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Weak placesThoughts on strengthening soft phenomena

Panu Lehtovuori

Arabianranta, 1998

I walk slowly towards the sea, wonder-ing. The wild, flowering grasslandextends hundreds of metres on both

sides of the footpath. I take a deep breath.The air is filled with the scent of anunknown herb. The cranes of SornainenHarbour loom on the horizon. The brightorange metro train runs across the Kulo-saari bridge, in the distance, like an exoticworm. Now and then, my eye catches abright flash, reflected from a distant wind-screen. It’s a hot day in early summer;everything is quiet, dream-like. It is quietuntil I hear the birds. They fly over thegrassland; they cling and dangle in thegrass, strange, colourful birds. They aremany and they are brave, as if they hadnever seen a human. Two oystercatchersstrut through the water, a little farther askylark flies up, then another, and a third!A hawk screams in the blue sky.

February. The sea is frozen. Across thebay, a snowstorm has turned the otherside of the islands white. The wind haspacked snow inside the forest and a thicklayer of snow unites the rocks and ice to asingle, white form. The grassland is cov-ered by snow as well and there are drystalks of grass, parsley, and thistle stickingthrough the snow. The sky is clear andthe snow and ice reflect the sunshine. Ifind some wild buckthorn bushes andtaste their orange berries. Freezing hasmade them sweet. The juice bites my lips,it spills on my fingers and stains the endsof my sleeves.

Direction . . .

The motivation of this paper is my irritationat the flatness and lack of sensitivity in urbanplanning in Helsinki. There are two cases athand, Arabianranta and Toolo Bay. Both are‘strategic’ developments for the city.Through the 1990s, they have been designedwith a big machinery1 and by applying newtools and forms of urban development. Bothareas consist of industrial landscapes, whichhave become gradually empty and of semi-natural, wild elements. Such landscapes havea unique atmosphere and, in my opinion, acertain value. Individuals, residents’ organi-zations and conservation movements haveattempted to bring some of the local charac-teristics into the process of design anddecision-making, but with little success. Theofficial planning process has been unable torecognize, never mind accept, these charac-teristics and potential values and, therefore,the planning of both Toolo Bay and Arabian-ranta has become that of producing a totallynew city and structures which neglect theexisting, rich situation. In the spirit of highmodernism, caterpillars start the work. Ibelieve that something important, maybeeven essential, slips through the net of thecurrent urban planning and realization pro-cedure, even when it is done well andcarefully on its own terms. In the back-ground, there are thus problems in partici-pating and, in particular, problems in trans-ferring knowledge and feelings about theurban environment.

The problem of laymen participating inplanning has often been interpreted as a

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Figure 1 Skylarks’s view on Arabianranta, the future Art and Design City. The Arabia factory complex with Universityof 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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problem of professional language, the specialterms and presentation formats: if plannersonly talked more clearly and drew lesstechnical pictures, participation would beeasier. Dear and Hakli (1998), interestingly,claim that there is a deeper problem. Thestructures of urban planning, regularitiesregarded as given (see also Giddens, 1994),lead to a certain, partial view of the city.Maps and statistics are the core and carrier ofplanning discourse. With them the planningprocess collects data on the city and society,making it visible in a uniform manner andcontrolling urban space. ‘Modern planninghas followed a logic where the visual controlsthe experiential, the paper projection con-trols what cannot be put on paper . . . Fromthe perspective of modernistic urban plan-ning, which aims at regulating the visible city,the lived and experienced city has becomemere invisible noise, even a disturbance’(Dear and Hakli, 1998, p. 64, translation byPL). In the city planning maps, Toolo Bayand 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 leftinside the planning discourse—visual aes-thetics and creation of pleasant spaces—alsohas its own, professional control technologyand its masters, the architects, are eager toguard good taste. In Helsinki’s planning andpublic debate, aesthetics are a legitimatetheme, which provides architects with arelatively good position to defend viewinglines, or street and courtyard patterns, orideas of free-standing monuments, depend-ing on the situation.2

How, then, to grasp such invisible powerresiding in the knowledge structures andlimiting both the understanding of urbanqualities and the actions concerning them? Inhis article, ‘Urban design and dilemmas ofspace’ (1996), Ali Madanipour looks for asolution in a more coherent use of concepts.By understanding how differently the word‘space’ is used by different people andprofessions and by uniting its differentmeanings, communication may be eased

across disciplinary boundaries and a relevantspace notion for urban design may be found(see also Lundequist, 1999). Madanipoursearches confronting uses of the concept ofspace. He contrasts, for example, absoluteand relational space, space and mass, physicaland social space, mental and real space,abstract and differential space as well as spaceand time. I think that these ‘dilemmas’, dualextremes of the notion of space, are problem-atic because they, on the one hand, crossarbitrarily over disciplines and discoursesand, on the other, do not take into accountthe historical change of space conceptswithin each discipline. Sometimes ‘dilemma’takes place between two notions of the samediscourse, which do not even exclude eachother (e.g. space versus mass), sometimes theproblem is caused by mixing totally differentdiscourses and research interests.

It is also easy to invent more ‘dilemmas’.In sociology, for example, space is often thematerial foundation or component ofabstract phenomena or relations. Castells’description of the ‘space of flows’ may serveas an example:

‘By space of flows I refer to the system ofexchanges of information, capital, andpower that structures the basic processes ofsocieties, economies, and states betweendifferent localities, regardless of localization.I call it ‘space’ because it does have a spatialmateriality: the directional centres located ina few selective areas of a few, selectedlocalities; the telecommunication system,dependent upon telecommunication facilitiesand services that are unevenly distributed inthe space. . . transportation system, thatmakes such nodal points dependent frommajor airports and airlines services, fromfreeway systems, from high speed trains; thesecurity systems necessary to the protectionof such directional spaces, surrounded by apotentially hostile world. . .’ (Castells, 1992,pp. 15–16)

‘Space’ is clearly asphalt, concrete, bundles ofoptic fibre, and everything what may moveon or in those, such as aeroplanes, cars, and

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light bursts carrying data. In architecture,then, space is the most ethereal element in thediscourse. Floors, walls, ceilings, doors, andwindows, which Castells would have called‘space’, are for an architect ‘materials’, ‘struc-tures’ or, at best, ‘space dividers’. ‘Space’ isthe emptiness between these and aroundthese and may be described with most ‘non-objective’ 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 isa material fact, in architecture it is individualperception, experience and interpretation.

In my opinion, Madanipour does not gettoo far in unifying the wide and fragmentednotion of space. However, because I do agreethat the word ‘space’ is used (individuals useboth in every-day parlance and in pro-fessional contexts) in many conflicting ways,I would like to propose another way toclarify the concept. My idea is that instead ofmapping ‘dilemmas’, it would be more useful(1) to find out the use of the concept of spaceand its historical development in each dis-cipline, in order to make it possible to findconnections and analogies instead of differ-ences, and (2) to take seriously the idea of apragmatic notion of space and work inrelation with the immediate tasks of urbanspace design. Madanipour refers to such aproject (1996, p. 351), but does not develop itany further.

Historical changes in the notion of spacein geography and architecture

Both in geography and architecture, thenotion of space has received various inter-pretations, which reflect epistemology, ideol-ogies, and the conception of the world oftheir time (see also Stenros, 1992). JouniHakli chronicles the notion of space in 20thcentury geography as follows:

‘in the era of regional geography space wasconceived as absolute—either as position(coordinates), distance (kilometres) or

regional framework (for example,administrative areas). . . [With the ‘quantitative revolution’ in the 1950s and1960s] absolute space received relative spaceas its counterpart . . . Space was no longerthe stable foundation of reality, but ratherits meaning depended on the object ofresearch . . . At a general level, as ageographical umbrella concept, spacedescribed the geographical reality in whichphenomena, objects, and people moved andformed various spatial patterns followingcertain spatial laws. Space was mostlyimagined as a homogenous surface, onwhich different spatial systems acted andorganised themselves.’ (Hakli, 1999, pp.51–54, translation by PL)

Furthermore, with the rise of human geog-raphy from the 1970s onwards,

‘. . . the interpretation of space as a relative(but basically still physical) dimension wasaccompanied 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 iscalled relational space’ (ibid., pp. 81–82)

A corresponding change in the notion ofspace can be seen in the field of architecturaltheory. Many textbooks still contain an(outdated) ‘positivistic’ assumption holdingthat space is a homogeneous continuum,which may be modulated and articulated byarchitecture. Interpretations through phe-nomenology, semiotics and urban historyhave drawn in ‘man’, first as a perceiving eyeand then as a thinking, feeling and reflectivesubject, as well as ‘culture’, that is, people asmembers of a certain culture and society andbuilt 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 hierarchyof five notions of space:

‘. . . the pragmatic space of physical action,the perceptual space of immediateorientation, the existential space, whichforms man’s stable image of his

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

From the basis of this historical constructionof concepts, he criticizes theoreticians, whotend to reduce architectural space to anEuclidean, mathematical space or to an indi-vidual perception only. ‘[Bruno Zevi’s] spaceconcept seems to be a combination of actionspace and Euclidean space, as he says:“Architecture is like a large hollow structureinto which man enters and around which hemoves” ’ (ibid, p. 12). According to Norberg-Schultz, this is not enough. It is necessary toconsider space as a relatively stable andculturally constructed relationship betweenman and his environment (cf. relationalspace), as the existential dimension ofBeing.

These short examples show that there aresimilarities in the developments and empha-sis of the notion of space between differentarts and sciences. In the course of the 20thcentury, both in geography and architecture,a gradual development towards a more holis-tic notion of space may be traced, shifting theconceptualization from absolute to relative(space-movement or space-perceiver) and torelational (space-society or space-culture).The above examples further underline thedeficiencies of Madanipour’s ‘dilemmas’. Itmay not be sensible to sharply contrastnotions, which are formulated in a disciplineapart in time or—even less—notions ofdifferent disciplines in different times.

Pragmatic notion of space—the questionof interest of knowledge

However, most likely ideas and conceptsfrom different periods do exist in the presentday and in the minds of people active today.Another path to create a common under-standing is to clarify the use of the word‘space’ in the respective situation—express-ing the interest of knowledge. Based onJurgen Habermas’ theory on knowledge and

human interest, Jouni Hakli (1999, pp.29–35) distinguishes three methodologicallines in the social sciences: positivism,humanism and structuralism. The corre-sponding interests of knowledge are techni-cal (to control nature and the social world),practical (to hold society together by ensur-ing a common understanding of the inter-pretations language and culture offer us onthe world), and critical or emancipatory (tounearth power relations in society). Thefourth methodological line, discussed byHakli, is constructionism, which focuses onreality as it is conveyed through language, tothe fact that many common sense truths andseemingly self-evident conditions are actu-ally not natural or stable, but produced andsustained by men (sic), by their thinking andaction. The interest of knowledge in con-structionist research is to question acceptedmodes of analysing reality and to make thescientist aware that his concepts have societalorigin and are latently political (Hakli, 1999,pp. 133–141).

The interest of knowledge created in thefield of urban planning is technical. Itspurpose is to control and regulate the city.Everything that is external to that discourse,such as urban experiences and lived city atlarge, form a threat to it and to the smooth-ness of the process it guides: the productionof the built environment. I am interested inlaying ground for a situation where thesevoices and interpretations, doomed to beoutsiders, strange, and weak, would have abigger influence on the results of urbanplanning and design, the production of thecity and future urban life. The interest of thefollowing conceptual developments, then, isfirstly critical, to dismantle power relations,and secondly practical, to make the worldbetter and to increase people’s mutualunderstanding.

In the field of concepts, I will move fromspace to place. The notions of space and placeare tightly connected (see Massey’s notion ofplace below). Even Aristotle suggested thatspace is the sum of all places, a dynamic fieldwith directions and qualitative properties.

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Later, this interpretation was overrun byEuclidean notions (Norberg-Schulz, 1971, p.10). Stenros also criticizes the separation ofspace and place into distinct categories: ‘Placeis like a poem, it is space in a condensed,simplified form. . .’ (Stenros, 1992, p. 315).More than anything else, place interests ushere, because it is significant, meaningful,human and cultural—all more clearly than‘space’. It is in place, in discussions on placeand in the sense of place and placelessnesswhere those quiet, weak voices, the otherenvironmental relationships I am looking for,surface.

In the field of planning praxis, I stressthe importance of the production of space,the concrete process and all those who areinvolved in it. In the background, there isHenri Lefebvre’s assertion that only theconcepts of production and the act of pro-ducing are really universal and, therefore,the only possible ground for a unifiednotion of space (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 15).Production and processes, by definition,‘take their time’. Time must be consideredto be equal to space, and space, place andthe city alike must be radically conceptu-alized as space-time.

Figure 2. Hameentie road. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori.

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Hameentie road, 21 March 2000—lookingfor places

From home, I walk along Hameentie roadtowards Arabia. I ponder the notion of placeand I try to see, without prejudice, which ofthe things all around—bridges, roads, plan-ted bushes, fenced-off pieces of parkland,natural rocks and icefalls on them, old depotbuildings—I could call ‘places’. I realise thereare very few. There is an old mansion with itspark-like courtyard (now used by the Botani-cal Garden) while a kilometre away standsthe characteristic facade of the Arabia factory;that’s about it. Of course, if one were an‘artist’ and searched, say, for a pictorial motif,almost anything would do, such as crossing ofa footpath and an industrial rail track, whererusty traffic signs lean against each other,with a rough fence and a clear spring sky astheir background . . . But would a framedpicture, which becomes significant in an artexhibition, be a ‘place’?

Maybe the effort of finding a distinctplace, which you can feel and in which youcan be, is fruitless. The Senate Square3 is aplace but the same can be said about thecity of Helsinki and about Paris and aboutthe Eiffel Tower there (Stenros, 1992, p.264). But again we face a problem: if theEiffel Tower is a place, where does thatplace stop? Is the intricate steel structureitself the place, or the Tower and the parkand river front in the vicinity, or maybeevery spot in Paris from which you can seethe Tower? That would really be a complexpattern. Or is the place in all the tourists’photo albums and videos and all the living-rooms in Finland and in Australia, wherethe albums are looked at and travel memo-ries told? (Stenros would say that the place-myths of the Eiffel Tower and Paris arenested and structurally similar and that theyintertwine and enforce each other.) Lookingfor a single place, a single spot, seems to befruitless. I believe that if I skip that alto-gether, I can move forward quicker.

According to Pauli Tapani Karjalainen,‘place is the meaningful totality of the

relations we project on to our environ-ment’ (1997, p. 231, translation by PL).Place is, thus, something significant andfrom looking for a single place, I couldmove to contemplate where the sense of theenvironment is. How or from what pointof view does something in an environmentstart to mean something, to be under-standable, even important? At least archi-tects, who are educated to be interested incities and spaces (even on a vacation trip),often say that suddenly a foreign city‘opened’ or became legible. That may bethe point.

Hameentie road, moving along an histor-ical route, brings sense to the Arabia area.The end facade of the Arabia porcelainfactory governs the road landscape. It pre-sents the factory’s traditional name and itsdistinctive smokestack to a pedestrian—or adriver—coming from the city. (The facadeused to be much more visible. It could beseen from the former city boundary andcustoms 1.5 kilometres away. Now apart-ment buildings conceal it until the city depot,as a sign of the reduced importance ofindustries in general and, specifically, Arabiafactory itself.) The old mansions, Kumpulaand Annala, open towards the road with tree-lined walkways and well-tended gardens;apartment buildings from the 1950s aresituated a little off the road, following thedesign ideal of their time, and they play withthe distance and direction relative to theroad.

A path and moving along it is one possibleframe of making sense. In some rare cases,the frame may be a point or landmark (seeLynch, 1960). In Arabia, there are no clearexamples of that, as even the discussedfactory facade is rather a sequence in the roadlandscape than a point/place in its own right.I suspect Lynch’s ‘area’. Isn’t an area exactlythe meaningless in-between, a pure distance,to which there is no relationship and whichmay be grasped and loaded with sense andsignificance by ‘places’ or some other way?And ‘node’? Isn’t it always in relation to apath or paths?

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Weak place

Let us leave Lynch for now, because thecentral observation is the multiplicity ofpossible frames. Every individual’s experi-ence is unique (Karjalainen, 1997). Everyperson sees, feels and interprets the Arabiaarea as an element in his/her singular chain ofexperiences. It is obvious that for old resi-dents the area is meaningful in a differentway and for other reasons than for theirgrand-children or for international guestsarriving at the University of Art and Design.For one person, the context (frame) of theplace is memories from past decades, sandyroads, blossoming apple trees, or hard workin the Arabia factory; for another, the contextmay be the rules and characters of a Nin-tendo game, transferred to ‘real’ games andradiating new content to the stones, bushesand forests; for a third, the context may be anair-conditioned, hermetic chain of ‘spaces offlows’, from the aeroplane to the arrivals hallin Helsinki-Vantaa, to a brand new taxismelling of plastic and leather, to the mini-malistic lobby of the Lume Media Centre, inwhich the sterile cocktail conversations of ascientific conference are held with the naturalpanoramic landscape in front, looked atthrough selectively glazed walls.

Furthermore, shared, intersubjective ele-ments are woven into the chain of one’s ownexperiences. Sirpa Tani (1995, 1997) uses thenotion of ‘landscape of mind’. She describesher experience in an exhibition on Paris films:‘I am in Paris, I am in a copy of a stage-set ofa Paris-movie, I am in the landscape ofPolanski’s Frantic. Where am I actually?’(Tani, 1997, p. 211, translation by PL).Merleau-Ponty has also referred to the imag-inary content of place (or environment):‘. . .Our body and our perception alwayssummon us to take as the centre of the worldthat environment with which they present us.But this environment is not necessarily thatof our own life. I can be somewhere elsewhile staying here’ (M. Merleau-Ponty, ThePhenomenology of Perception, 1962, p. 293,quoted in Norberg-Schultz, 1971, p. 16).

So, ‘place’ is unclear, flexible, personal, andits connection to the physical or perceivedreality may be loose. Every location in theArabia area belongs to several systems ofmeaning, or may be out of them altogether.In the contemporary city, it is difficult to findage-old, stable places, places with a capital P,which we, at least, believe to have existed inthe cities of past societies and maybe to stillexist in the countryside. In Arabia, there isno cathedral with its sharp turrets linking themundane community to the divine world, nocity wall with its gates defining who belongsto us and who is an outsider, no Bastille to behated and destroyed in the euphoria ofrevolution, no archetypal farmhouse living-room, gathering the life of successive genera-tions, no ring of courtyard buildings andfences preventing wolves from attacking thecattle. . .

This environmental relation of the globalcondition I call weak place. Behind thenotion, there is Gianni Vattimo’s ‘weakthinking’.4 Ignasi de Sola-Morales quicklytransferred the idea, or its aesthetic implica-tions, to a tool for architectural criticism(‘Weak architecture’, 1987). According to deSola-Morales, ideas developed in the fields ofphilosophy and humanities, such as thearchaeology of knowledge or de-construc-tion, have a counterpart in the productionand experience of form and, therefore, also inarchitecture. Such parallels, which are oftenconnected to the changes in the temporalityof experiences which is important, includethe superimposition and juxtaposition ofelements, the diffracted explosion of time,architecture conceived as an event, the meet-ing of the subjective and objective in thenotion of fold5 and the re-interpretation ofmonumentality as an ephemerality, trace,residue or after taste. The core of de Sola-Morales’ text may lie in his discussion ondecoration: ‘. . .the decorative condition [ofart or architecture] is not necessarily a vulgartrivialisation but rather that it simply con-stitutes the recognition of the fact that inworks of art—either sculptural or archi-tectural—acceptance of a certain weakness

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and, therefore, its placing in a secondaryposition, is possibly the condition for itsgreatest elegance and, at bottom, for itsgreatest weight’ (de Sola-Morales, 1987, p.84). Weak architecture gets its power pre-cisely from its weakness, from its (cultural)marginality and a resulting chance to influ-ence semi-secretly, from the side. There isalso a connection to Benjamin’s notion ofdisinterestedness.

Doreen Massey has forcibly criticizedstatic conceptualization of space and a con-nected, nostalgic notion of place. Accordingto Massey, if space is conceived of as space-time and as being formed out of ever-changing social interrelations at all scales,then place becomes a moment or articulationof these relations and understandings. Theparticularity of a place is ‘. . .constructed notby placing boundaries around it and definingits identity through counterposition to theother which lies beyond, but precisely (inpart) through the specificity of the mix oflinks 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, ifconceived structurally, a flexible system ofplaces, in which the relationship between theprevious space and the next gives place itsmeaning’ (1992, p. 151, translation by PL).

Taina Rajanti’s concept, weak experience,which is also a Vattimo-analogy, gives us avery different point of view concerning theidea of weak place. According to Rajanti, thereal issue in globalization is not that others,such as Tamils or Arabs, come here, to ourcity, but that all people, including the seem-ingly secure and affluent Westerners, areforced to detach themselves from their Being.‘The space of global opens as a permanentstate of emergency. The space of refugee(meaning everyone, PL) is a camp, a spatialdimension permanently outside normal lawand order’ (Rajanti, 1999, p. 191, translationby PL). The state of emergency becomes arule and a conventionality. Humanityincreasingly lives outside their traditionalareas in non-places, which do not lend anidentity to their user, neither place them in

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

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any relationship to each other or to the past,the already lived. Typical non-places arespaces and landscapes for the tourist andconsumer, such as high-ways, transit hallsand hypermarkets, but also (real) refugeecamps (ibid., p. 192)—in other words, Cas-tells’ ‘space of flows’. Staying in non-places iscontractual. It is not possible to begin to feelat home in them, but people are in them ‘asif’ at home. The skill to conduct a reasonablelife in the global world of non-places requiresavoiding unconditional choices and signifi-cant, total relationships to achieve an empty,open, opportunistic, weak experience. So, wemeet similar themes of partiality, tangential-ity and ephemerality as in de Sola-Morales’thinking.

Simon Hubacher has developed the idea ofweakness in urban planning. The object of‘weak urbanism’ is regional structuralchange. At issue is not a fixed, visualizablecity-object but the problem-oriented man-agement of a process. Important tools forsuch work are scenarios and alternative viewsof the future. Crucial elements furtherinclude co-operation across municipalboundaries and governmental hierarchies andvarious partnerships and sponsorships withprivate actors. As an example, Hubacherpresents the Stadtlandschaft Rheinland proj-ect, which concentrated on the landscapequalities in the zone between Cologne andBonn, and which became a ‘permanent work-shop’ for architects, planners, landscapedesigners, as well as political and economicdecision-makers (Hubacher, 1999, pp.16–17).

Linguistic interpretation

Before I continue to sketch the possibleimplications of ‘weakness’ for the aims andmethods of planning and urban design, Ireturn for a while to the notion of place. Iproposed earlier that it would be more usefulto contemplate the significance and meaningof environment than to look for separateplace-experiences. From these meanings,

there is an attractive hidden door towards ametaphor of architecture/space as language(cf. Rajanti, 1999, p. 9). Now I hope that thefollowing excursion into language will shedlight on the interesting question, discussedalso by Madanipour, of whether a weak placehas any stability and substance, or is it totallydecentred and devoid of qualities of itsown.

In the structuralist approach, originated byFerdinand de Saussure, language is aboutgiving meaning by making distinctionsregarding the meaningless and unstructuredcontinuum of reality as such. The key con-cepts are the sign, the arbitrariness of thesign, and the distinction between ‘langue’ and‘parole’ (Culler, 1994). The world, openingup for a perceiver as ‘environment’ (throughseeing, hearing, touching, memorizing),could be interpreted as ‘material’, analog-ically to all the combinations of sounds, towhich the ‘form’ of language projects mean-ings.6 The form of the ‘environmental lan-guage’ is the perceiver’s way to look, hisframe, his chain of experiences and the sharedmeanings he possesses, as discussed above. Inthis frame, some parts of the material envi-ronment contain, are matched and madesignificant.

Every (structural) element of a language issign. Analogically, every element in an envi-ronment, which is made significant, is a sign.Both constituents of a sign, the signifier andthe signified, are arbitrary. Both are formedthrough distinctions, through negative rela-tions (this is A precisely because it is not B);both are pure form without any substance.This is meant by saying that language (itsstructure) constitutes the world. Earlier, wedefined a location in space/environment,which is made significant, as a place, and nowit would be tempting to conclude that placedoes not have any positive substance.

A language is, however, a single system,whereas ‘environmental language’ consists ofmany (see also Stenros, 1992, pp. 325–337).Broadbent (1996, p. 133) claims that archi-tecture differs from language because there isno social contract in it, defining what this and

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that means. Are the languages of archi-tecture/space/environment totally private,autistic, then? Probably not totally, for cer-tain characteristics of the environment, someof its ‘material’, people do interpret at leastpartially similarly, which is illustrated by thenotion of the landscape of the mind, dis-cussed earlier or by geographies of fear, aprocess where fear produced by societalpower relations is projected in certain, non-accidental, locations, such as tunnels orcentral city parks (see Koskela, 1999). Mada-nipour proposes (1996, p. 349), drawing fromLefebvre, that the question can be solved bytaking into account the materiality of spaceand the process of its social production, bymoving from abstract theorizing to the realmof real world interactions.

Although that is a good point, I will stickto the abstract language metaphor still for awhile. This is because it seems interesting tocompare the ‘reading of environment’ whichextends through social interrelations at allscales, and the resulting open notion of place,to the post-structuralist conception of mean-ing. This conception holds that, say, a non-sense poem or Joyce’s neologism receiveseveral interpretations (or countless inter-pretations) with relation to the words nearbyin the text and to the associations andconnotations these syllable chains create fordifferent readers. The material of languagecan be ‘cut’ in countless ways, pieces of textand masses of sound can be given weightsand meanings in thousands of ways. De Sola-Morales also refers to ‘diagonal’ or ‘oblique’cuts through the panorama (or ‘archaeology’)of present-day architecture (1987, p. 72).

In the Hameentie example, much of thevisual ‘material’ and many traces of historycan be well interpreted through the frame ofa historical road, but, for example, the soundsof the environment would need a differentframe. The noise of the nearby highway ispervasive and it is inconceivable from thecontext of the historical Hameentie road(unless one were to imagine old, narrowHameentie with its sparse traffic, with thenew highway as a ‘sign’ of post-war eco-

nomic growth, increased traffic and the needto produce a ‘new Hameentie’). Similarly,natural sounds, such as birds, need anotherframe, for example, the rich ecosystem of theVanhankaupunginlahti bay and its positionon the main migration routes.

Operationalization—the practice ofurban planning

From all that has been said so far, it ispossible to derive three objectives for urbanplanning. (1) Planning should find, andrender understandable, as many ways ofseeing an environment as meaningful—asmany frames—as possible. (2) It shouldmake sure that these ways of seeing, voicesand points of view do not get trampled on inthe further phases of design or implementa-tion. (3) Planning should be able to find thoselocations, which belong to many systems ofmeaning, to many ‘languages’ and are, there-fore, ‘public’ or shared. These are the weakplaces, open, ephemeral and tangential fromseveral points of reference, but not owned byanyone, bounded and essential.

There are several experimental examples ofa planning practice with these objectives, apractice, which for want of a better namecould be called ‘open’. Earlier, I referred toRheinland, where there has been an ongoingworkshop-like landscape project among 12municipalities for five years. Let us takeanother, arbitrary, example from the Park vanKraal project. The future park is situatedoutside Utrecht as part of a new town(VINEX). As the environment in such new,instantly designed districts often becomespoor, the project’s architects proposed anunusual strategy for the realization of thepark:

‘All too often, park design is still seen as anarchitectural matter. The landscape architectis given a detailed description of the spatial,functional and ecological principles, anddraws a design to fit the stated budget. . . Itwould be a missed opportunity to construct

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Park van Kraal in the same way. Forcenturies, the time factor has been thelandscape architect’s most importantinstrument. During the designphase—which usually involved creating animpression of the most desirable targetscenario—a management plan was drawnup that gave a description of the measureswhereby that target scenario might beattained. Sufficient scope was thereby leftfor changes of a natural, social, cultural, oreconomic nature. . . Althoughcontemporary management structures nowmake it difficult to accommodate such aprocess, we nonetheless propose a designstrategy. . . that makes it possible, evenduring construction, for the park torespond to the ways in which people use it.The construction process is thus part of thedesign. . . It will be adventurous, exciting,unpredictable, and always challenging.’(Karres and Brands, 2000, p. 57)

Time and a gradual process of change arecentral in both cases (see also de Sola-Morales above). It seems that one way tochallenge the ‘virtual reality’ of current‘strong’ urban planning, which follows visuallogic, and which is fixed by maps andstatistics, is to take seriously the process ofproducing space itself, a situation of inter-actions which unfolds in time, can includemany voices, and may lead to unexpectedresults; urban reality that is lived. Openplanning is possible to achieve only by lettingthings truly and concretely be open andundecided.

Raoul Bunschoten’s (Chora) method, anew practice of urban curation, is a well-

developed version of the themes of open-ended change and sensitive analysis on urbansituations and actors involved. Bunschotenconceives the city as a life-form, havingemotions. He calls the city the ‘second skin’;nature is the ‘first skin’, covering the Earth.Key concepts in his thinking are ‘proto-urban condition’, start or seed of urbanchange, ‘caretakers’, actors which take care ofemergent phenomena, ‘metaspace’, space ofpossibilities and holding, ‘games’, ‘scenarios’and ‘conflicts’, ‘epic geography’, concretiza-tion of metaspace in the city, ‘prototype’,‘liminal body’, self-organizing, new actor orpartner, and ‘urban gallery’. There is no spacehere to describe fully the rich method, whichalso admits (on purpose or not) severalinterpretations. Sensitivity to new, weakurban phenomena is the starting point.Urban processes, change, are the essence,they ‘are the substance of the second skin’sflux; they create its form in time and space’(Chora, 1999). Processes are modulated, and,for example, scenarios created, by steps ofErasure, Origination, Transformation andMigration. Further, nothing is possible with-out co-operation with real people and insti-tutions. The following two final points from‘Chora Manifesto’ condense the ethos:

‘56. Urban Curation is the practice ofmaintaining Urban Galleries, the metaspacesof the second skin. Urban Curators are thepractitioners that manage the contents ofthese metaspaces. They oversee theproduction of scenarios and prototypes.They organize tables of negotiation, supportthe initiation and work of Liminal Bodies.

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

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57. The practices of urban planning andarchitecture are evolving in the context ofan ever-more complex second skin. Incollaboration with other practices,inhabitants, users, clients, decision-makers,producers, and investors, these practitionershelp to invent new urban forms and definethe shifts in practice that are required forthe management of these new forms. UrbanCurators orchestrate this shift in practice,detect emergent phenomena, designate citiesas metaspaces, form galleries, and curatetheir contents.—New urban phenomena;metaspaces as new public spaces; a newpractice.’ (Chora, 1999)

But, finally, where is the problem? Whatessential matter escapes from the net of urbanplanning? Why is there a need to change ourconceptualization of the city or the way weplan and design our cities? The current,modernistic planning, based on mastering thevisible city, is by no means dead. ‘As long asplanning is able to control urban change anddevelopment and, on the other hand, is ableto produce urban space, which satisfies resi-

dents, the situation is not too problematic forthe political community’ (Hakli, 1997, p. 50,translation by PL). The answer is two-fold.

Looked at regionally, there are severalphenomena, which have ‘escaped’ from therealm of visual logic of planning and control.Large ex-urban malls, ‘experience worlds’,consuming hundreds of hectares of land andbuilt with foreign investors’ money, officeparks, where thousands work every day, etc.are mushrooming in the vicinity of ring roadsand the airport almost freely without theneed or influence of ‘urban planning’. Thisincreased importance of the periphery andthe so-called edge city phenomenon are alsoknown, much debated, and familiar in theHelsinki region, especially in the neighbour-ing municipalities of Espoo, Vantaa, Kirkko-nummi and Sipoo. Urban planning has prob-lems in the upper end of its geographicalscope, with wider phenomena than the tradi-tional city-object.

In this paper, we are dealing with another,somewhat more vague, problem. (Yet Ibelieve many ideas developed here would

Figure 5. Toolo Bay and the city centre. The old warehouses are the U-shaped building in the middle, next to ElielSaarinen’s main railway station. Scale approx. 1:20,000. Source: Helsinki City Planning Office.

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also be applicable on a regional scale.) Newurban space in Helsinki—new museums,upgraded parks and streets, shopping mallswhich have moved from the suburbs back tothe city, as well as new housing districts withnicely paved squares and well-equippedplaygrounds —have mostly been welcomedwith delight. Comments in the press, visitorstatistics or prices of apartments could serveas indicators. In every project, however, thereare also losers, lost values and, sometimes,open resistance. The target audience of thenew city centre is the well-to-do two-thirdsof the population, people who appreciate artand who can buy a cup of cappuccino nowand then. On the first page, I described myown nature experience in Arabia a couple ofyears ago. Now, new development is aboutto wipe this nature, plants, animals, soil andlandscape, completely away; new structure,streets, houses and a park built from scratchwill replace the reality and essence of theplace. In Toolo Bay, there is an open conflictbetween people defending an old warehousecomplex and official planners and their advo-

cates—Otherness, strangeness, scars of timeand human life (work, pain, love) are lost inthe current, state-of-the-art planning pro-cesses. The essence of the lived city isendangered.

The old railway warehouses as a state ofmind

The planning of the Toolo Bay area has hadvery many twists and turns.7 The area is inthe geographical centre of the inner city ofHelsinki, but the railway track and goodsyard have hampered its development fordecades. There have been several planningcompetitions, the most recent in 1985–1986,which have all come to nothing. During thelast few years, Toolo Bay’s Sleeping Beautydream has been interrupted (Haarni, 2000).The goods yard was moved to anotherlocation in the late 1980s, opening up land forKiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art,which was opened in 1998 (the competitionwas held in 1993). It was accompanied by the

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

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massive glass-cube of the headquarters of themain news corporation, Sanoma Ltd in 1999(lot purchase in 1994, invited competition in1995). The Toolo Bay park competition washeld in 1997 and now, in the year of theEuropean City of Culture, there is a sketchof the future park in the landscape. Thecompetition for the Parliament extension wasin 1999 and for the brave new Music Hall in1999– 2000. Further projects in the areainclude a hotel, main library, set of officebuildings, parking facilities and an under-ground highway channelling traffic past thecity centre.

The old railway warehouses stay in themiddle of this void, which is suddenly drawninto a whirlwind of change. Their low,lengthy gestalt and very material character donot fit into the transparent, straight, coolaesthetics of the emerging New Helsinki.The warehouses have not been included inany plan or competition proposal with anyofficial recognition. In the beginning of the1990s, assistant mayor Pekka Korpinen men-tioned, in passing, that the warehouses can bekept ‘in some form’ (Kaarina Katajisto’svideo). The National Board of Antiquitiesand Historical Monuments has changed itsview; now it mildly supports the preserva-tion. Not a single proper re-use plan has beenmade, however.

In the middle of all the change andinsecurity, the warehouses have become apeculiar event space (see also Lehtovuori,2000). Their long halls and wide courtyardhave served as the stage for flea markets andsnow board games; both mediaeval festivalsand techno clubs have been organized inthem. Gradually, the warehouses havebecome, in Bunschoten’s terminology, a‘metaspace’, a place of opportunities andsurprising encounters, and, respectively, itsprotectors, the fragmented Pro Makasiinitmovement, a possible ‘liminal body’, whichhas a voice and position in the discussion anddecisions on the issue. But what, then, is the‘quality’ of the warehouses, which the officialplanning fails to recognize? Here we bumpinto a paradox.

The old railway warehouses are a space ofopportunities because no-one owns them.None of the groups and institutions whichuse the spaces own them juridically8 andnone of these actors permanently occupy themain spaces. The place is fundamentallyempty, ‘open and porous’ in Massey’s words.Empty in the sense that it is easy to accessand it gives one the opportunity to be andbehave as one likes, free of external defini-tions and expectations. The warehouses are astate of mind, a feeling that things are in acertain way. This specific quality, which isdifficult to formulate, surfaced clearly in adiscussion, titled ‘Makasiiniutopiat’, in May2000. One of the questions asked was whereelse in the city centre of Helsinki could youpick a piece of wire, do something with it,and maybe ‘exhibit’ it, or where else couldyou spontaneously repair a small corner? Inthe warehouses, it is possible to do things notpossible elsewhere and to build a relationshipto the place more freely than, say, in amuseum (even though the museum claims tobe ‘open’ and like a ‘living-room’) or in ashopping mall (even though shopping isgenerally held to be the ultimate realizationof freedom and self-expression). At the sametime, emptiness and openness are the prob-lems of the warehouses, in three respects.Rhetorically, it is easy to argue that thebuildings are not worth keeping, becausethere are times, especially during the winter,when almost nobody uses them. From theeconomic point of view, the periodical andcommercially marginal use does not reachthe ‘revenue expectations’ of a central citylot, and it is difficult to imagine how it wouldbe possible to sustain the space under thepressures of land rent and financial calcula-tions. Thirdly, because there are fairly fewcontinuous users, the warehouses cannoteasily get a strong and aggressive lobby tospeak for it. These ‘deficits’ are the other sideof the space of opportunities, and by ‘repair-ing’ even one of those, the essence of thewarehouses would be lost and the open spaceof urban play would become defined andbounded, in one way or another.

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. . . where then?

How to give space and opportunities forurban realities, sidetracked by current plan-ning practices? How to enrich and diversifythe production of cities, space and places?The situation is a version of the meeting of

David and Goliath. Individual experience,feelings, moments, coincidences and ephem-eral aftertastes are opposed by big organiza-tions, economic interests and the legitimate,visualized urban information of maps andstatistics. The critique of urban planning anddesign can work at three levels. It can attack

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

Figure 8. Leikkaus—section exhibition, 2000. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori.

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the deep structures of thinking and knowl-edge, the planning discourse; it can concen-trate on institutions, such as the question ofwho can participate, under what conditions,and in which context, or it can proposechanges in the concrete action, actual plan-ning processes and individual actors. Earlier,I have sketched conceptualizations of spaceand place (structures of knowledge) andmethods of urban planning and realization(action). Raoul Bunschoten’s thoughts on‘liminal bodies’ and ‘caretakers’ for processesin metaspaces fall in the realm ofinstitutions.

It is essential that space is not conceived ofas absolute but as relational and social, thatplace is not understood as static and closedbut as an open, momentary articulation ofsocial links and interconnections at all scales,and that the planning practice is concretelyopen so that there is courage to leave thingsunfinished, to let time pass and environmen-tal relationships form. Planning, and theknowledge it uses, do not have externalreferences, but they must define, case by case,their own reality. The objective of planning isto find and formulate several ways to see itsobject, lived and living city, as meaningful.

The ways to see what planning conceived likethis is interested in are not necessarily visiblein maps or in statistics. The lived city doesnot consist of experiences with a capital Enor places with a capital P. Rather, bothexperience and place are weak, ephemeral,partial, individual and optional. Further-more, planning has to shift its focus fromvisual (and timeless) space to space-time;urban reality does not exist, it happens. Inthis situation, the ‘design method’ or ‘simula-tion’ is, instead of a map, a game. It cannot bedrawn, it must be played, in the real worldwith real people in real time.

Notes

1 There are about 70 architects in the Helsinki CityPlanning Office, and its total staff is almost 300.Furthermore, the city commonly uses consultants inplanning tasks. Anecdotally, Antwerp with a similarpopulation has only about 10 architects incomparable tasks.

2 I am not against efforts to create visually pleasantspaces. On the contrary, one might say that thevisual aesthetics are the last small, positive thing leftin the tough realm of urban politcal economy.

3 The administrative square and symbolic centre ofHelsinki.

Figure 9. Toolonlahdenkatu street. Photograph: Panu Lehtovuori.

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4 The notion refers to the opportunities of philosophicalinquiry in a situation where there is no solid, absolutemetaphysical foundation for thinking (see e.g.Rajanti, 1999, p. 195).

5 ‘Reality appears as a continuum in which the time ofthe subject and the time of the external objects aretravelling on the same endless belt on which thesubjective and the objective meet only when this verycontinuous reality folds in upon its own continuity’ (deSola-Morales, 1987, p. 83).

6 All differences of sound, which could carry meaning,do not. That is why it is possible to also understanddifferently or badly pronounced language.

7 Plans include Eliel Saarinen’s Pro Helsingfors 1918,Oiva Kallio’s 1924, general master plans 1923 and1932, P.E. Blomstedt’s 1933, Yrjo Lindegren and ErikKråkstrom’s 1949, Alvar Aalto’s 1961 and 1964,master plan framework 1974 (Haarni, 2000).

8 Since October 1999, the warehouses are underValtion Kiinteistolaitos control, before that they wereunder Ratahallintokeskus (1995–1999) and the StateRailways. The owners have no future plans for thewarehouses (www.makasiinit.net).

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Panu Lehtovuori is an architect, researcherand PhD student at the Graduate School forUrban Studies, Helsinki University of Tech-nology. E-mail: lehtovuo@uiah.fi