space of possibilities and holding, games, scenarios and conflicts, epic geography, concretization of metaspace in the city, prototype, liminal body, self-organizing, new actor or partner, and urban gallery. There is no space here to describe fully the rich method, which also admits (on purpose or not) several interpretations. Sensitivity to new, weak urban phenomena is the starting point. Urban processes, change, are the essence, they are the substance of the second skins flux; they create its form in time and space (Chora, 1999). Processes are modulated, and, for example, scenarios created, by steps of Erasure, Origination, Transformation and Migration. Further, nothing is possible without co-operation with real people and institutions. The following two final points from Chora Manifesto condense the ethos:
56. Urban Curation is the practice of maintaining Urban Galleries, the metaspaces of the second skin. Urban Curators are the practitioners that manage the contents of these metaspaces. They oversee the production of scenarios and prototypes. They organize tables of negotiation, support the initiation and work of Liminal Bodies.

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Figure 5. T ol Bay and the city centre. The old warehouses are the U-shaped building in the middle, next to Eliel o o Saarinens main railway station. Scale approx. 1:20,000. Source: Helsinki City Planning Office.

57. The practices of urban planning and architecture are evolving in the context of an ever-more complex second skin. In collaboration with other practices, inhabitants, users, clients, decision-makers, producers, and investors, these practitioners help to invent new urban forms and define the shifts in practice that are required for the management of these new forms. Urban Curators orchestrate this shift in practice, detect emergent phenomena, designate cities as metaspaces, form galleries, and curate their contents.New urban phenomena; metaspaces as new public spaces; a new practice. (Chora, 1999)

But, finally, where is the problem? What essential matter escapes from the net of urban planning? Why is there a need to change our conceptualization of the city or the way we plan and design our cities? The current, modernistic planning, based on mastering the visible city, is by no means dead. As long as planning is able to control urban change and development and, on the other hand, is able to produce urban space, which satisfies resi-

dents, the situation is not too problematic for the political community (H kli, 1997, p. 50, a translation by PL). The answer is two-fold. Looked at regionally, there are several phenomena, which have escaped from the realm of visual logic of planning and control. Large ex-urban malls, experience worlds, consuming hundreds of hectares of land and built with foreign investors money, office parks, where thousands work every day, etc. are mushrooming in the vicinity of ring roads and the airport almost freely without the need or influence of urban planning. This increased importance of the periphery and the so-called edge city phenomenon are also known, much debated, and familiar in the Helsinki region, especially in the neighbouring municipalities of Espoo, Vantaa, Kirkkonummi and Sipoo. Urban planning has problems in the upper end of its geographical scope, with wider phenomena than the traditional city-object. In this paper, we are dealing with another, somewhat more vague, problem. (Yet I believe many ideas developed here would

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Figure 6. Aerial view looking south. Finlandia hall, railway warehouses, Kiasma, Sanoma Ltd headquarters. Source: Helsinki City Planning Office.

also be applicable on a regional scale.) New urban space in Helsinkinew museums, upgraded parks and streets, shopping malls which have moved from the suburbs back to the city, as well as new housing districts with nicely paved squares and well-equipped playgrounds have mostly been welcomed with delight. Comments in the press, visitor statistics or prices of apartments could serve as indicators. In every project, however, there are also losers, lost values and, sometimes, open resistance. The target audience of the new city centre is the well-to-do two-thirds of the population, people who appreciate art and who can buy a cup of cappuccino now and then. On the first page, I described my own nature experience in Arabia a couple of years ago. Now, new development is about to wipe this nature, plants, animals, soil and landscape, completely away; new structure, streets, houses and a park built from scratch will replace the reality and essence of the place. In Toolo Bay, there is an open conflict between people defending an old warehouse complex and official planners and their advo-

catesOtherness, strangeness, scars of time and human life (work, pain, love) are lost in the current, state-of-the-art planning processes. The essence of the lived city is endangered. The old railway warehouses as a state of mind The planning of the Toolo Bay area has had very many twists and turns.7 The area is in the geographical centre of the inner city of Helsinki, but the railway track and goods yard have hampered its development for decades. There have been several planning competitions, the most recent in 19851986, which have all come to nothing. During the last few years, Toolo Bays Sleeping Beauty dream has been interrupted (Haarni, 2000). The goods yard was moved to another location in the late 1980s, opening up land for Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was opened in 1998 (the competition was held in 1993). It was accompanied by the

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CITY VOL. 4 NO. 3 The old railway warehouses are a space of opportunities because no-one owns them. None of the groups and institutions which use the spaces own them juridically8 and none of these actors permanently occupy the main spaces. The place is fundamentally empty, open and porous in Masseys words. Empty in the sense that it is easy to access and it gives one the opportunity to be and behave as one likes, free of external definitions and expectations. The warehouses are a state of mind, a feeling that things are in a certain way. This specific quality, which is difficult to formulate, surfaced clearly in a discussion, titled Makasiiniutopiat, in May 2000. One of the questions asked was where else in the city centre of Helsinki could you pick a piece of wire, do something with it, and maybe exhibit it, or where else could you spontaneously repair a small corner? In the warehouses, it is possible to do things not possible elsewhere and to build a relationship to the place more freely than, say, in a museum (even though the museum claims to be open and like a living-room) or in a shopping mall (even though shopping is generally held to be the ultimate realization of freedom and self-expression). At the same time, emptiness and openness are the problems of the warehouses, in three respects. Rhetorically, it is easy to argue that the buildings are not worth keeping, because there are times, especially during the winter, when almost nobody uses them. From the economic point of view, the periodical and commercially marginal use does not reach the revenue expectations of a central city lot, and it is difficult to imagine how it would be possible to sustain the space under the pressures of land rent and financial calculations. Thirdly, because there are fairly few continuous users, the warehouses cannot easily get a strong and aggressive lobby to speak for it. These deficits are the other side of the space of opportunities, and by repairing even one of those, the essence of the warehouses would be lost and the open space of urban play would become defined and bounded, in one way or another.

massive glass-cube of the headquarters of the main news corporation, Sanoma Ltd in 1999 (lot purchase in 1994, invited competition in 1995). The Toolo Bay park competition was held in 1997 and now, in the year of the European City of Culture, there is a sketch of the future park in the landscape. The competition for the Parliament extension was in 1999 and for the brave new Music Hall in 1999 2000. Further projects in the area include a hotel, main library, set of office buildings, parking facilities and an underground highway channelling traffic past the city centre. The old railway warehouses stay in the middle of this void, which is suddenly drawn into a whirlwind of change. Their low, lengthy gestalt and very material character do not fit into the transparent, straight, cool aesthetics of the emerging New Helsinki. The warehouses have not been included in any plan or competition proposal with any official recognition. In the beginning of the 1990s, assistant mayor Pekka Korpinen mentioned, in passing, that the warehouses can be kept in some form (Kaarina Katajistos video). The National Board of Antiquities and Historical Monuments has changed its view; now it mildly supports the preservation. Not a single proper re-use plan has been made, however. In the middle of all the change and insecurity, the warehouses have become a peculiar event space (see also Lehtovuori, 2000). Their long halls and wide courtyard have served as the stage for flea markets and snow board games; both mediaeval festivals and techno clubs have been organized in them. Gradually, the warehouses have become, in Bunschotens terminology, a metaspace, a place of opportunities and surprising encounters, and, respectively, its protectors, the fragmented Pro Makasiinit movement, a possible liminal body, which has a voice and position in the discussion and decisions on the issue. But what, then, is the quality of the warehouses, which the official planning fails to recognize? Here we bump into a paradox.

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Figure 7. The mediaeval festival, 1999. Photograph: Roope Rissanen.

. . . where then? How to give space and opportunities for urban realities, sidetracked by current planning practices? How to enrich and diversify the production of cities, space and places? The situation is a version of the meeting of

David and Goliath. Individual experience, feelings, moments, coincidences and ephemeral aftertastes are opposed by big organizations, economic interests and the legitimate, visualized urban information of maps and statistics. The critique of urban planning and design can work at three levels. It can attack

Figure 8. Leikkaussection exhibition, 2000. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori.

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Figure 9. T ol nlahdenkatu street. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori. o o

the deep structures of thinking and knowledge, the planning discourse; it can concentrate on institutions, such as the question of who can participate, under what conditions, and in which context, or it can propose changes in the concrete action, actual planning processes and individual actors. Earlier, I have sketched conceptualizations of space and place (structures of knowledge) and methods of urban planning and realization (action). Raoul Bunschotens thoughts on liminal bodies and caretakers for processes in metaspaces fall in the realm of institutions. It is essential that space is not conceived of as absolute but as relational and social, that place is not understood as static and closed but as an open, momentary articulation of social links and interconnections at all scales, and that the planning practice is concretely open so that there is courage to leave things unfinished, to let time pass and environmental relationships form. Planning, and the knowledge it uses, do not have external references, but they must define, case by case, their own reality. The objective of planning is to find and formulate several ways to see its object, lived and living city, as meaningful.

The ways to see what planning conceived like this is interested in are not necessarily visible in maps or in statistics. The lived city does not consist of experiences with a capital E nor places with a capital P. Rather, both experience and place are weak, ephemeral, partial, individual and optional. Furthermore, planning has to shift its focus from visual (and timeless) space to space-time; urban reality does not exist, it happens. In this situation, the design method or simulation is, instead of a map, a game. It cannot be drawn, it must be played, in the real world with real people in real time.

Notes
1 There are about 70 architects in the Helsinki City Planning Office, and its total staff is almost 300. Furthermore, the city commonly uses consultants in planning tasks. Anecdotally, Antwerp with a similar population has only about 10 architects in comparable tasks. 2 I am not against efforts to create visually pleasant spaces. On the contrary, one might say that the visual aesthetics are the last small, positive thing left in the tough realm of urban politcal economy. 3 The administrative square and symbolic centre of Helsinki.

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4 The notion refers to the opportunities of philosophical inquiry in a situation where there is no solid, absolute metaphysical foundation for thinking (see e.g. Rajanti, 1999, p. 195). 5 Reality appears as a continuum in which the time of the subject and the time of the external objects are travelling on the same endless belt on which the subjective and the objective meet only when this very continuous reality folds in upon its own continuity (de Sola-Morales, 1987, p. 83). 6 All differences of sound, which could carry meaning, do not. That is why it is possible to also understand differently or badly pronounced language. 7 Plans include Eliel Saarinens Pro Helsingfors 1918, Oiva Kallios 1924, general master plans 1923 and 1932, P.E. Blomstedts 1933, Yrj Lindegren and Erik o Krkstr ms 1949, Alvar Aaltos 1961 and 1964, o master plan framework 1974 (Haarni, 2000). 8 Since October 1999, the warehouses are under Valtion Kiinteistlaitos control, before that they were o under Ratahallintokeskus (19951999) and the State Railways. The owners have no future plans for the warehouses (www.makasiinit.net). H kli, J. (1999) Meta Hodos. Johdatus a ihmismaantieteeseen. Tampere: Vastapaino. Karjalainen, P.T. (1997) Aika, paikka ja muistin maantiede, in T. Haarni et al. (eds) Tila, paikka ja maisema. Tutkimusretki uuteen maantieteeseen, a pp. 227241.Tampere: Vastapaino. Karres, S. and Brands, B. (2000) Object trouv s: a e strategy for Park van Kraal, Mama-magasin f r o modern arkitektur 26, pp. 5657. Koskela, H. (1999) Fear, Control and Space: Geographies of Gender, Fear of Violence, and Video Surveillance. Helsinki: Helsingin yliopisto. Lefebvre, H. (1991 [1974]) The Production of Space. Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Lehtovuori, P. (2000) Tapahtuma-toinen paikka?, in Stadipiiri (ed.) Urbs. Kirja Helsingin kaupunkikulttuurista, pp. 104117. Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus. Lundequist, J. (1999) The Idea of Architectural Research and its Relation to Philosophy. Stockholm: Kungl Tekniska H gskolan. o Lynch, K. (1960) The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: Technology Press. Madanipour, A. (1996) Urban design and dilemmas of space, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space 14(3), pp. 331355. Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity Press. Norberg-Schultz, C. (1971) Existence, Space and Architecture. London: Studio Vista. Rajanti, T. (1999). Kaupunki on ihmisen koti. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto. Rossi, A. (1982) The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. de Sol a-Morales, I. (1987) Weak architecture, ` Quaderns 175, pp. 7485. Stenros, A. (1992) Kesto ja j rjestys. Tilarakenteen a teoria. Helsinki: Yliopistopaino. Tani, S. (1995) Kaupunki Taikapeiliss. Helsinki: a Helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus. Tani, S. (1997) Maantiede ja kuvien todellisuudet, in T. Haarni et al. (eds) Tila, paikka ja maisema. Tutkimusretki uuteen maantieteeseen, pp. a 211226.Tampere: Vastapaino

References
Broadbent, G. (1996) A plain mans guide to the theory of signs in architecture, in K. Teoksessa Nesbitt (ed.) Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, pp. 124140. New York: Princeton Architectural Press [originally published in Architctural Design 47(7/8), 1978]. Castells, M. (1992) European Cities, the Informational Society, and the Global Economy. Amsterdam: Centrum voor Grootstedelijk Onderzoek. Chora (R. Bunschoten, T. Hoshino, P. Marguc et al.) (1999) CHORA Manifesto, Daidalos 72, pp. 4251. Culler, J. (1994) Ferdinand de Saussure. Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto [original J. Culler (1976). Saussure. Trans. Risto Heiskala]. Dear, M. and H kli, J. (1998) Tila, paikka ja a urbanismi-uuden kaupunkitutkimuksen metodologiaa, Terra 110(2), pp. 5968. Giddens, A. (1984). The Constitution of Society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Haarni, T. (2000) Unelmien T ol nlahti-painajaisten o o Kamppi?, in Stadipiiri (ed.) Urbs. Kirja Helsingin kaupunkikulttuurista, pp. 120135. Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin tietokeskus. Hubacher, S. (1999) Weak urbanism. Schw che(n) mit a Zukunft, Daidalos 72, pp. 1017. H kli, J. (1997) N kyv yhteiskunta. Kansalaiset ja a a a kaupunkisuunnittelun logiikka, in T. Haarni et al. (eds) Tila, paikka ja maisema. Tutkimusretki a uuteen maantieteeseen, pp. 3752.Tampere: Vastapaino.

Additional source
Haarni, T. (1997) Joustavia tiloja. Vallan ja ulossulkemisen urbaania tulkintaa, in T. Haarni et al. (eds) Tila, paikka ja maisema. Tutkimusretki a uuteen maantieteeseen, pp. 87104.Tampere: Vastapaino.

Panu Lehtovuori is an architect, researcher and PhD student at the Graduate School for Urban Studies, Helsinki University of Technology. E-mail: lehtovuo@uiah.fi