Illustration Antti Uotila.
The motto for Helsinki’s World Design Capital 2012 bid was “The people make the city”. Moreover, “we need the world and that is why we ourselves must be useful citizens of the world”. We should spend more time exploring other cultures and invite the world to our place too. Interested in the current and future state of the city’s internationalization, I went through some statistics and talked with citizens of the world who have moved to Helsinki from abroad or who feel like moving out. Where do people come from and where should they go?
Finland’s internationalization has accelerated since receiving EU membership in 1995, making Helsinki one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in Europe with a migration rate of 550 people every month. Having said that, statistically the biggest leap in migration took place in the nineties, when Ingrians returned to Finland in their thousands after being granted a right of return from the former Soviet Union. At that time, many refugees also arrived from Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.
By the end of last year, there were nearly 40,000 foreigners from 160 different nationalities residing in Helsinki, making up a little less than ten percent of the city’s population. On a global scale, the number is small, but it is rapidly growing.
The reasons for moving here are increasingly not only driven by necessity. For example, artists NURRI KIM from Korea and SASHA HUBER from Switzerland have come to Helsinki for love and to work with creative independence. This kind of more spontaneous migration to Finland must have something to do with the fact that Finnish people go and stay abroad more, meeting people from different corners of the world.
“In Finland I learned to live more reduced and perhaps more simple – with less ‘stuff’ compared to Switzerland,” says Sasha Huber. “This feels good. I think people are less materialistic but definitely appreciate good quality, beautiful, functional and ethically made products.”
New areas and perspectives
The Helsinki region which has a population of 1.3 million people lies on the shore of the Baltic Sea. It is known for its good standard of living and high level of education. However, the publics’ well-being and prosperity are counterbalanced by a high cost of living. In city comparisons, Helsinki ranks sixth highest on the list of housing prices in Europe with an average cost of 2,580 euros per square meter.
As a city, Helsinki is also expanding rapidly. Complete new areas are under construction; Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari will become completely new districts, while Keski-Pasila will become the second centre for the city. Alppikylä, Ormuspelto and Östersundom will become areas of new town houses that are yet to be in Helsinki. All in all, more than 5,000 new apartments will be built in Helsinki every year.
In addition to people moving to Helsinki, Helsinkians are moving abroad. In 2009, about 3,100 people from Helsinki alone relocated to outside the country, with the most popular destinations being Sweden, the USA as well as South-Eastern and Eastern Asia.
MARTTI KALLIALA, an architect and musician, is planning to join the club this autumn. Meanwhile, he is touring the world with his electronic music project, Renaissance Man, and editing a book on pragmatic utopias for Finland. The book suggests a compulsory year out for all Finnish people.
He presents a polemic idea about replacing Finnish national service with a compulsory year out which would provide people with first-hand experiences of different cultures.
“We need an international criterion and standards for doing things instead of operating only within our own small circle,” Kalliala says. “And people should encounter Finns outside Finland, too.”
“The cultural enemy of Finland is the poisonous combination of weak national self-esteem veiled in over-emphasized complacency,” he continues. “It’s easy to settle for things here, people don’t protest against bad service, substandard food or inefficient health care practices.”
According to the general consensus, maintaining the status quo is OK. The reasons for this are the country’s distant geographical location, late internationalization as well as young city culture, which add up to a lack of international references.
“Our perspective is very different from that of a Central European who is physically surrounded by other distinctive cultures and everyday practices,” adds Kalliala.
Piece of ragged city culture
“Helsinki is a city where everything that’s great doesn’t exist yet,” says artist Sasha Huber.
However, new influences come in with each and every immigrant. While local food doesn’t have a good reputation, at least if you ask some French and Italian politicians, Nurri Kim from Korea likes to prepare the traditional Finnish sautéed reindeer at home, in Helsinki.
Illustration Antti Uotila.
“I have developed a Korean take on the dish, adding many black peppers and herbs in the pot,” she explains. “In the same vein, I also have a Finnish friend who eats Kimchi (a Korean dish) with rye bread.”
During the dark and long winter Nurri introduced Kimjang, a Korean tradition of communal cooking between neighbors, to Helsinki. “It’s all about making Kimchi for the winter to keep you warm inside,” she says.
What makes Helsinki interesting from Martti Kalliala’s perspective is that gentrification has only just begun here. Kallio, a district on the eastern side of the Helsinki peninsula about one kilometer from the city center, makes him think of Greenwich Village in the 1950s as described by JANE JACOBS in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Kallio is a perfect mix of immigrants, working class, students and artists.
“Kallio combines different cultures and nationalities as well as schedules and practices,” says Kalliala with a grin. “There are a lot of original residents, and you can’t see many coffee shops in the area yet. Students and artists have been taking it over since the 1990s, the original residents are moving out because of the ascending prices of estates…” It is hard to find a part of the city theoretically as ideal as Kallio – a central spot in an industrialized country yet to have undergone the transformation from a ragged city to a trendy location”.
“This part of the city is living a fleeting moment,” as Kalliala puts it.
Helsinki outside in
While metaphorically Helsinki can be seen as an island in Western Europe, empty and far away from everything, thus intimate by nature, it is also an international traffic junction operating as a transit gateway for regular flights between America and Asia. Yearly, over five million passengers depart from and arrive at the Helsinki-Vantaa Airport on international flights. Helsinki’s development has been sparked by its close proximity to other metropolises such as St. Petersburg in the east, Tallinn in the south and Stockholm in the west.
Nevertheless, Finns spend little time outside Finland and when they do, they are usually tourists rarely exposed to first-hand experiences of foreign culture.
The map showing the genetic variation between European populations still applies – the Finnish population is isolated. “The Finnish ethos should be: if the world doesn’t come to Finland then Finland has to go to the world,” states Kalliala.
Finnish architecture and design enjoys a good reputation thanks to the post-war success stories of ALVAR AALTO and ARMI RATIA’s Marimekko. Like the story of Alvar Aalto, an international networker during his time, all the important phenomena in the history of arts and sciences are based on people and information moving around freely.
Making ourselves part of another cultural sphere would also help us to recognize our own specialties.
What is valuable about our culture and what could be better?
The writer Jenna Sutela is one of the two founders of think tank OK Do. She works in Helsinki, London, Berlin and Paris. The article is based on the City of Helsinki Urban Facts’ statistics about Foreigners in Helsinki 2009 as well as Statistical Yearbook of the City of Helsinki 2009.
Illustrations Antti Uotila
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Helsinki Design Week on 26 August–5 September 2010. See the complete schedule at www.helsinkidesignweek.com.
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