The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning: Plotting the Helsinki Waterfront 9780367555856, 9781003094173

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“This is a fne contribution to the planning feld and will be especially helpful to those interested in the stories told around planning strategies and projects. It draws together and enriches the literature on narrative and storytelling, both generally and specifcally in relation to planning and urban studies. It contains two well-developed case studies of major redevelopment projects in one of Northern Europe’s major cities which illustrate the different ways narratives inform, get used in and are generated by planning activity. Many will fnd this book a really helpful resource.” (Patsy Healey, Professor Emeritus, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK)

The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning

Narratives, in the context of urban planning, matter profoundly. Planning theory and practice have taken an increasing interest in the role and power of narrative, and yet there is no comprehensive study of how narrative, and concepts from narrative and literary theory more broadly, can enrich planning and policy. The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning addresses this gap by defning key concepts such as story, narrative, and plot against a planning backdrop, and by drawing up a functional typology of different planning narratives. In two extended case studies from the planning of the Helsinki waterfront, it applies the narrative concepts and theories to a broad range of texts and practices, considering ways toward a more conscious and contextualized future urban planning. Questioning what is meant when we speak of narratives in urban planning, and what typologies we can draw up, it presents a threefold taxonomy of narratives within a planning framework. This book will serve as an important reference text for upper-level students and researchers interested in urban planning. Lieven Ameel is a university lecturer in comparative literature at Tampere University, Finland. He holds a PhD in Finnish literature and comparative literature from the University of Helsinki and the JLU Giessen and is docent in urban studies and planning methods. He has published widely on literary experiences of the city, narrative planning, and urban futures. His other books include Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature (2014) and the co-edited volumes Literature and the Peripheral City (2015), Literary Second Cities (2017), and The Materiality of Literary Narratives in Urban History (2019).

Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design

Routledge Research in Planning and Urban Design is a series of academic monographs for scholars working in these disciplines and the overlaps between them. Building on Routledge’s history of academic rigour and cutting-edge research, the series contributes to the rapidly expanding literature in all areas of planning and urban design. Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore Rethinking the 21st Century Public School Erkin Özay New York in Cinematic Imagination The Agitated City Vojislava Filipcevic Cordes The City in Transgression Human Mobility and Resistance in the 21st Century Benedict Anderson The City Makers of Nairobi An African Urban History Anders Ese and Kristin Ese Race, Faith and Planning in Britain Richard Gale and Huw Thomas Planning within Complex Urban Systems Shih-Kung Lai The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning Plotting the Helsinki Waterfront Lieven Ameel For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/Ro utledge-Research-in-Planning-and-Urban-Design/book-series/RRPUD

The Narrative Turn in Urban Planning Plotting the Helsinki Waterfront

Lieven Ameel

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Lieven Ameel The right of Lieven Ameel to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 9780367555856 (hbk) ISBN: 9781003094173 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

x xii xv

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements 1

Introduction: Examining narratives in the context of urban planning Narratives matter 1 Aims 3 Plotting the waterfront 6 The Helsinki waterfront, Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama Sources 13 Outline 13 Notes 15

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7

Urban planning and narrative: Towards a theory of narrative planning The narrative turn in planning: A critical overview Different kinds of knowledge 19 Defning narrative in planning 21 What is not a story? 24 Notes 27

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1

Narratives for, in, and of planning A threefold taxonomy 28 Narratives for planning 31 Narrative mapping 32 Mapping the Helsinki waterfront: A concise literary case study 34

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viii Contents Narratives in planning: The brief story of the waterfront Planning maritime Helsinki 41 Narratives of planning: Telling the future of the waterfront 43 Conclusion 47 Notes 48 4

Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in Kalasatama

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49

Emplotment as spatial and narrative practice 50 Situating Kalasatama within a plot 52 Metaphors of Kalasatama: “In the armpit of the city” 57 Diverging narratives: Urban centre or shopping mall? 60 “How we live in 2033” 66 A meshwork of contradictory storylines 68 Conclusion 72 Notes 72 5

Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari Dominant narratives in planning of Jätkäsaari 76 Simple story, complex story, and micro-narrative 77 Narratives for planning in Jätkäsaari 80 Jätkäsaari’s identity marker: The hotel controversy 81 Centre or periphery? 83 Narratives of planning in Jätkäsaari 85 A Bildungsroman for a waterfront development 86 Planning as Bildungsroman 94 “Man’s island” or “women’s city”? 97 Lost opportunities for planning with narrative 102 Park “Good Hope” 102 Sledging hill 103 Greening the wasteland 103 Sustainable Jätkäsaari 105 Narratives and the housing block 106 Planning with diversity? 108 Conclusion 109 Notes 111

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Planning with narrative

ix 113

Narrative mapping and PPGIS 113 Planning with polyphony 115 Planning without closure 118 Planning for narrative space 119 Teaching planning with narrative 120 Notes 122 7

Conclusion

123

References Glossary Index

127 145 148

Illustrations

Figures 1.1

1.2 1.3 2.1 3.1 3.2 4.1

4.2 4.3

4.4 5.1 5.2

5.3

Map of Helsinki, with the partial local master plans (planned as well as confrmed) since 2002. The focus on development along the water is clearly visible. Kalasatama is the area referred to on the map as “Sörnäistenranta ja Hermanninranta”. The city’s historical centre is located roughly in the area between Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama © City of Helsinki, 2016 Kalasatama under construction. © Lieven Ameel, 2015 Cranes in Jätkäsaari. © Lieven Ameel, 2016 Not a narrative: The theme map of “Maritime Helsinki”. © City of Helsinki, 2016 Narratives in the context of planning. © Lieven Ameel, 2016 The expanding centre. © City of Helsinki, 2011 The area of Kalasatama, as shown in the partial local master plan documentation. The “Long Bridge” referred to in the plan is not even visible in the photograph and is situated to the south-west of the area. © City of Helsinki, 2008 REDI publicity tower in Kalasatama. © Lieven Ameel, 2015 “Beautiful landscape apartments”, with an artist’s image of a view of the eastern Helsinki waterscape, evoking images of the lakes of inner Finland. © Lieven Ameel, 2018 Screenshot from the advertising video of Loisto. © SRV, 2019 Information pillar in Jätkäsaari. © Lieven Ameel, 2015 Area A: “No new buildings that are signifcantly higher than the present height scale are planned”. © City of Helsinki, 2011 A map of Helsinki in the strategic spatial plan, with Jätkäsaari denoted as part of the city centre (E2 on the map). © City of Helsinki 2009

9 10 11 25 29 41

53 63

65 65 75

84

85

Illustrations 5.4

5.5

5.6 5.7

Map of south-west Helsinki around 1900, with superimposed contours of the city around 2030. © City of Helsinki 2009 Container with the slogan “This chap has got an island – and it’s a big one”. In the background, Jätkäsaari under construction and the tramway turnaround. © Lieven Ameel 2016 Jätkäsaari is being marketed with the art installation Bad Bad Boy. © Lieven Ameel 2015 “Line drawn in the water.” © City of Helsinki 2015

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98 100 110

Table 3.1

Key narrative functions of the waterfront in Helsinki literature

36

Preface

Storytelling is a ubiquitous feature of human life; when something happens, people tell stories about it. Imagine the following. You witness a deplorable incident, and a police offcer subsequently asks you what happened. You tell her what you observed and then share the story with your friends on social media. They “like” your post. If you were a journalist and thought the incident was important enough, you might transform your initial eyewitness account into a story that would appeal to readers of a major magazine. If a writer of fction, you might treat the incident as inspiration for your next novel. But, being a democratically engaged person who wants to minimize the occurrence of such incidents in the future, you join a group that has been advocating changes in your city’s policy toward such matters. You and others in the advocacy group go to the next city council meeting and demand they take effective remedial action. Much to your surprise, the council agrees, the city’s staff (including its planners) respond effectively, and a year later the mayor proudly says, “We have a great story to tell and we need to get it out into the world”. As this hypothetical tale implies, references to stories and storytelling abound in the urban planning and policy arena these days. Regrettably, however, most people who use these terms have only a thin understanding of what constitutes a good story, what story telling entails, and how stories and storytelling affect urban planning and the future of cities. A substantial number of scholars in urban planning and related disciplines have sought to rectify this situation. Writing from diverse theoretical perspectives, scholars including Leonie Sandercock, John Forester, Bent Flyvbjerg, Ruth Finnegan, Mark Childs, Chris Ivory, Merlijn van Hulst, Mark Benton, Jennifer Tucker, Natalie Collie, Todd Landman, and Francesca Poletta et al. have sought to enhance our collective understanding. Some observers think this collective body of work marks a “narrative turn” in planning. Almost 25 years ago, I made my own contribution to this turn when the University of Chicago Press published my book Planning as Persuasive Storytelling. In the years since it appeared, I have written numerous other articles about stories and storytelling in relation to cities. But I have also

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served for 10+ years as an elected city council person and (simultaneously for the period from 2016 through 2019) as mayor. This political experience has signifcantly infuenced my views about how stories and storytelling infuence the future unfolding of cities. A few features strike me as being key. When telling their tales, storytellers inevitably do so from their point of view. This, the “situated imagination” from which tellers watch and listen, determines what is likely to capture their attention – that is, what they are likely to observe or not observe. They cannot include everything in their stories, and so they also must be very selective; they must decide where to begin and end their tales and what to emphasize and what to omit. Good storytellers also bring the characters in their stories alive, and they do so partly by enabling those characters to act in vivid settings. This activation of the readers’/listeners’ imagination points to one of the most compelling features of a good story: it motivates one to keep reading or listening and to wonder: And then? What happens next? Good storytellers also draw upon the imagery and rhythm of language. In some cases, storytellers tell their stories in ways designed to persuade – that is, to motivate readers/listeners to adopt a preferred attitude toward the situation and its characters. In these cases, storytellers explicitly try to persuade by combining the skilled use of language with other tropes (that is, persuasive fgures of speech and argument). Of special importance for people who seek to craft the future unfolding of cities, good storytellers emplot the fow of future action in ways that tie imagined pasts to imagined futures. As the allusions to readers and listeners implies, when tellers seek to affect action in the public realm, they must share their stories with a larger public. Once told, stories about actions circulate in webs which involve both face-to-face interactions (which are deeply infuenced by the spatial distribution of people by race, class, faith, and other key socioeconomic markers) and virtual interactions at the global scale via the internet and social media. Consequently, as literary theorists have documented, the meaning of a story depends not just on a teller’s intention or the literal text of the teller’s story, but also on what diverse audiences bring to it – that is, how audiences interpret the story. This point lies at the heart of the politics of narrative and storytelling in the public realm. The meaning of a story is contestable and negotiated between the teller and the story’s many audiences. In the end, the quality of interaction between tellers and recipients is crucial, for the interaction can help them live together amicably and possibly construct a shared sense of community and identity, or, conversely, it can divide tellers and recipients of stories into hostile camps. In a contested world such as ours, deeds become words, and words can become wars. In this context, I enthusiastically welcome the publication of Lieven Ameel’s new book. Although he prefers to use the term narrative rather than story, his project takes a big step forward from past work on stories and storytelling. Claiming “there is no comprehensive study of how narrative

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– and concepts from narrative and literary theory more broadly – can enrich planning and policy”, he has crafted his book to serve as the frst go-to text for students and researchers who engage with urban planning in terms of narratives. He asks: (1) What is meant, exactly, when we speak of narratives in urban planning? (2) What kinds of typology can we begin to draw up? And (3) how does a narrative analysis unpack different, always politicized, visions of a better future city? With this focus and set of questions in mind, he draws upon methods and concepts from literary studies, narratology, and rhetoric. He defnes key concepts, offers a functional typology of different types of planning narrative, and applies those concepts and theories to two case studies from contemporary planning for Helsinki’s waterfront. Ameel’s book arrives at a propitious moment. We are collectively engaged in a major social, economic, and ecological transition that demands new ways of thinking. When some people look to the past now, they imagine harmonious and homogeneous nation-states, which they seek to replicate in the present. Other people look to the future and imagine economies that will become so digitized and automated that virtually no human workers will be required. Still others foresee an ever-warming world which leads slowly but inevitably toward the sixth great extinction of life on this planet. And still others eagerly await the “end times” and Armageddon. These (along with more micro-scale stories) are infuencing action in the present and they are likely to continue doing so for many years to come. We also live in a time when some narrators, including certain elected offcials, are telling stories that are explicitly designed to play upon their audiences’ emotions (e.g., fear) and thereby manipulate them into believing lies about the present and the future of their cities and nations. In this context, understanding how storytelling functions in planning and policy has lost nothing of its urgency. James A. Throgmorton

Acknowledgements

In the years researching the Helsinki waterfront, I have accumulated a considerable debt to colleagues, students, and research communities. A crucial period was the year 2012–2013, when I completed the post-graduate expert programme in land use, zoning, and planning, organized by the Land Use Planning and Urban Studies Group (YTK) at Aalto University. At the time, I was also fnalizing my PhD dissertation on experiences of Helsinki in Finnish literature. The encounters and discussion at Aalto University opened my eyes to planning in all its complexity at a crucial stage in my development as a researcher. Several of the researchers and teachers I met during that year have continued to provide an important sound-board for my thinking about dialogues between the humanities and planning theory. Upon defending my PhD in June 2013, I was fortunate enough to receive generous funding from the Ehrnrooth Foundation and the Kone Foundation, which enabled me to embark on a research project to study narratives in the planning of Helsinki’s waterfront. I am deeply grateful to both foundations for their support for my postdoctoral project, during which I returned for a number of months to YTK as a visiting researcher. I am indebted to everyone at Aalto University for sharing their immense expertise in planning theory and urban studies, Raine Mäntysalo, Marketta Kyttä, Hanna Mattila, Tuomas Ilmavirta, Jenni Kuoppa, Johanna Lilius, and Maarit Kahila, in particular. In my frst forays into urban studies, I had the luck of being guided by Sirpa Tani, whose expertise in cultural and humanistic geography was a profound inspiration. The research we conducted together on parkour has laid the groundwork for much of my later work within the broad feld of urban studies. Similarly, Panu Lehtovuori has remained an inspiration ever since he asked me to teach a course on the city and literature to his urban studies students at the Tallinn Academy of Arts, now more than a decade ago. When he moved to Tampere University of Technology (now part of Tampere University), I had the opportunity to continue collaboration with the Architecture Department there, a collaboration which became formalized when I became a docent in urban studies and planning methods in 2016. Thanks also to Minna Chudoba and Juho Rajaniemi in the Architecture

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Acknowledgements

Department for inspiring discussions and collaborations, not in the least during our joint course “Kaupunki kertomuksena” [City in Literature], organized in collaboration with Markus Laine and Helena Leino of the University of Tampere. Thanks to everyone in the Department of Finnish, Finno-Ugrian and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Helsinki, where I was located for most of the period 2013–2015, the frst years of my research project on the Helsinki waterfront. At the University of Helsinki, the research network Urban Layers of Meaning provided one particularly encouraging environment for rethinking the relationship between the humanities, planning, and policy; thanks are due, among others, to Laura Kolbe, Terhi Ainiala, Samu Nyström, and Anja Kervanto Nevanlinna. Thanks also to Eeva Berglund and Cindy Kohtala for inviting me to participate in the book Changing Helsinki. During the years 2015–2017, I took up work at the University of Tampere as a university lecturer in comparative literature. The University of Tampere provided encouraging surroundings for continuing work on my project. Finally, in the period 2018–2020, my work at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies provided the ideal environment to complete my research and to fnalize this manuscript. A special thank you to all the students of planning, urban studies, geography, and architecture I had the privilege to teach over the years, among others at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn, at Aalto University, in the Helsinki USP programme, and at Tampere University of Technology. Several people with intimate knowledge of the workings of the Helsinki City Planning Department and in the City of Helsinki have shared their expertise: thank you, Pasi Mäenpää, Lotta Aulamo, Timo Laittinen, Hannu Mäkelä, Hanna Niemi-Hugaerts, Matti Kaijansinko, Anni Bäckman, Hannu Asikainen, and Outi Säntti. Needless to say, any shortcomings in the book are entirely my responsibility. Thanks to colleagues in the Finnish Society for Urban Studies and to all my colleagues in the Association for Literary Urban Studies – it has been rewarding to work on the interstices between literary studies, urban studies, and planning, with the support of researchers with similar interests. Special thanks to Markku Salmela and Jason Finch. Several colleagues invited me to give talks, which gave me the opportunity to test different hypotheses on narratives and planning. Thanks to Nazry Bahrawi for inviting me to give a keynote at the Humanities and the City conference at Singapore University of Technology and Design; to Linda Karlsson Hammarfelt for inviting me to Gothenburg University for a guest lecture; to Line Sandst for inviting me to Copenhagen University for a guest lecture; and to Ayona Datta for inviting me to the Big Data and Urban Governance on the Margins of the City workshop at King’s College, London.

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It is hard to imagine in what directions my research would have developed if it had not been shaped at an early stage by several scholars from the Ghent Urban Studies Team. The work of Bart Keunen, in particular, on narrative theory and urban planning has profoundly shaped my thinking about cities and urban narratives. Many thanks also to Sofe Verraest and Pieter Uyttenhove. Putting the fnal touches to the manuscript coincided with a half-year research stay as visiting professor at the KU Leuven, Belgium. Thanks to all the colleagues in the Department of Literature, and to Pieter Vermeulen, in particular. Over the past few years, I have had the privilege of working closely with the research group Scripts for Postindustrial Urban Futures at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. The research group’s work in literary studies, planning, and policy has been a perfect environment to discuss several of the concepts developed during my research project. I would like to thank all the researchers in the Scripts group for inspiring discussions, in particular, Jens Gurr and Barbara Buchenau. I would also like to thank Niko Völker for his encouraging engagement with my work, and Lena Mattheis for engaging conversations in the feld of literary urban studies. With Sarianna Kankkunen, I collaborated on an article that examined the Helsinki archipelago in Finnish literature. Several of the research results of our work were also of importance for my broader understanding of the archipelago as a complex cultural environment. Thanks are due to the many colleagues who provided valuable comments during numerous academic conferences and seminars in recent years, from Rome to Oslo, London to Zurich, Berkeley, CA, to Brussels. Many thanks to everyone at Routledge for their work, and to the four external reviewers for their encouraging and astute feedback. I am grateful to James A. Throgmorton, who kindly agreed to write the preface to my book, and to Patsy Healey for her generous blurb. Several of the chapters in this book were previously published as journal articles. I would like to thank Datutop, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, Urban Design International, and the Finnish Journal of Urban Studies for their permission to republish the articles in a much-amended form here. The original articles are: Ameel, Lieven. 2016. “Narrative Mapping and Polyphony in Urban Planning.” Yhdyskuntasuunnittelu/Finnish Journal for Urban Studies 54 (2): 20–40. Ameel, Lieven. 2016. “Emplotting Urban Regeneration: Narrative Strategies in the Case of Kalasatama, Helsinki.” Re-City. Future City – combining disciplines. DATUTOP 34: 222–240. Ameel, Lieven. 2016. “Towards a Narrative Typology of Urban Planning Narratives for, in, and of Planning in Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.” Urban Design International 22 (4): 318–330.

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Ameel, Lieven. 2016. “A bildungsroman for a Waterfront Development. Literary Genre and the Planning Narratives of Jätkäsaari, Helsinki.” Journal of Urban Cultural Studies 3 (2): 167–187. I would to express my gratitude to SRV and the City of Helsinki for giving me permission to reproduce relevant images and maps. Finally, I would like to thank Maria for her unwavering support and unrelenting critical perspective.

1

Introduction Examining narratives in the context of urban planning

Narratives matter Narratives, in the context of urban planning, matter. This is not a new argument – if anything, it has become something of a commonplace in thinking and writing about the contemporary city. It is implicit in planning theory paradigms such as communicative and discursive planning theory, and is met also in a range of approaches to the city as diverse as urban history, sociology, ethnography, literary urban studies, and human and cultural geography. The narrative view of planning is implicitly founded on the thought, following Henri Lefebvre ([1974] 1991), that space is relative and intersubjective, and it is a view that draws on the long legacy of the linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences. Cities are, in the words of Doreen Massey, “the intersections of multiple narratives” (Massey 1999, 165), and planning always participates – willingly and consciously, or not – in the formation of these intersections. The interest in urban narratives goes hand in hand with an increasing awareness that urban planning could (and in many countries legally should) take into account experiential, “subjective” place-based information, shared in the stories people and communities tell of their place in the world. As a result of such shifts, and following a range of intertwined paradigmatic turns variously described as “cultural”, “spatial”, “rhetorical”, “communicative”, and “narrative”, planners have emerged during the past decades as producers, curators, and negotiators of diverse narratives, rather than as the descendants of the hero-planners from the modernist era. But the conceptual and methodological apparatus available to planning theorists and practitioners to assess this narrative turn has remained fragmented, unevenly developed, and largely separated from developments within what is arguably its most relevant cognate feld: narrative studies. Little systematic analysis has been carried out to examine the different kinds of narrative that are used in the context of urban planning from a particularly narrative perspective, and, to date, there is no comprehensive study of how narrative – and concepts from narrative and literary theory more

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Introduction

broadly – can enrich planning and policy. Although several researchers have noted the existence of a “narrative turn” or a “story turn” in planning, few have found it necessary to problematize the concept of “narrative” in this context. What is meant, exactly, when we speak of narratives in urban planning? How are these narratives defned, and what kinds of typology can we begin to draw up? What is the relationship between such narratives and the built environment? And, starting from there, what methods for analysis and conceptual tools can be applied to examine the production, dissemination, and reception of urban planning narratives? These are the key questions addressed in this book. Directing the focus squarely on examining urban planning in terms of its narrative characteristics, this study gives a key role to methods and concepts from disciplines with long-standing expertise in this respect: literary studies, narratology – the study of narrative – and rhetorics. Narrative is defned here, following James Phelan, as a “rhetorical act: somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (Phelan 2007, 3–4). What is told is the story, and the telling can be oral as well as in a written form of text. I will return to the defnitions of story and narrative, and the extent to which these can be applied to planning, in more detail in the following chapter; for now, this defnition will have to suffce. To put narratives frst in a study of urban planning is not to say that this book is not concerned also with the materiality of the actual city. What I hope to elucidate, with an analysis of two specifc case studies of urban planning, is the extent to which the actual – planned, built, and lived – city is shaped by narrative structures in planning, and how narrative and the material urban world are part of a frmly intertwined and interactive meshwork of meaning and experience. Narratives that are created, told, and circulated in the context of urban planning eventually turn into the stone, glass, and concrete of the built and lived city; they guide and defne the material realities of the city. And the built environment in turn produces its own stories to be retold or contested. An urban redevelopment project that is envisioned in terms of its industrial heritage may result in a preference for a specifc urban morphology or building material (such as red bricks to mirror earlier industrial architecture) and in the preservation of specifc features of the built environment (such as obsolete tram rails or quay boulders). Certain types of building height, building block structure, and traffc solutions will be preferred, depending on whether a development is presented as part of the storyline of city centre expansion or, conversely, as that of a new garden town that brings nature into the urban fabric. Features of the built environment in their turn produce particular experiences and narratives. An artifcially constructed canal may produce stories of division and separation between different parts of the city – or, quite the opposite, it may foster the experience of a recreational space linking these, all depending on a complex combination of often unpredictable factors. The windowed street-level spaces designed by planners for front stores may be used instead for bicycle

Introduction

3

parking or for community meetings, creating unintended spatial uses that may give rise to a host of narratives of an area’s semi-public spaces. Following Jonathan Raban, cities are “plastic by nature” and, if we “mould them in our images”, they “in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our personal form on them” (Raban [1974] 1988, 10). Narratives are seen here as drawing on, and producing, such resistance, and as situated on the interstices between city planners, city inhabitants, and the cities they work and live in. But narratives in the context of planning are never natural or self-evident, even when they are presented as evocations of causal or organic relationships. They are also instruments of power, used to legitimize interventions in space, dislocations, and the prioritization of specifc interests over others.

Aims The frst aim of this book is to draw up a typology of the kinds of narrative that are found in the context of urban planning, in order to clarify the existing terminological inconsistency in narrative planning theory, and to provide a taxonomy that could be of use for urban planners, planning theorists, and the inhabitants living in the end result of planning efforts, the everyday city. Second, it wants to outline key methodological concepts from literary and narrative studies that are relevant for the analysis of urban planning texts, and to showcase how these can be applied to planning texts and practices. More specifcally, I apply a narrative analysis to two areas currently under development in the Finnish capital Helsinki, a city that provides a particularly rich case study for examining narratives and planning. In sum, the aims are both theoretical, in proposing new concepts and approaches to the study of planning theory and urban studies, and applied, in bringing new insights to specifc case studies. The fnal part of this book proposes new approaches not only to the study of planning narratives, but also to planning practices, by examining the concepts of polyphony and the possibility for planning without closure. This study has the beneft that it can build upon a considerable body of existing scholarly work. Inspiring book-length studies of urban planning from a narrative perspective include the PhD dissertations by Stefan Dormans (Dormans 2008) and Mareile Walter (2013); the seminal study of Milton Keynes by Ruth Finnegan (1998); as well as the studies by James A. Throgmorton (1996) and Bent Flyvbjerg (1998). All of these studies (which will be more fully introduced in the following chapter) draw upon narrative concepts as ancillary methods for use within their own specifc disciplines (regional management, planning, anthropology). This is the frst booklength study that takes the opposite route and that starts out from a frm basis in narrative and literary studies in order to elucidate how narrative has been used in a context that has traditionally not been associated with literary or narrative theory.1

4

Introduction

When teaching narrative theory to urban studies students who are trained within felds such as architecture, land use, or engineering, I am often asked about the added value of a narrative approach. Why would one need narrative studies if planners, architects, and policymakers can draw on well-established approaches from the social sciences, geography, and architecture? What are the rewards of studying urban planning texts and practices in terms of narrative? A frst reward, I would suggest, comes from introducing a measure of clarity in the context of an increasing “storyfcation” of planning practices and planning theory. Earlier discussions of narratives in the context of planning have tended to suffer from conceptual unclarity by using terms such as discourse, narrative, story, imaginary, myth, and imagination almost interchangeably. What counts as narrative in the context of planning and policy? What are the minimum requirements to speak of a story? What types of narrative can be discerned in terms of how they function within planning practices? Such questions are not about mere technicalities, but go to the heart of how planning narratives describe cities in order to prescribe city futures, and of how they legitimize particular choices. An examination grounded in narrative studies starts out from formalist aspects in order to be better equipped to move on to questions of context, purpose, and power. How are storylines given persuasive force with the help of specifc rhetoric devices? What alternative storylines are hidden behind them? Who is allowed to speak and to act in them? A starting point in narrative and literary theory also has the beneft of being particularly attuned to the historical and cultural connections of the rhetorical tropes and genre conventions that are used in contemporary planning. Literary and narrative studies may in this respect provide a window into the long history of particular cultural tropes used in thinking of cities. In the background of this book’s thinking on planning narratives is a view of narratives as frames of knowledge that describe reality but that also prescribe how we are able to make sense of reality, and how we are able to frame our possibilities to change the world. Following the now dominant approach in current narrative studies, telling stories is seen as “a basic human strategy for coming to terms with time, process, and change” (Herman, Jahn, and Ryan 2005, ix), which provides “a major reservoir of the cultural baggage that enables us to make meaning out of a chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it” (Bal 2002, 10). In recent decades, narrative research based on these assumptions has proliferated across a range of disciplines (see Heinen 2009; Hatavara, Hydén, and Hyvärinen 2013; Nünning, Nünning, and Neumann 2010). In its basic tenets, and especially in how it has been developed in more recent cognitive narratology, this view of narrative has a strong affnity with cognitive frame theory, which posits cognitive frames as “knowledge structures”, used by people on an everyday basis to make sense of information and to translate complex data into meaning-making structures (see e.g. Meyer 2015). Following the publication of Erwin Goffman’s Frame Analysis (1974),

Introduction

5

cognitive frame analysis has rapidly gained ground across a number of disciplines, including regional management and planning. Cognitive frames and scripts crucially orient people towards particular actions (see e.g. Palmer 2004, 47) and towards particular ways of knowledge production. Applying frames to the study of policy and planning, Donald Schön and Martin Rein have pointed out that, “[t]hrough the process of naming and framing, the stories make the ‘normative leap’ from data to recommendation, from fact to values, from ‘is’ to ‘ought’” (as quoted in Gunder 2003, 289). Examples of recurring narrative structures that take on characteristics of normative frames are plot structures such as those of the “reconstitution story” in illness narratives (Frank 1995) or the “monomyth” of the hero’s journey (Campbell 1956), frequently adapted to creative writing and movie scripts. In planning and policy, cognitive frame theory has become one of the ways in which the analysis of narrative structure has been applied to planning (see e.g. Knieling and Othengrafen 2009; Othengrafen [2012] 2016). In literary and narrative studies, frames have – albeit under different names – long been an object of study, from the “horizon of expectation” in reception studies (Jauss 1982), to the study of rhetoric tropes (see Curtius [1948] 1967), genre conventions, and character prototypes such as the fgure of the foundling (see Korthals Altes 2014, 150; Nünning 2008, 48; Ikonen 2010, 202–208). They constitute eminently useful heuristic tools for examining how experience and knowledge take shape in narrative form. From a formal perspective, the most basic frames can be seen as relatively value-free, akin to a toolbox that can be adapted to a range of widely varying purposes. But it could be argued that most, if not all, narrative structures and frames come with some ideological baggage that is hard to cast aside. Specifc symbolic structures may be connected to pervasive moral or didactic attributes, or identifable with specifc social, political, scientifc, and/or ideological contexts. Examples include the Robinsonade as a genre concomitant with a belief in reason and progress in the context of the Age of Exploration; or the compulsive map-making in much of nineteenth-century prose fction (including the detective novel and adventure fction) at a time of colonial expansion; or the classical Bildungsroman and the rise of the bourgeoisie and the nation-state. In addition to these historical genres, such ideologically coloured structures may include powerful and pervasive metanarratives, such as what Michel Serres has called the “Modern Constitution”, the dominant Western metanarrative that determines the relationship between humans and the surrounding world “in terms of mastery and possession” (see Rigby 2014, 212). Of course, narrative theory cannot be transposed wholesale from the realm of literary theory to the examination of highly stylized policy texts. A commentary on a partial local master plan is no War and Peace, and, when concepts such as narrative “travel” from one research feld to another, the way in which they may be used and adapted is far from straightforward (see Hyvärinen 2013). In this study, the focus will be on how narratives in

6

Introduction

the context of urban planning are structured according to a limited set of narrative forms and strategies that are well established in literary fction and in narrative studies: metaphor (such as the city as body), genre (such as the Bildungsroman), and the protagonist’s development within the broader outlines of a narrative plot. All three of these narrative forms have implications for assessing the planning narratives discussed here. Metaphorization may underscore the implied logical, “natural”, or necessary nature of a chosen course of action (Throgmorton 1996; Cresswell 1997). The causality implied within a narrative plot may contain reasons for the specifc choices made in the planning documents and for the exclusion of others (Healey 1997, 277–278; Westin 2014, 213). Literary genre has been examined repeatedly (although rarely in depth) in studies of urban planning. These range from the treatment of (literary) utopia in planning rhetorics (see e.g. Hall 1989; Rykwert 2000; Pinder 2005), to arguments that modernist planning drew its inspiration from the pastoral (Berman [1982] 1989, 134 ff.), to specifc case studies, such as Mareile Walter’s insightful analysis of Karlskrona’s planning narratives as modulation of the generic mode of the comedy (2013), or Leonie Sandercock’s emphasis on the importance of plot structures such as the rags-to-riches tale (2003).

Plotting the waterfront “Plot” takes on a special role in this study and provides an apt conceptualization for what is at stake in this book, not least because of the concept’s semantic double entendre, which encapsulates the meanings of both spatial “plot” (location) and narrative “plot” (narrative intrigue). To “plot” also has the added suggestion of scheming in secret, “esp. a crime or conspiracy” (Plot 1 / OED), and, although this study does not start out from the assumption that all urban planning can be equated by defnition to scheming or deceiving, the implication of the term that there are (potentially veiled) meanings to be uncovered in the planning and telling of the Helsinki waterfront is not entirely unwelcome. More to the point, the concept of “plotting” conveys the idea, central to this book, that all urban or regional planning is a communicative and narrative act and is concerned with enmeshing a planned area in a narrative intrigue. We can follow this idea through the various meanings of “to plot”, as found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Drawing on the defnitions of plot, planning is seen here as a form of “plotting” in the second sense defned by the OED, to “draw or make a plan” (Plot 2a / OED). Doing so is to “make a chart, map, plan, or diagram” (Plot 2b / OED), with the aim “to lay out (land) in plots” (Plot v 2c / OED; original emphasis). Such an activity is never neutral or objective, but always part of a complex operation that amounts to “devis[ing] the plot or story of (a play, novel, flm, etc.)” (Plot 3a / OED). On the most basic level, plot denotes how a story is organized. But plot also includes how and why the structure of the narrative is set to affect the

Introduction

7

reader and her judgement about what is being told (cf. Dannenberg 2005; Phelan 2007). Emplotment, then, denotes the act of situating events, characters, and places into a plot (see Ricoeur [1984] 1990, 65). Emplotment and its applicability for analysing non-fctional texts will be addressed at more length and applied to the planning of Kalasatama in Chapter Four. But an interest in the dialectic between a geographically situated “plot” of land and the way it is made to be part of a broader narrative connects all parts of this book.

The Helsinki waterfront, Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama The shoreline of the Finnish capital, Helsinki, and the two specifc areas discussed here – the areas of Kalasatama (Eastern Harbour) and Jätkäsaari (West Harbour) – offer particularly telling case studies for an examination of narratives in the context of urban planning. One reason is the rich diversity of the material at hand. In the planning process of the Helsinki waterfront, narratives are found in various forms, from the usual, almost book-length urban planning documents, to offcial websites with historical stories of the area, to branding and marketing narratives such as the graphic identity that was created for Jätkäsaari. But also important is how planning is explicitly foregrounded in terms of narrative and linked by the City of Helsinki and its planning department to fctional storytelling.2 One of the most fascinating narrative elements in the development of the Helsinki waterfront is the commissioning of a literary novel to accompany the development of Jätkäsaari: the book Hyvä jätkä (Good Chap; 2009), written by the wellestablished Finnish author Hannu Mäkelä and distributed to everyone moving to Jätkäsaari. In Kalasatama, development has been accompanied by comic reels aimed at the general public and by place-making strategies ranging from imaginative toponyms to co-creation and artistic interventions by the Eskus Performance Centre (Eskus 2015). The Helsinki waterfront is an area in which urban planning’s narrative characteristics have been explicitly foregrounded during the past few decades by the city, the City Planning Department, as well as by the consultancy agencies involved. A notable fgure is Tuomas Rajajärvi, head of the Helsinki City Planning Department during the crucial years 2000–2012, who has been called “the man who zones stories” and who has stated on several occasions that the city should be thought of as a story (Häkkinen 2000). While frmly set within a specifc Nordic, Finnish, and Helsinki context, the planning of the Helsinki waterfront has relevance also for an understanding of international examples of urban waterfront development. The Helsinki waterfront shares characteristics with a range of international postindustrial harbour areas, from Hamburg’s Hafencity to Toronto’s waterfront, from London’s Thames Gateway to Tokyo’s Odaiba area. Some of these characteristics are fairly prototypical: the development of brownfeld harbour areas close to a historical city centre into a densely built living and

8

Introduction

working area with good access to public transport, and an interest in drawing on cultural capital, historical heritage, and resurgent “urban” lifestyle preferences. An examination of Helsinki’s waterfront adds to the existing literature on post-industrial urban waterfront renewal through the specifc narrative strategies employed in its planning, but also by the specifcities of its context. Such specifcities include public ownership of most of the land (the City of Helsinki owns 65 % of the land within its borders); public access to most of the waterfront; the existence of a publicly well-respected and well-funded urban planning department; and a growing sense of public entitlement with regards to questions of planning, visible among others in the publication of an alternative city plan for Helsinki in 2014, drawn up by grass-root groups (Urban Helsinki 2014). A narrative analysis of the plotting of the Helsinki waterfront exemplifes and contextualizes the early twenty-frst-century rhetoric of inner-city renewal and of the renaissance of the (inner) city, while also shedding light on the renewed appetite for high-rise building and iconic identity markers in the urban built environment. Furthermore, as a Nordic case study with original textual material that is primarily written in Finnish, the examination of Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama complements the considerable existing research on waterfront developments in English-speaking countries and makes available material that would otherwise have remained largely inaccessible to an international audience. This book is in part inspired by two studies with a similar narrow geographical focus on one specifc locality, but with a broad applicability to international contexts: the study of how Chicago’s electric future was rhetorically constructed, in James A. Throgmorton’s Planning as Persuasive Storytelling (1996), and Bent Flyvbjerg’s study of the planning of Aalborg, Denmark, in Rationality and Power (1998), which self-confessedly uses a “narrative method” to present its case. The Helsinki waterfront is more than 130 kilometres (80 miles) long, and the city has more than 300 islands. Every inhabitant of the Finnish capital lives less than 10 kilometres (6 miles) from the shore. In the frst decades of the twenty-frst century, this long shoreline is undergoing its biggest overhaul in more than a century, with a range of areas under development or otherwise undergoing considerable transformation, from plans for the redevelopment of the centrally located South Harbour to the proposed zoning and radical transformation of the idyllic island Vartiosaari, in eastern Helsinki, to the development of former oil harbour Kruunuvuorenranta, with a new tram connection across the water to the central market square, and continued development in the Arabia district along the Vanhankaupunginlahti bay, among others (Figure 1.1). Development of the Helsinki waterfront began in earnest with the relocation of container harbour and gas and oil terminal activities from the Eastern Harbour, West Harbour, and Kruunuvuorenranta, all located close to the city centre, to the more peripherally located Vuosaari harbour in 2008. The decision on the relocation, decades in the making, was introduced in the City

Introduction

9

Figure 1.1 Map of Helsinki, with the partial local master plans (planned as well as confrmed) since 2002. The focus on development along the water is clearly visible. Kalasatama is the area referred to on the map as “Sörnäistenranta ja Hermanninranta”. The city’s historical centre is located roughly in the area between Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama © City of Helsinki, 2016.

Plan of 1992 and fnalized in the City Plan of 2002 (Helsinki City 1992; Othengrafen [2012] 2016, 147). The construction of the Vuosaari harbour began in 2003, and the harbour was inaugurated in 2008. In Kalasatama, all harbour activities ceased, whereas Jätkäsaari remains the site for active passenger traffc and roll-on roll-off traffc. The passenger harbour has continued to grow – Helsinki is the busiest passenger port in Europe – with concomitant challenges for traffc and infrastructure. Kalasatama is located due north-east of Helsinki centre. This former container harbour – before that, a diverse working-class area – is being redeveloped as a working and living environment for 10,000 jobs and 25,000 inhabitants. Construction started in 2011 and is set to be fnished by 2040 (see Helsinki City 2018a). As in Jätkäsaari and other new development areas, the city aims at diverse and mixed housing, with private as well as social and subsidized housing. Important factors in the area’s development have been the opening of the metro station of the same name in 2007, the

10

Introduction

redevelopment of the former gas works site Suvilahti, immediately adjacent to Kalasatama, into a cultural centre (see Krivy 2013), and the creative temporary use of the site (Hernberg 2012) (Figure 1.2). Jätkäsaari is located in the south-western corner of the Helsinki peninsula. It borders on the Ruoholahti area and is situated only a few kilometres from the city centre and the central railway station. Formerly an industrial harbour – and a fshermen’s and summer house community before that – its development began in 2009, and construction is projected to reach its conclusion by 2030, when it is planned to be the home of 21,000 inhabitants and 6,000 jobs (see Helsinki City 2018b; see also Othengrafen [2012] 2016, 137–174). It has a varied mix of housing, including social housing and hitas housing (Helsinki’s housing price- and quality-control system), as well as specifc housing experiments such as building associations with intergenerational housing solutions and co-housing. Jätkäsaari is for the most part surrounded by water, with a canal that separates it from nearby Ruoholahti. Although the industrial harbour has moved to Vuosaari, industrial activities continue nearby, at the Hietalahti shipyard adjacent to Jätkäsaari. Jätkäsaari has good connections by public transport, with several tram-lines and a metro station in walking distance. The names “Jätkäsaari” and “West Harbour” are used sometimes interchangeably; strictly speaking, the Jätkäsaari area is part of the larger West

Figure 1.2 Kalasatama under construction. © Lieven Ameel, 2015.

Introduction

11

Harbour area, which also comprises the areas of Ruoholahti (constructed 1982–2003), Eiranranta (2005–2008), Salmisaari (2005–2020), Hernesaari (2020–2030), and Telakkaranta (2017–2022). The “West Harbour” is also the name of the active passenger and cargo harbour in the Jätkäsaari district, the busiest passenger harbour in Europe, which connects to nearby Tallinn and St Petersburg (Figure 1.3). The planning and development of the Helsinki shoreline have coincided with decades that have witnessed, in Finland as well as abroad, what has been called an “urban renaissance” or even a “triumph of the city” (see Glaeser 2011), with renewed expansion and growth of inner cities, a shift in lifestyle preferences towards urban environments (ranging from consumption and transportation to living preferences, especially among the well-educated middle classes), and a belief that cities, as hubs for culture, creativity, and social change, can be the engines of the economy as well as leaders in addressing global problems such as inequality and radical climate change. But this urban renaissance has also been criticized for being a “neoliberal policy dogma” that legitimizes targeting neighbourhoods with vulnerable populations, and that measures its success “primarily by the rise in land values” (Porter and Shaw 2009, 4). Urban renaissance thus arguably “encapsulates a confusion of ideals of social, cultural, economic, environmental and political sustainability” (ibid., 3), and it is one of the key aims of this book

Figure 1.3 Cranes in Jätkäsaari. © Lieven Ameel, 2016.

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Introduction

to unpack the often contradictory narrative strains that frame urbanity in planning in Helsinki, and to demonstrate how, paradoxically, developments such as the erosion of urban public space and a narrative of growth and effciency can be driven with the help of “urbanist” arguments. Although the evocation of an “urban renaissance” suggests new possibilities and growth, Helsinki, like other post-industrial cities located by the sea, also faces new challenges, such as the transformation of a post-industrial port environment under pressures of privatization and austerity, and the spectre of radical climate change and rising water levels. On the political plane, one notable shift during these decades is the rise of the environmental party in Helsinki to become the second biggest (from 2000 onward); urban planning is one notable electoral theme embraced by the Helsinki Greens, and some of the more vocal proponents of a more “urban” Helsinki (in terms of density, public transport, services, and building bock structure) come from within that party. From a planning perspective, coastal areas are particularly complex, as much of their symbolic capital, cultural meanings, and their economic value lies outside the built environment and partly also outside clearly defned land use in terms of traffc, spatial functions, service distribution, or workspace. Attitudes towards building by the water may change rapidly: the added value of a view of the water is a relatively recent development of the post-industrial city, and the spectre of rising water levels and concomitant food risks may reverse the appeal of living on the waterfront again in the foreseeable future. In its attention to (cultural) narratives of the city within the context of planning, this study contributes also to the growing body of research that takes its cue from a focus on coastal areas. Since antiquity, the shoreline has been represented as a fundamentally liminal and transformative space in cultural narratives. According to Margaret Doody, “the place between water and land functions most obviously and overtly as a threshold”; it is “a site of restlessness, just as it is place of promise for the future” (Doody [1996] 1998, 321, 324). In more recent work such as the volume The Beach in Anglophone Literature and Cultures (2015), Ursula Kluwick and Virginia Richter argue for a new kind of “littoral studies” that has as its task to examine the littoral “as an aesthetic and culturally productive terrain”. The recent book The Shifting Sands of the North Sea Lowlands: Literary and Historical Imaginaries by Katie Ritson, which examines the shoreline of the North Sea from an environmentally oriented perspective, bears witness to the rewards of such an approach (Ritson 2018). But littoral studies have tended to pay little attention to cities on the water or to urban waterfronts. The urban waterfront constitutes in many respects a spatial area set apart in material and cultural terms, with specifc nuances and infections. I will return to these cultural meanings of the urban waterfront in Chapter Three, in the section “Mapping the Helsinki waterfront: A concise literary case study”.

Introduction

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Sources The source material examined in the case studies consists of a selection of mostly textual narratives related to the planning and development of Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama. These fall roughly into two categories: the frst category is texts that emanate from Helsinki City, including texts produced by the Helsinki City Planning Department or agencies close to the Planning Department, or by private contractors working with the city; and the second category is narratives that comment on the planning, such as media articles. The frst category includes texts such as the works of popular fction commissioned by the City of Helsinki (Hannu Mäkelä’s Hyvä jätkä [Good Chap]); offcial documents produced by the Helsinki City Planning Department such as partial local master plans and commentaries on local plans; offcial websites of the development projects, with historical material and background information; textual material from private construction companies and consultancy agencies involved in the development; and offcial profles on social community networks affliated to the Helsinki City Planning Department, such as the Facebook pages of Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari (see e.g. Helsinki City 2012a, 2012b, 2012c). The second category includes mostly media articles from the dominant Finnish media outlets, such as the daily newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and public broadcaster Yle, and social media threads such as posts on relevant Facebook groups. The textual material dates roughly from between 2000 and 2020 and was published for the most part in Finnish, with some texts also in English or Swedish. In addition, I draw in my analysis on my personal, on-the-ground observations in Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari, which were documented with photographs and feld notes taken intermittently over the period 2008– 2018. A number of interviews were also conducted with people working in the Planning Department and the City of Helsinki.

Outline Following this introduction, the second chapter, “Urban planning and narrative: Towards a theory of narrative planning”, provides a critical assessment of the key research literature on narratives in the context of urban planning. It looks at the most important recent approaches that have examined narratives in planning, including semiotics, ethnography and anthropology, Habermasian and Foucauldian planning theory, and research on “placemaking”, branding, and cultural planning. In the third chapter, “Narratives for, in, and of planning”, I propose a threefold taxonomy of narratives in the context of urban planning: narratives for planning (local narratives of an area, prior to the planning process); narratives in planning (narratives in planning documents and activities, authored by planners); and narratives of planning (the local narratives of an area and its planning as they develop after, and simultaneously with, the planning process proper). The proposed

14

Introduction

typology is meant as a hermeneutic tool to enable scholars, planners, and the general public to talk in more precise terms about the authorship, context, and objectives of specifc kinds of narrative in the context of planning. The typology will be illustrated with an introductory examination of the waterfront planning in Helsinki. Chapters Four and Five move into the case studies and examine narrative planning in Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari, with reference also to the planning of the Helsinki shoreline more generally. Chapter Four, “Emplotting urban regeneration: Narrative strategies in Kalasatama”, starts out with an examination of the emplotment of this area as an imagined part of the eastern city centre, an area with traditional working-class associations. It looks at a range of metaphors used in the planning and branding of this area, and at the consequences and implications of these metaphorizations. Finally, it looks at how the competing storylines of Kalasatama were drawn upon to transform the vision of this area as an “urban” centre with limited building heights to that of a suburban-like area built around a shopping mall and radical high-rises. Chapter Five, “Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari”, examines Jätkäsaari. It looks at the proliferation of contradictory narratives, oscillating between urban fringe vs city centre, high vs medium height, global harbour vs village-like urban community; and the competing visions, in planning and marketing, of this area as either a “women’s city” or as a “man’s island”. The chapter also looks at the hotel controversy in the planning of the area, in which the key narrative that was used by the City Planning Department and that posited Jätkäsaari as an extension of the city centre was used against itself to counter the proposed height of a landmark hotel. A fnal part of this chapter is an in-depth examination of the commissioned novel Hyvä jätkä [Good Chap], which shows how the dominant genre in this novel, the Bildungsroman, is also the dominant generic frame found in the planning of this area. The analysis of both areas shows how Helsinki’s waterfront planning in the early twenty-frst century focuses on telling the story of the expansion of the urban centre, with a concomitant focus on “urban” forms of public transport (trams and metro, in particular), “urban” building blocks (semiclosed blocks), and “urban” services and lifestyles (such as street-level shops and services). This narrative ran up against continuing counter-narratives that in part hijacked the “urban” argument to suburbanize some of the planning areas, and Kalasatama in particular. Both analysis chapters draw on narrative and literary theory to examine how such stories are told, who acts as protagonists, and how specifc arguments are couched in terms of metaphors and rhetoric tropes as part of persuasive narrative frames. Chapter Six proposes new models for understanding narratives in the context of urban planning, with a focus on dialogic space (drawing on Bakhtin’s thinking) and planning that aims to produce narrative space. The seventh and fnal chapter summarizes the research fndings of this study and looks forward to future avenues of research.

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Notes 1 To the list of book-length studies, it would be possible to add the forthcoming book La Puissance Projective. Narrativité et imagerie discursives au fondement du projet urbain (Uyttenhove, Keunen, and Ameel 2021). 2 From 2017, the activities of the City Planning Department were restructured as part of the City of Helsinki Urban Environment Division. To avoid confusion, I use the term City Planning Department throughout.

2

Urban planning and narrative Towards a theory of narrative planning

The narrative turn in planning: A critical overview The last decades have seen an increasing interest in issues of language and storytelling in planning theory, a paradigm shift that has been tentatively called a “narrative” or “story” turn in urban planning practices and theory (Ameel 2014a; Cohen 2008, 111–115; Sandercock 2010). In the background of this interest are the recent demands made on urban planning to be more inclusive, democratic, more compatible with local experiential knowledge, and aware of the various layers of meaning embedded in the city. Far from being a clearly outlined paradigm, this narrative turn – still in the making – consists of a number of more or less interlinked approaches to planning that often deal with rather different aspects of cities and their planning. They are all rooted to some extent in the long-lived “linguistic” turn in the humanities and the social sciences, and in an interest in the importance of language as a conveyor of meaning and power relationships. They differ considerably, however, in the kinds of research questions they aim to answer and in the kinds of narratives they scrutinize. The following critical overview aims to show the rich literature concerning storytelling and planning that has come into being but also to clarify the considerable differences in methodology used by different approaches, as well as the diverse understanding of what is meant by narratives as source material in planning theory. The overview concludes with a defnition of story and narrative in the context of planning. A frst approach, visible mostly in architectural research into planning, is grounded in semiotics and examines the environment as a sign (Greimas 1974) or collection of signs (e.g. Gottdiener and Lagopoulos 1986). The architect or planner can be seen as a (co-)producer of the architectural landscape as a readable sign (see also Yanow 1995). Drawing on Robert Venturi, Karsten Harries, for example, envisions a “literary architecture” and “architecture as text” ([1997] 2000, 78, 70). If this line of thought is followed through, the vision of the architect or planner can be juxtaposed with that of a poet: the planner, a creative genius of sorts, uses his or her imagination to produce a potentially powerful communicative work. This “poetic” approach towards planning and architecture uses the term

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“narrative” predominantly as a metaphor, according to which particular planning styles can be seen as the signature “handwriting” of planners, and every city as speaking a “language” (Ziegler and Bouma 2010, 25; see also Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein 1977; Barthes [1986] 1997, 167). It is then also entirely possible to speak of postmodern planning histories in terms of the “death of the author” (echoing Roland Barthes), and by calling for planning histories that focus on institutions and communities, rather than individual planners (Avermaete 2018). Theorists that draw on this perception of architectural landscape and its planning include Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton (1998), and Bernardo Secchi (see e.g. Secchi 2007). The work of Klaske Havik on the intersections between architecture and literature can also be partly related to this research tradition (Havik 2014). For Secchi and others, an interest in narratives also meant an interest in the various scenarios that could be drawn up for a specifc area. Scenario planning, in turn, moves urban planning in the direction of futures studies, a feld of study with its own approaches to the narrative (cf. Dammers 2000; Mäntysalo and Grisakov 2016). Secchi, Potteiger and Purinton, and others were also interested in how planners could be inspired by the existing narratives of a specifc place, and this interest moves the focus from the creative, storytelling process of the architect/planner to the local stories existing prior to the planning process, and the ways in which these often experiential forms of knowledge could be included in planning. Potteiger and Purinton observe that, “[t]aking the time to listen to the stories of a place is not typically part of the site research and analysis process of sketching, photographing, sending out questionnaires, or interpreting the place through the designer’s eyes” (1998, 192), suggesting that listening to the “stories of a place” should have a place in area surveys. This approach to the urban environment as a repository of local stories has a broad range of tributaries in the humanities and the social sciences, including, among many others, anthropology (e.g. Finnegan 1998), urban history, literary urban studies, and ethnography (see Ameel, Kervanto Nevanlinna, and Nyström 2016). In planning theory and urban studies, the interest in local narratives is inspired by a desire for more democratic and inclusive forms of planning, in the wake of communicative, deliberative, and participatory paradigm shifts. This perspective is summed up by Jude Bloomfeld when she argues that, “[c]ities should draw on the diversity of social perspectives through research on citizens’ narratives to forge a more democratic, pluralist and inclusive urban imaginary” (Bloomfeld 2006, 45). Similar arguments can be found in a range of other authors (e.g. Isserman et al. 2010). Perhaps the most coherent and dominant approach to narratives in the context of planning is that which sees narrative as an instrument of power, used in the complex processes of policymaking. It is an interest that can be traced to the Foucauldian overview of American planning history by M. Christine Boyer ([1983] 1997), with its interest in planning myths of the

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city. A key work in this tradition, inspired by Habermasian philosophy and Foucauldian thinking concerning the language of power, is Frank Fischer and John Forester’s volume The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (1993), which brings together a range of papers by authors that would continue to infuence this debate for decades to come, with work on communicative planning, the importance of rhetoric in planning, and story lines in policy (Innes 1995; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003). In planning practices, new approaches to planning and its narrative characteristics have resulted in a paradigm that sees planning as a form of “persuasive storytelling” (Throgmorton 1996; see also Eckstein 2003; Throgmorton 2008; 2020), and the planner not as architect-hero, but as curator deliberating between various voices and producers of narratives, a moderator of potentially competing narratives (see Mandelbaum 1991). Following this paradigm shift, planning is summarized in distinctly narrative terms in the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning: Planners use theory to answer questions about the reasons and causes for urban order and change. In making a plan, planners compose these answers as narratives, explanations, and arguments about changes in the pattern of urban activity and form that provide the plot line for stories and models that then describe and simulate alternative futures. (Hoch 2012, 247) In this perspective, the focus is not on the architect or planner as poetlike “author”, or on the importance of drawing on repositories of local knowledge in narrative form, but on the everyday activities of the planning profession, which take the form of negotiation between different storylines. A similar approach to the planner is also taken by Raine Mäntysalo, IngerLise Saglie, and Göran Cars, who argue that “[t]he role of planning should … be, frstly, to provide the arenas for information exchange, communication and negotiation between various stakeholder interests” (Mäntysalo, Saglie, and Cars 2011, 2123). Using a metaphor that foregrounds planners’ essentially narrative activities, Päivi Rannila and Tikli Loivaranta have even put forward the conceptualization of “planning as dramaturgy” (2015; see also Carter 2015). In Finland, the country that provides the context for the cases studied here, important publications pointing in this new direction of planning as narrative are Sanat kivettyvät kaupungiksi (Words Petrify into the City; Mäenpää et al. 2000), an infuential publication that looked at the competing visions, ideals, and processes in Helsinki and that described these in terms of narratives, metaphors, and subplots. Rikhard Manninen, who was one of the co-authors, went on to take a leading role within the Helsinki City Planning Department (from 2017 onward part of the City of Helsinki Urban Environment Division), where he has headed the Strategic Planning

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Division since 2011. Some of the new practices inspired by the narrative turn are summed up in the publication Yleiskaavoituksen uusia tuulia (New Directions in Strategic Planning; Koivu et al. 2013). Such narrative approaches have moved from theory to practice. In the case of mid-size Finnish city Jyväskylä, planners preferred to speak of a “rhetorical plan” instead of the term “city plan” (Rossi 2011; Koivu et al. 2013, 21). In Lahti, also a mid-size Finnish city, the premise for the process of the city plan was to explicitly produce a plan in the form of a narrative, and the aim throughout was to strengthen the plan’s narrative by various means (Koivu et al. 2013, 13). The small Finnish town of Lempäälä produced a “narrative introduction” to its town centre plan, distributed to all households, in 2007. In the case of the plans for Helsinki’s waterfront, leading members of the Helsinki City Planning Department have on several occasions described urban planning and development in terms of storytelling, arguing that the city should be seen as story (Ekelund 2012). Although Jyväskylä and Lahti illustrate the interest in the narrative within the planning profession, it remains somewhat unclear in both cases whether the rhetoric and narrative dimension of their planning strategies constitute more than merely a sophisticated communication practice towards the general public. There are also approaches to narratives in planning that do not look at policy and planning processes proper but at the ways in which an imagined identity of an area is constructed parallel to, or after, the planning of an area. Such an approach looks at how specifc strategies can have their infuence on local narratives and the way these depict an environment. It includes research on “place-making” (see e.g. Fleming 2007) and branding in relation to urban planning projects (e.g. Jensen 2007). Finally, among other planning paradigms that draw in part on a linguistic (or narrative) approach, Lacanian planning (Gunder and Hillier 2009) could be mentioned, as well as feminist and multicultural planning (see e.g. Sandercock 1998), both closely linked to Foucauldian approaches in planning theory. Although very different in their approaches, both want to contest dominant claims to expert knowledge within planning, Lacanian planning, by demythologizing planning and showing how planning is essentially about constructing ideological knowledge claims, and feminist and multicultural planning (in the work of Sandercock), by bringing in methods and insights to incorporate more diverse voices and forms of knowledge into planning.

Different kinds of knowledge Summing up, the notion that, in planning, issues of storytelling are at stake lies at the core of a paradigm shift that has variedly been called the linguistic, communicative, argumentative, or narrative turn in planning (see e.g. Fischer and Forester 1993; S. Wood 2009, 207–210). Planning processes

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and planning documents reveal, shape, or contest existing storylines, and, in planning, power relations and language are frmly entwined. Ultimately, planning is a communicative activity that by rhetorical means and persuasive storytelling defends, steers, and dictates changes in the environment. As the above overview shows, a focus on language and narrative brings with it a concomitant focus on knowledge. The urgent interest in how planning functions as a form of storytelling is rooted in an epistemological crisis which acknowledges that planning produces particular frames of knowledge, posits some kinds of knowledge as superior to others, and is highly selective in the forms of knowledge it draws on in its decision-making. With growing epistemological uncertainty and proliferation of forms of knowledge, what different kinds of knowledge can and should be known in planning – and how well is the planning profession prepared for consulting, using, and producing these? As Judith Innes points out, the question of how planners deal with different forms of knowledge is also an ethical question: If knowledge that makes a difference is constructed through a process in which a planner is not only a player, but a guide and manager, initiating and framing questions and directing attention, then ethical principles for this planner become even more essential. (Innes 1995, 185) Different planning theorists have argued for planning theory to “dig deeper into the learning processes where the tacit dimension of knowledge is involved” (Lapintie 2016, 5) and for planning to move from “grand narratives” to small narratives; from narratives of dominant voices to narratives of the underprivileged; and, more generally, towards an “epistemology of multiplicity” in planning (Sandercock 2010). What does all this mean for the planning profession? Patsy Healey poignantly assesses how an understanding of the work of contemporary planners in terms of story-writing has created new kinds of challenges: In many parts of the world, governance elites are trying to write new stories for their cities, to inscribe these stories in the identities of the key players upon whose actions the core relations of a city depend and to incorporate them into the practices of an urban governance which stretches beyond the town hall to a wide range of people involved in governance in one way or another. The challenge for planners is to reconstruct their own ways of thinking and acting to provide creative resources for critiquing and facilitating this work of city story-writing. (Healey 2000, 527–528; my emphasis) The schooling and conceptual apparatus available to urban planners, however, seem to have left this profession singularly ill-equipped to embark upon the kind of work of “city story-writing” envisioned by Healey. What is needed is a more rigorous effort to develop a theoretical and conceptual

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framework with which to address, analyse, and apply the increasingly narrative urban planning practices that have been evolving during the past decades. So far, research of planning narratives as narrative, and based on narrative or literary theory, has had a relatively limited impact on planning theory. Few scholars working on narrative urban theories have let themselves be inspired by narrative theory proper (see, however, Buchenau and Gurr 2016; Keunen and Verraest 2012; Walter 2013). This is all the more striking given the notable expansion of narrative studies in the humanities and in the social sciences. Concepts from narrative theory could bring new insights into the feld of urban planning theory, which has arguably been struggling to develop conceptual frameworks to coherently incorporate discursive practices and paradigms and, in particular, to replace totalizing master narratives with a subtle treatment of “small”, local narratives (see Knieling and Othengrafen 2009; Sandercock 2010). First, it will be necessary to defne what is meant by narrative in the context of urban planning.

Defning narrative in planning In the existing research literature of the past few decades, terms such as “discourse”, “rhetoric”, “story”, “imagery”, “myth”, “vision”, and “storytelling” are often used interchangeably, without a clear difference between how these terms are used. As a consequence, although there has been a remarkable amount of writing within urban theory about narratives and planning, there is a limited degree to which these various studies communicate with each other. Recent research speaks of “imaginaries” (Bridge and Watson 2000; Weiss-Sussex and Bianchini 2006), urban “images” (Pagano and Bowman 1995, 44–67), “mythical chronotopes” (Keunen and Verraest 2012), “narratives” (Tewdwr-Jones 2011), “tales” (Dormans 2008), “stories” (Sandercock 2003; 2010), and “metaphors” (Baeten 2001), among many others. Sometimes, different terms are used to mean the same thing, but, more often, one and the same term is used to describe widely different practices or resources in the context of planning. But what counts as a narrative in the context of urban planning to begin with? James A. Phelan’s defnition of narrative provides one reasonably straightforward starting point: a narrative is “somebody telling somebody else on some occasion and for some purpose(s) that something happened” (2007, 3; see also Prince 2003, 58; Fludernik 2009, 5). Phelan, a representative of rhetorical narratology, understands narrative primarily as a “rhetorical act”, and this point of view is also shared in this book. The way narrative is understood here, furthermore, is that what is told (“that something happened”) takes the form of a written or oral text. A narrative is not something evasive or esoteric that needs to be deduced from something else, not something that is implied and has to be dug up or inferred. It is something concrete and can be shown to exist, can be quoted. For example, in the history of Helsinki, there is a long-standing implied allegorical view of the Finnish capital as an under-age fgure waiting for her coming of age. It is a

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myth that often can be seen at work in the background of media and policy representations of the city, as well as in literature. It is canonized in the city’s epithet of the “Daughter of the Baltic” and materialized in the allegorical statue of Havis Amanda in the historical market square (Ameel 2014b, 20–21). But, when the Helsinki mayor Jussi Pajunen, in an opening speech given on the occasion of the start of construction in the West Harbour, tells reporters that, “[t]he daughter of the Baltic is submitting herself to the sea, her former hunting grounds” (Mattila 2008),1 the newspaper article gives us a narrative: someone (Pajunen) tells someone (the general public), on some occasion (2008, beginning of construction), that something happened (Helsinki’s development is opening up towards the shore) for a particular reason, drawing on a particular allegorical image to provide a sense of historical continuity and causality in the story he tells. Another way to phrase Phelan’s defnition is to say that narrative means that someone tells someone on some occasion and for some reason, a real or fctional story. Story and narrative form a crucial, binary pair in narrative studies. Story can be understood as the mentally constructed event (or sequence of events) a narrator has in mind, and narrative as the actual recounting of these events in question (see, however, Ryan 2005, 347–348); the difference between the two is akin, in other words, to that between the word in one’s mind and the word as spoken in a particular communicative context. The same story – say, the story of how I frst arrived in Helsinki as an Erasmus exchange student in the late 1990s – can be told any number of times, and the telling will differ considerably depending on the audience and the occasion of the narrating. Narrative thus entails a context, teller (narrator), audience (narratee) to whom the story is addressed, and the telling of a story. And, although a narrative may consist of elements that are thoroughly ambiguous and that demand rigorous narrative analysis, there is nothing vague about it: it is a tangible artefact of language which is or can be recorded in speech or writing in exact terms. This broad defnition of narrative can be applied with relative ease to urban planning documents: planners (or a planning agency) can be seen as the narrator(s) who recounts a story, usually aimed at the inhabitants of the area affected by planning, who in their turn act as narratees.2 Most of the recounted events will be real enough (rather than fctional), but planning documents also tend to involve conjectured elements, such as claims about what an area will look and feel like in the future. In addition to planners’ narratives of a particular area, there is a wide variety of narratives produced by others: by inhabitants (in writing or speech) or, more generally, by interested parties, narratives distributed by the press, or recounted by politicians, or written down in letters or personal documents, or posted on social media. The distinction between these different narratives (in terms of their context) will be further elaborated in Chapter Three. But what is a “story” – what does it mean that “something happened”? Giving a defnition of narrative will not suffce without also identifying

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the characteristics of story. People may have an intuitive sense of what a story is, but narratologists have had lively debates over its defnition, and, although for our purpose we do not have to go into the details, sketching some of the basic characteristics of “story” will be necessary. What are the minimum requirements for a story? Is, for example, a list that outlines the national land use objectives (a standard component of Finnish urban planning documents) a story? Does the presentation of a map amount to the narrating of a story? Drawing on Marie-Laure Ryan (2005), a story is defned here as: • • •

involving one or more human-like agents, presenting a world that goes through some kind of (not entirely predictable) change of situation, and containing event(s) that is/are associated with mental states (Ryan 2005, 347).

A brief discussion of one specifc example from planning documents will clarify how these features of story may appear in planning documents. The introduction of the Helsinki City Planning Department’s document “Maritime Helsinki in the city plan” (Helsinki City 2013a), an annex to the 2016 city plan, opens as follows: Helsinki is called the Daughter of the Baltic, and with good reason. The sea surrounds the city from three sides, and the presence of the sea is one of the most obvious features of Helsinki. Coastal Helsinki is one of the most central national landscapes of our country, and a maritime identity has been a strong part of the local mindscape and the identity of the inhabitants from the founding of the city [in 1550] onward. … The sea offers unique possibilities to Helsinkians also in the future and is one of the most important quality factors of living in Helsinki. In the city plan, maritime Helsinki is developed as an active part of the city, without forgetting maritime traditions and meanings. (2013a, 5) Narrator, narratee, context, and purpose can all be defned fairly straightforwardly: the narrator is identifed in the opening page of the text as the responsible City Planning Department team (a team of eight people is mentioned). The intended audience is the general public, but also (more implicitly) the future planners of Helsinki, for whom the document will form a point of reference. The context is the year 2013 and the preparations for the new city plan. When it comes to the question of the story and its characteristics, various instances can be singled out as the “human or human-like agents” (following Ryan) in this story: depending on the perspective, the agents in the story are the planners who are drawing up the plans for maritime Helsinki; with a bit of a stretch of the imagination, the agents could

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also be identifed with the personifed area (maritime Helsinki), or the city and its inhabitants going through change. The “change of situation” from Ryan’s defnition is the future development of this area “as an active part of the city”, capitalizing on the “unique possibilities” it has; the implication is that the potential of maritime Helsinki has not been suffciently taken into account and that it has remained underdeveloped, which becomes explicit in the opening sentence of the next page of the document, which states that, “Regardless of the nearness of the sea, its potential has in the present time not been exploited in all its respects” (6). A transformation of this area for the better, proposed by the plan, thus constitutes the key “change of situation” in this story, and the next pages of the text will set out to outline those elements that can be developed – the text crucially calls for the “strengthening of maritime identity” (7). The benefts of this development are presented as benefcial for all Helsinkians, but also as drawing on long-standing historical and cultural roots (“from the founding of the city”, “without forgetting maritime traditions and meanings”). Several of the elements of this story are generic. An underdeveloped shoreline and the change for the better through the proposed development of the waterfront can be found in a range of texts by the Helsinki City Planning Department, and indeed in a range of urban waterfront development plans internationally (New York’s Vision 2020 and Antwerp’s waterfront redevelopment are cases in point; see New York City 2011; Antwerpen 2010). The reference to Helsinki as the Daughter of the Baltic is also generic, as the mention of a similar reference made in 2008 (see above) shows. But each specifc narrative tells a story (even a generic one) in a specifc manner, and these particular arrangements are essential for the rhetorical function performed by the narrative. The reference to the Daughter of the Baltic was discarded in the longer version of “Maritime Helsinki in the City Plan” published in 2014: apparently, the authors thought it was not necessary for the point they wanted to make. In the text quoted above, several of the seemingly factual statements are far from self-evident. That Helsinki is surrounded on three sides by the sea holds true mostly of the centre of Helsinki, located on the Helsinki peninsula – much of the rest of Helsinki is frmly inland. Arguing that maritime Helsinki is one of the “central national landscapes of our country” is closer to wishful thinking than being a description of an actual fact; the predominance of inland forests and lakes as national landscapes in Finnish culture and literature is well established (see Ameel 2018a). And there could have been any number of alternative ways to frame this development – with any range of implications.

What is not a story? Having established a defnition of narrative and story, it is important to also briefy mention what does not count as a narrative or as a story in the defnition used here. A map, in the defnition used here, is not a narrative.

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Figure 2.1 Not a narrative: The theme map of “Maritime Helsinki”. © City of Helsinki, 2016.

It is not a written or oral text, and it does not tell a story with clearly outlined human or human-like agents, a change of situation, or a distinct association with mental states (Figure 2.1). Similarly, a building, or a built environment, does not tell a story, unless the term “story” is used fguratively. A list is typically not a story either. However, maps, images, lists, and interventions in the built environment, even when they do not amount to a fully-fedged narrative, can be considered as composite parts of narratives and can contain what Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu have called narrativity: Perhaps a useful distinction to make at this point is between “being a narrative” and “possessing narrativity” (Ryan 2004b). Broadly speaking, having narrativity consists of the ability to evoke known or new stories. An artifact or even an event in life can have narrativity (i.e., it suggests stories to the mind) without “being a narrative” (i.e. without being a set of signs – a discourse – intentionally composed to transmit a story). … works of “spatial art” … can’t narrate an entire story, but

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Urban planning and narrative they can possess narrativity since they are able to represent and highlight “pregnant moments” in the action that encapsulate, embody, symbolize, and otherwise recall an entire plot (Lessing [1766] 1984, 23, 78). (Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu 2016, 139)

An image in a planning document of what the future seashore development will look like (e.g. the view from above of the future, Hanseatic-looking buildings on the West Harbour’s Telakkaranta waterfront; Helsinki City 2012d, 15) may contain narrativity to the extent that it supports the overall planning narrative, suggesting the story of the integration of the waterfront within the urban fold, gesturing towards historical continuation, and highlighting the telic moment of completion towards which the plan is moving. A building can possess narrativity, something which the Helsinki City Planning Department implicitly suggests in its document “Maritime Helsinki in the City Plan” when describing possible windmill farms on the Helsinki coast as communicating to the future viewer a story of “a city of high-tech and ecological know-how”, where “sustainable energy should be visible” (Helsinki City 2013a, 18). Depending on the structure, content, and context of its telling, a list, too, may have a considerable degree of narrativity. Robert Beauregard, in Planning Matter, notices how “lists of urban problems have been commonplace in both popular and scholarly writing about the condition of cities”, but argues that, rather than presenting mere “inventories” or “litanies” to evoke the breadth of decline, such lists are used rhetorically to bring home the message that, “such conditions are so intertwined as to make decline even more intractable” (2015, 16). In his example, a specifc list of imagined urban problems can be seen to contain narrativity that strengths a particular story of urban decline, its cause, and its hopelessness. Narrative is not only descriptive but also prescriptive and normative – it not only refects back on the world but also shapes the world by guiding the way we speak and think of reality. The prescriptive characteristics of narrative are particularly relevant for policy and planning narratives, which are explicitly intended to intervene in the real-world built environment. Drawing on speech act theory, policy narratives can be described in terms of their perlocutionary function (cf. Austin 1962, 101–107), even when they are not legally binding. Or, as James Throgmorton argues in his examination of planning rhetorics, rhetoric “is not … simply persuasive; it is also constitutive” (Throgmorton 1993, 121). One element that takes centre stage in the discussion on narratives is their fundamental situatedness. Any examination of a narrative can (and often should) not only look at its structural and formal features but also at its context. What is its purpose? Who authored these narratives, for what audiences? If this is a generic story, what metaphorizations were used in narrating the story in this specifc context? An important step to clarify such

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questions is to situate the narratives within their context in the planning process: are these genuine pre-existing, local narratives, recounted prior to the planning process? Or is this a narrative instituted by the planning department, a narrative that is published as a result of legal and political processes, and with material consequences? Or are we looking at a narrative that has been generated after planning, at the moment when the planning decisions are already locked in, and when the narratives can no longer affect material conditions on the ground? For this purpose, a threefold typology of planning narratives is drawn up in the next chapter, outlining narratives for, in, and of planning.

Notes 1 All translations from Finnish are by the author unless indicated otherwise. 2 In terms of applying narrative analysis to planning, it is useful to make a distinction between urban planning generally and the more specifc technical practice of zoning. Zoning takes the form of technical maps, which can be approached as narrative only by stretching the defnition considerably. One of the key aims of zoning is to stabilize an operational environment and to improve the predictability from the perspective of land owners or investors. This also entails the deliberate exclusion of alternative paths. All of this runs counter to a conceptualization of narrative as entailing dynamics between possible alternative worlds. Zoning maps, however, like images or buildings, can have narrativity.

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Narratives for, in, and of planning

As the overview in the previous chapters shows, examinations of narratives in the context of planning are often concerned with widely diverging questions and tend to examine a range of highly varying types of narratives.1 The growing interest in narrative aspects of urban planning has only partially been concerned, for example, with planning texts in and of themselves. As much, if not more, attention has been paid to a host of other kinds of narrative that surround the planning process: local narratives that feed into planning – or not – as well as the various media or branding narratives concerning a specifc project. A taxonomy of the different kinds of narrative in the context of planning provides an important tool for distinguishing how particular kinds of narrative function, as well as for examining how stories “travel” from one context to the other. The analysis of planning narratives on the basis of such a typology has the potential to further expose questions of power, decision-making, and narrative legitimacy in planning processes: Whose stories are retained, and under what guise? Who has agency, and who is allowed to speak in such stories?

A threefold taxonomy The threefold typology introduced here is set up to distinguish between narratives in planning, the narratives produced and sanctioned by planning departments, and with more or less direct repercussions in the built environment, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, narratives that have other narrators and other intended audiences, because they originate either before the planning process or afterwards. Such narratives do not lead directly to material changes on the ground, although they may have other infuences and they may eventually become co-opted in planning texts and practices. The threefold taxonomy proposed here consists of: (1) the existing narratives of a location prior to planning, such as local everyday stories, artistic representations, or historical documents; (2) the narrative texts and practices involved in planning itself; and (3) the narratives parallel or posterior to the planning proper – for example, in branding or place-making strategies, but also in the way local stories react to and

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communicate with the planning and development of an area. These three types are called here: • • •

narratives for planning: narratives that planners can draw on in their practices narratives in planning: planning as a form of storytelling narratives of planning: the storytelling that follows in the wake of planning practices (Figure 3.1).

The frst category consists of narratives that do not emanate from planners themselves: narratives that can be consulted, appropriated, or commissioned by planners, which is why they are called here narratives for planning. Another term could be localized narratives: narratives that emanate from the location itself, rather than from the planning actors who seek to impose themselves onto the location. The second category, narratives in planning, consists of the activities and documents emanating from a planning department or, more broadly, from actors in planning and policy (the city; other agencies within the city; regional government; private actors operating in collaboration with planners) and can be considered as part and parcel of the “persuasive storytelling” Throgmorton argues planning to be (1993; 1996). The third and last category is that of narratives of planning: the storytelling that takes place after or alongside (and sometimes considerably apart from), the actual planning processes – for example, by branding and

Figure 3.1 Narratives in the context of planning. © Lieven Ameel, 2016.

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media agencies, but also by locals. In a sense, the storytelling in this category returns back to the localized level. An analysis of narratives in the context of planning can focus on any of these three contexts, or on a combination of different types. One could, for example, examine the interaction between local narratives of a specifc area and the way these are taken into account in planning rhetorics (dynamics between 1 and 2; see e.g. Finnegan 1998), or the rhetorical strategies and storylines put into place by planning actors (category 2; see e.g. Throgmorton 1993), or the way in which a branding agency spins the imagination linked to an area (dynamics between 2 and 3; see e.g. Jensen 2007). Narratives in the context of planning theory can also be approached on a metalevel. A research process and the way research outcomes are presented can be carried out in explicitly narrative terms, as happens in Bent Flyvbjerg’s infuential Power and Democracy in Practice, which proceeds along a “narratological method” (1998, 7–8). Planning histories, theories, and paradigms in themselves can also, in turn, be examined in terms of narratives, as has been done by Olivier Kramsch in “Tropics of Planning Discourse” (1998). One course of inquiry would be to trace the trajectory of specifc narrative elements from a localized, experiential context to the context of the planners and then onwards to a branding context, from which they feed back into the local context. Planning practices draw on, mend, and then project storylines back into local contexts, and this is especially so in view of postmodern planning’s structure as a “spiral”, in which planning processes move back and forth between formal and informal, local, political, technical, or bureaucratic contexts (see Horelli 2002). An important consideration that arises from this threefold taxonomy relates to participatory processes in planning and how these affect different types of narratives. The promise of participatory planning practices is that citizens can have an impact on the core storylines of planning itself (narratives in planning). The reality, however, could as easily be that material provided by locals is used merely to legitimate the decision made in narratives in planning, or that they are employed by place-making strategies in the forms of narratives of planning. Three distinct roles for a narrative theory in urban studies and urban planning can be singled out. The frst one is related to the epistemological project of charting and understanding the city’s various layers of meaning by way of a narrative mapping (see Ameel 2016a). A second contribution would be the examination of narrative strategies and rhetoric in planning (see e.g. Ameel 2016b; 2016c). A third role is concerned with developing new conceptualizations and methodologies that could reconcile local narratives with planning perspectives (see Chapter Six). In their key aims, these contributions have a close affnity with recent developments within the urban humanities and literary urban studies. The urban humanities have developed into a distinct feld of study that aims at a more culturally, linguistically, and historically oriented research of the urban condition. It takes as its task to include and study immaterial layers of urban meaning in

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the context of confict, inequality, and exclusion, and to “ally architecture, design, urban planning, computational analysis, GIS, and the humanities to investigate the complexities of cities – as embodied, lived in, built, imagined, and represented spaces” (Presner and Shepard 2016, 209). Literary urban studies have increasingly become attentive to the material conditions underlying narrative descriptions of the city, with interest in the “materiality in/ of literature” – “the way in which literary narratives are at once referring to the material world and also actively partaking in the material construction of the world” (Ameel et al. 2019, 2). This book is mostly concerned with the second approach (i.e. the examination of narratives in planning), which will be put to the test in an analysis of the areas Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari (Chapters Four and Five). The third approach will be briefy explored in Chapter Six, which looks forward to more narrative-oriented planning practices and texts. An extensive example of narrative mapping will be provided in the course of the rest of this chapter. In what follows, I will frst outline more fully the concept of narratives for planning, illustrated by a tentative narrative mapping of literary narratives of the Helsinki waterfront. I will then examine early twenty-frst-century planning of Helsinki and its shorelines as an example of narratives in planning, and will conclude with a brief consideration of how such narratives are critiqued in narratives of planning, and, in particular, in contemporary near-future fction.

Narratives for planning Urban theorists are increasingly treating the narratives produced by citizens with regard to their everyday environments as valuable experiential data, with insights into the local stories of a community seen as benefcial for a more inclusive, democratic, and sustainable city (Eckstein and Throgmorton 2003; Depriest-Hricko and Prytherch 2013; Hajer, van’t Klooster, and Grijzen 2010, 24–26). A genuine connection between narratives in planning and pre-existing narratives that are shared by the affected community may be crucial for success, as infuential information in policymaking tends to be the kind of information that is linked to locally shared narratives (Innes 1995, 185). In their simplest form, two broad strategies to make local narratives useful for planning can be suggested. A frst is to compile collections of local narratives for planners to draw on – a form of narrative mapping.2 The second is to try to actively connect narratives for planning, the narratives produced for and by locals about a development area, to a planning department’s narratives in planning by enabling stakeholders to actively propose their own views, experiences, memories, and visions about a place in a way that is meaningful for the planning process – an approach, of course, that has been the focus in much of recent participatory planning theory. Over

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the past decades, a vast literature on participatory planning and co-design in urban planning and policy has come into being (see e.g. Healey 1998; Forester 1999). Some of these recent approaches can be singled out as particularly relevant for the perspective of narrative in the context of planning. “Digital storytelling” and the possibilities offered by geographic information systems are some of the many innovative methods, inspired by new media, that aim to reach a better understanding of subjective and intersubjective knowledge of the city (cf. Elwood 2006). One of the important questions that arises from examining planning cases in terms of different types of narratives is what happens when a story has ambiguous status or complex authorship. Narratives collected through participatory processes and produced by locals within a context supervised by planners (or by actors commissioned by planning agencies) fall somewhat in between the categories of narratives for planning and narratives in planning – they have double authorship. This in-between status of local narratives that are generated in participatory processes should attune planners and urban theorists to the challenges involved in working with this sensitive category. Double authorship means that such narratives could easily be appropriated or bent to specifc purposes, and that they can be infuenced by dominant narratives in planning. This issue is raised also by Judith Innes, who has pointed out the ethical problems that arise when planners are simultaneously producing, framing, and applying localized knowledge (see above; Innes 1995, 185). It is important to reiterate that a focus on narrative as narrative in the context of planning emphasizes the situatedness and specifcities of particular narratives, as well as the need to document the stories in question in their exact wording, as they are told by narrators. If local voices are really to come across in participatory processes, it is crucial that the end result of such processes takes into account stories that are recounted in their original wordings, not merely local stories rewritten or summarized by planners. Narratives for planning are increasingly seen as important experiential information, the successful adaptation of which in the planning process could lead to more inclusive and democratic planning. However, if the aim of participatory narrative practices is to let local voices be heard more clearly, efforts should be made to ensure a transparent selection process, as well as a coherent analysis and adaptation of these narratives. To ensure that the original narratives do not get lost in the process of summarizing and rewriting, one frst step would be to at least keep these available for future reference – for example, in the form of open-access databases.

Narrative mapping The cartography of narratives of a place has been advocated by several urban thinkers as a method to enable planners to form an idea of the broader narrative framework within which they are operating. It can be traced to Patrick Geddes’s aphorism “survey before plan”; Geddes, working

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in the early twentieth century, frmly believed that planning should start with a rigorous and broadly understood survey of the resources of an area in question (Davoudi and Strange 2008, 17). More recently, theorists have understood this approach in distinctively narrative terms. Mark Childs, for example, argues that, as “[s]torytelling is part of urban design”, taking into account “stories of place can inform designers about the narrative fabric that is as much a critical part of the context of a site as the soil type” (2008, 185). Or, as Bond and Thompson-Fawcett argue in a call for more qualitative methods in urban research, [t]he tiny details, often reduced and overlooked in analysis, can reveal the depth of the meaning people have for places and spaces with which they identify. Narratives provide a means to make sense of and understand social phenomena and individual experience. (2008, 56–57; see also Filep, Thompson-Fawcett, and Rae 2014) In Finland, Panu Lehtovuori is one of several planning theorists who have recently drawn attention to the importance of urban layers of meaning as “keys to the future” (Lehtovuori 2012, 25). One note should be made concerning the relation between what I call here “narrative mapping” and the concept of “cultural mapping”, which belongs to the paradigm of cultural planning. Franco Bianchini has, in various publications, called for a better understanding of urban “imaginaries” and advocated for a “cultural cartography” of such imaginaries (2006). He has drawn up a detailed overview of what constitutes the “image bank” of a city, as well as the resources that could be uncovered by way of a cultural mapping: resources including media coverage, local narratives, and literary and other representations of place (2006, 14). “Cultural mapping” could thus be understood as outlining broadly defned “cultural resources” (Lehtovuori 2012, 15), including all aspects of a particular culture (information concerning its built environment, people’s everyday activities, local stories). But “culture” has also been understood in cultural planning much more narrowly, in terms of artistic communities and practices, and, following this narrower defnition, cultural mapping is seen as the “identifcation and inventorying of local arts, culture, and heritage resources” (Bain and McLean 2012, 129). Such cultural mapping has gained some legitimacy; the Australian Capital Territory, for example, has an extensive cultural map project (Young 2006). The narrow understanding of cultural mapping as the cartography of the “cultural assets” of an area, in the idiom of the creative cities industry (Stevenson 2014, 47), however, is distinctly different from the wide-ranging narrative survey I envision here. I prefer the term “narrative mapping” to defne the wide-ranging assessment of place-based narratives relevant for the planning of an area, including personal, historical, as well as offcial narratives. Narrative mapping is not only a mapping of narratives, but also, and more specifcally, an indexization of narratives

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in terms of their narrative form and structure, and of the way in which these account for how a relationship with the surrounding environment is forged. Narrative mapping, as defned here, embraces a heterogeneous set of textual data, from historical documents, diaries, policy documents, and transcribed interviews, to newspaper accounts. Analytical coherence is provided by treating these different sources in terms of their narrative structure, and by focusing on a key set of narrative elements: plot, character development, metaphor, and genre. This enables a structured treatment of the material and lays the ground for rigorous interpretation and comparison. The resulting examination of a location’s manifold narratives would thus be able to refect the locations’ polyphony (in Bakhtinian terms): the many-voiced perspectives of stories told within specifc contexts and for specifc audiences, undisrupted by an overarching authorial voice. In literary and narrative research, narrative mapping can draw on a growing interest in questions related to space and place, such as the literary research method deep locational criticism, developed by Jason Finch (2016), the “topopoetic reading” envisioned by Pultz Moslund (2011), or the recent geocritical approach to narratives advocated by Bertrand Westphal (2011) and Robert Tally Jr (2011), and literary geography (Alexander 2015). These approaches can provide planners with a deeper understanding of the layered meanings of the planning environment, a palimpsestic view that may function as qualitatively complementary to layered planning tools such as the program Autocad, which planners use to create layered drawings. Narratives are continuously in motion. There is always a hero on a quest, hoping to bring her mission to a close, or an emotional state to be handled, or a moral question to be resolved. A narrative mapping of a particular area, guided by conceptualizations from literary and narrative theory, would not approach narratives in the way these describe (rather statically) a particular environment as mere dots on a map. It would, instead, focus on the dynamic role played by location in relation to the plot and character development, on metaphorizations of the area, and on the interaction between the location and the literary frames or genre features it triggers. Questions that could be answered in such an analysis would be: How does the location act with regard to a specifc plotline, and is it possible to discern specifc generic features in the narrative? Is the location related to a story of recovery, to a trajectory of development, to a “tragic” plot of exclusion or a “comic” plot of inclusion and reconciliation (cf. Frye 1957)? What kinds of relationship does the area evoke or provoke between a character and the area? What metaphorizations are used in describing the area and the activities carried out there?

Mapping the Helsinki waterfront: A concise literary case study A concise examination of the Helsinki shoreline in literature exemplifes how a narrative focus does not concern itself with the descriptions of space

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per se, but rather with the way a location functions as part of more complex narrative dynamics. Summarizing here the outcomes of research that has been presented elsewhere at more length (Ameel 2014b; 2018a; Ameel and Kankkunen 2017), the following key points concerning the way in which the Helsinki waterfront functions within literary narratives can be singled out. The seashore tends to be, frst of all, an area of transformation. The shore is often described as being under construction and as subject to change (e.g. in the opening scene of Arvid Järnefelt’s Veljekset [Brothers]; 1900, 1–5; see Ameel 2014b, 82 ff.). But this is also the area where a personal metamorphosis is initiated or carried out – for example, in Pirkko Saisio’s debut novel Elämänmeno (Vivid Life; 1975, 152–160), in which the confrmation party of the teenage protagonist is set on a Helsinki island. The shore is also an area which enables the evocation of alternative forms for society – for example, in the protagonist’s revolutionary vision during a nighttime trip to the shore in Järnefelt’s Veneh’ojalaiset (The Family Veneh’oja; [1909] 1996, 58–65; see Ameel 2014b, 97–99), or in the near-utopian suburban development of a Helsinki island satirized in Henrik Tikkanen’s Brändövägen 8 (Kulosaarentie 8; 1975). The most radical example of an imagined counter-society can be found in Anja Kauranen’s Pelon maantiede (The Geography of Fear; 1995), in which a feminist guerrilla movement that challenges the patriarchal order has set up its headquarters on an island in the city’s inner bay. The waterfront, then, appears as a metaphorical space of possible transformation, a liminal space where life and death, as well as past and future possibilities, collide (cf. Doody [1996] 1998). The relation of the characters to this space refects the sense of the waterfront as an environment that engenders, enables, and/or channels transformative power for both the protagonists and society at large. A schematic visualization of the way in which the waterfront is experienced and metaphorized, as well as the generic frame within which the narratives unfold, sums up the key narrative functions of the location (Table 3.1): In its most positive associations, the waterfront appears as a pastoral space, a park-like environment outside the everyday urban fabric. It is metaphorized as the locus amoenus of romantic literature: an idealized natural landscape that forms the setting for passionate encounters, especially the kinds of encounter that are not sanctioned in shared public space on moral or social grounds (because one of the characters is married, for example, or because they are from different social classes; see Ameel 2018a). The romantic context means that this location tends to be set within the generic frames of the “comic” plot (Frye 1957), which aims at integrating the character into society (for example, through marriage), although the conciliation at the waterfront tends to be a temporary state. The novels examined here are generally speaking tragic in outlook, conveying the diffculties of successful integration into society. The waterfront, then, is a place which is distanced from the city proper, and which also enables a detached view of the character and his/her relationship with the surrounding world.

heterotopian space

recognition of fault lines in society/city

social problem novel (“tendency novel”)

mirror of society

liminal space

threat of death/suicide

place of contemplation, possibility liminal space of rebirth

“comic” plot locus amoenus (or “pleasant, idyllic place”) border zone exclusion from society (critical Bildungsroman), “tragic” plot mirror of the soul inclusion into society, “comic” plot

pastoral space

romantic encounter

The location enables character development within the generic frame of:

Uurto 1935 Holappa 1954 Järnefelt 1909 Joensuu 2003 Hirvonen 2005 Tarvas 1916 Hämäläinen 1941 Järnefelt 1909 Joensuu 1993 Kauranen 1995

Character experiences The location presents itself the location as: in metaphorical terms as:

Function of the location vis-à-vis character and plot. The location enables/evokes:

Novels

Table 3.1 Key narrative functions of the waterfront in Helsinki literature

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The waterfront and the view of the open sea which it offers also function as a foil for the inner thoughts of the protagonist, and as a location for soul-searching and self-questioning. Several of the protagonists in twentieth-century Finnish literature set in Helsinki are troubled characters, and their contemplations often include the possibility of committing suicide by drowning (e.g. in Waltari 1928; Holappa 1954; Joensuu 2003). Although the sea offers this ultimate possibility of dissolving into a grander totality, the waterfront also provides more positive experiences and can function as a place for reconciliation and of possible rebirth (e.g. in Uurto 1935; Hämäläinen 1941; Hirvonen 2005). In sum, the seashore constitutes the location for negotiation between radical exclusion from society (self-doubts, suicide) and for reconciliation and re-entry into society. If the urban waterfront constitutes a liminal space and a foil for the protagonist’s consciousness, it also functions as a kind of mirror of society, in which the cracks and ruptures in ordered society appear as threatening, uncanny forces. At the seashore, hidden dangers and possibilities are revealed. In this sense, the shore – and perhaps the archipelago of Helsinki, in particular – appears as a profoundly heterotopian space, mirroring and contesting the organized spaces of the society to which it belongs (see Foucault 1986; Ameel and Kankkunen 2017). The Helsinki waterfront, then, appears as a liminal location outside the normal order and urban fabric, but it also draws its transformative power from this characteristic. New visions of society are summoned, new perspectives opened up, both for society at large and for the personal perspective of a literary narrator or character. This narrative function of the waterfront in literary fction is concomitant with the historical development of the Helsinki shoreline, which often constituted, quite literally, the muddy and dirty margin of the Finnish capital, partly closed off to the general public by military or industrial activities. As Panu Lehtovuori notices, the liminal quality of the shore (which he identifes with its occasional function as wasteland) could have the potential to play an important role as “catalyst and innovator” in twenty-frst-century Helsinki (2012, 24). When the narrative cartography presented above is compared with surveys in architecture, planning, urban history, and urban studies that focus on the Helsinki shore (Lehtovuori 2012; Kervanto Nevanlinna 2012), a number of elements stand out. The frst is that the shore as a peripheral area, outside city dwellers’ everyday routines, a site of out-of-sight industrial and military activities and of urban waste, has long been explicitly present in the historical documentation. Similarly, the “pastoral” aspect of this environment – its recreational functions as a green space – constitutes a feature that appears forcefully in the responses gathered in recent research conducted with public participation geographic information system (PPGIS) methods (such as the ENJUSTESS project; see Laatikainen et al. 2017). The “transformative” characteristics of the waterfront, however, the strong evocation of a site that suggests and enables personal as well as societal

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transformation, is largely confned to more elaborate and more complex cultural and literary narratives of the waterfront. The lack of these transformative characteristics in non-fctional narratives may well be related to the fact that more traditional survey articles and material gathered with GIS methods tend to focus on static descriptions of an area, rather than on the dynamics of place as part of personal or communal plot lines. If we want geoinformation research to become more attentive to the dynamic narrative functions associated with a location, it will have to allow for narrative methodologies, such as the ability of respondents to create dynamic interconnections between different locations on PPGIS maps, or the possibility to connect locations to broader personal or communal storylines (see Ameel et al. 2016). The challenge to connect local narratives for planning, which contain insights into the qualitative and experiential dimensions of a planned area, with narratives in planning can be considered as something akin to the Holy Grail of participatory planning. Taking a perspective from narrative studies makes it possible to foreground two important aspects of place-based stories told by local stakeholders. The frst relates to the situatedness, context, and exact phrasing of such narratives: if local stories are rephrased or summarized in appendices to planning, this results in new narratives with ambiguous authorship. The second aspect relates to the underlying structures of narratives, which can be analysed in terms of plot, metaphor, character development, and genre. By taking such aspects into account, a narrative perspective can provide a rich, grounded analysis of how a particular environment appears in historical, cultural, and personal forms of storytelling.

Narratives in planning: The brief story of the waterfront Planning is understood here as a form of storytelling and as a rhetorical activity which is performed in the form of texts (such as planning documents) and processes (such as consultations or community meetings). As laid out in Chapters One and Two, planners are at work producing and negotiating narratives (Ivory 2013) and communicating in planning texts as well as through built form (Filep, Thompson-Fawcett, and Rae 2014, 309). One of the most coherent conceptual frameworks of planning as a narrative has been provided by Throgmorton (1993; 1996; 2003), who has worked for decades on narratives and planning, proposing a vision of planning as “persuasive storytelling”.3 Planners, in this view, are “authors of persuasive and future-oriented texts (plans, analyses, reports) that refect awareness of differing opposing views and that can be read and interpreted in diverse and often antagonistic ways”; they “achieve persuasiveness by attending to the principles of good fction writing and reader-response theory” (1996, 115). Throgmorton outlines fve guiding principles that shape the rhetoric and ethics of planning storytelling. The frst is that planners “should think of themselves as characters in a larger story that they are helping to construct,

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and that they should strive to act in a manner that is consistent with the characters invoked by their story”; the second, that planners “are also the authors (or at least coauthors) … and hence that as authors they must adopt a point of view”; third, that planners “have intentions, and that they should seek to accomplish those intentions in part by how they emplot the future course of their narratives … [by] shaping the readers’ attention and expectations rhetorically”; fourth, that planners “are at best co-authors of their own stories while also being characters in someone else’s story”; ffth, that planners must “also engage conficting stories and be open to transformation through the encounter with them” (1996, 52–54). Like other thinkers within planning theory, James Throgmorton directs an understandable focus on the roles and actions of planners. The present book is more interested in the narratives produced by planners, rather than in the perspective of the planner per se. Narratives in planning are defned here as the full set of narrative activities and documents produced and authored by a planning department and associated actors, such as consultants, building constructors, or other city organizations, in relation to a particular planning project. The protagonists of narratives in planning are often planners, but they can also be citizens, as well as personifed cities and city districts. If we are to approach the planning of Helsinki’s waterfront in terms of its narrative, what story does it tell? In some of the more extensive documents produced by the Helsinki City Planning Department in the frst decade of the twenty-frst century (Helsinki City 2000; 2002; 2009a), the dominant storyline is one of the extension and strengthening of the city centre, which gradually draws other areas into the urban fold of the centre. The postindustrial harbour areas of Kalasatama, Jätkäsaari, and Kruunuvuorenranta are key to this narrative: their freeing-up enables development in Helsinki to move in a new direction, and the planning, in turn, enables the return of these areas to within the urban core. The section “Objectives, aims, and principles” in the City Plan of 2002, for example, specifes that, “(t)he increase in construction of new housing is focused on the city centre [keskusta] and on the inner city [kantakaupunki] areas, whose earlier functions are moving out” (Helsinki City 2002, 59). This development is presented in terms of growth (in economic terms as well as in population). The direction of development along the coast is contrasted with earlier post-war development that had focused on garden suburbs and concrete suburbs at some distance from the city.4 Development of the shores is presented in explicit terms as a “historical turning point” in the history of Helsinki’s construction (Helsinki City 2000, 19). In this narrative, there is a distinct focus on strengthening the city centre and expanding the built form, on transport solutions, and on lifestyles associated with the city centre. The 2002 City Plan notes that its aim is to realize new areas with the effciency (i.e. density) associated with the inner city (Helsinki City 2002, 209). The predominant narrative of Helsinki’s development posits densifcation and the expansion

40 Narratives for, in, and of planning of the urban core as a way to attain a more sustainable, attractive, and socially cohesive city (Helsinki City 2000, 29–46). This focus on urban living can also be associated with a growing interest in urban culture in a period that witnessed Helsinki being the European Capital of Culture in 2000 and the World Design Capital in 2012. In the background of this narrative are global developments such as the shift towards urban infll, changes in urban living preferences, middle-class families’ (relative) return to the (inner) city, and decades of waterfront regeneration, from Baltimore, San Francisco, and New Orleans to Rotterdam, Genoa, Marseilles, and beyond (see Jones 2006; Mah 2014). The planning of the waterfront areas to be redeveloped – Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama, in particular – feeds into the broader narratives outlined above. In the planning texts, there are repeated efforts to rhetorically frame these areas as located in, or drawn into, the city centre. In the strategic spatial plan of Helsinki, for example, the former industrial harbour Jätkäsaari is unequivocally designated as part of the “main city centre” (Helsinki City 2009a, 18). In an early planning document concerning the effects of the opening of the post-industrial waterfront, Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama are both described as “central areas of the city centre” (Helsinki City 2000, 4, 19). A similar narrative of these areas’ central location can be found in a range of planning texts, from offcial leafets to the Helsinki City Plan (Helsinki City 2011a; 2013b). Given the focus on coastal liminality and peripherality in the literary texts discussed above, the emphasis on centrality establishes a striking (and far from arbitrary) discrepancy between how the waterfront is presented in planning and how it appears in cultural narratives. In the literary texts examined above, the shoreline derives its particular characteristics and its transformative power from its peripherality. But the perceived centrality of the Helsinki waterfront in planning documents points to a different contextualization. The planning vision for Helsinki’s post-industrial harbours tells a story of integration and inclusion into the existing urban fold. Development is envisioned as happening from the inner city outward, rather than as starting from the waterfront and its peripheral characteristics. The dominant view of the development is summed up by the image of the “expanding city centre”, with arrows pointing to Jätkäsaari, Pasila, and Kalasatama (Helsinki City 2011b, 7; see Figure 3.2). The dominant story told in narratives in planning of the post-industrial waterfront is, thus, that of an area that forms an integral part of the city centre. It is a form of emplotment that realizes within language the processes that the planning has only begun to set in motion. The dominant story is told in many of the extensive textual narratives produced by the Helsinki City Planning Department (see Helsinki City 2008a; 2009b). A few words should be added to further complicate the key plot lines of early twenty-frst-century Helsinki waterfront planning as outlined above. The development of the city centre and centrally located coastal areas differs

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Figure 3.2 The expanding centre. © City of Helsinki, 2011.

considerably from that in earlier decades, which tended to focus on suburban development. But planning in Helsinki in the frst decades of the twenty-frst century continues to be also based on the idea of the city having multiple centres, and on the need to continue to strengthen these centres (see e.g. Helsinki City 2002, 59). In the more recent city plans, and the City Plan Vision 2050 (Helsinki City 2013b) in particular, the focus is again more on an idea of Helsinki as a polycentric city, rather than on an expansion of the centre towards the shores (cf. e.g. Granqvist, Sarjamo, and Mäntysalo 2019). The dominant storyline in Vision 2050 is one of the city boulevards that expand outwards from the city centre along the key traffc arteries leading out of Helsinki. For a variety of reasons that fall outside the scope of this book, crucial aspects of this vision of the city were torpedoed by the Finnish Supreme Court in 2018. It is notable that, in reactions to this setback, it was not only legal grounds that were foregrounded but also aspects of communication and argumentation in the planning and the inability of the Planning Department to let narratives in planning resonate with localized narratives in Helsinki.5

Planning maritime Helsinki Planning in Helsinki is subordinate to hierarchies that move in concentric circles: the provincial plan has precedence over the city plan, which in

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turn determines partial local master plans and local detailed plans. Within these spatial hierarchies, it is only to be expected that local plans emphasize how they integrate the development areas into larger geographical frameworks. And it is similarly predictable that the perspective of the shoreline as a peripheral area that draws its distinctive cultural characteristics from connections with the sea, the islands, and other shores remains somewhat underdeveloped. A fascinating change in this respect has been the development, in the course of the 2010s, of Helsinki’s maritime strategy, which aims to coordinate strategic planning of the capital’s maritime areas: its shores, islands, and harbour activities. The preface to the publication Maritime Helsinki in the City Plan argued that such coordination was needed: “It is time for maritime Helsinki” (Helsinki City 2014a, 5). In terms of hierarchies, the maritime strategy is located between the levels of the local plans and the master plan, with the task to coordinate between different levels. Rather than approaching the waterfront in terms of relations between centre and periphery, it examines how different peripheries along the water are fundamentally interconnected. And, instead of focusing on the built environment, it sets out possibilities for activities and creative temporary use of the water. One of the aims of the maritime strategy is to enhance accessibility to the shores and islands. Most of the islands in the Helsinki archipelago are accessible to the general public on the basis of the customary Nordic “everyman’s right” (see Ameel and Tani 2012). During the 2010s, several new islands were opened to the public (Lonna in 2014, Vallisaari and Kuninkaansaari in 2016, and Isosaari in 2017), with added ferry connections. To further enhance accessibility to Helsinki’s archipelago, city rowing boats are rented out at several locations along the shore for a small monthly fee. As part of the maritime strategy, the city actively invites citizens to take ownership of the public shores – for example, by making it easier to organize events along the water. Since 2015, anyone can organize an event at one of 19 designated places by a simple announcement using a mapping tool, with the only requirement being to abide by the terms of use (Rantakesä 2020). One new tool, published in 2019, is a map that brings together information about 120 possible sites for various kinds of activity by the water, including cafeterias, ferry services, and places for events. The focus on maritime spaces also highlights the role of interacting spatial networks beyond the main traffc arteries that lead outward from the centre towards the suburbs inland. The plan for maritime Helsinki aims to foreground the shorelines not as a frontier but as a connecting space. Hence, the emphasis on the nodes between different modes of transportation, such as the links that connect the metro station with ferry services, the “metro– sea nodes” (metro–meri solmut), which are highlighted in the theme map “maritime Helsinki” (Helsinki City 2014a, 7–8; see Image 2.1). The existence of a strategic vision for maritime Helsinki, which gives a special status to the shorelines as a distinctive spatial environment, has also infuenced

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the development of pedestrian and bicycle route that runs along most of the Helsinki shoreline. All of these developments are meant to enhance the accessibility and public use of maritime Helsinki for the inhabitants of the city. But they are also important for tourism and symptomatic of the growing competition between global cities. In that competition, the sea is considered as a “competitive factor which distinguishes Helsinki from other European capitals”, with tourism and business activities “sprouting” from Helsinki’s “maritime and charming centre” (Helsinki City 2014a, 7). The development of strategic plans for maritime Helsinki allows for fascinating opportunities for “commodifying the Finnish experience” in the form of public saunas situated at the seashore (Helsinki City 2013a, 15). Public saunas, in part catering for international crowds, quickly sprang up along the Helsinki shoreline during the 2010s, including Kulttuurisauna (2013), Allas Seapool (2016), and Löyly (2018). Although the maritime strategy has less legal and political weight than the local plans and the master plan within which it operates, the document performs important narrative functions. It provides future planners with a shared vision for developing an otherwise neglected area. It educates citizens and visitors about their possibilities for the agency at the waterfront. And, by virtue of its very existence, it foregrounds the shoreline and islands of the capital as a distinctive environment to be taken seriously in its own right by planners and citizens. The narrative cartography outlined above, in the section “Mapping the Helsinki waterfront”, paints the Helsinki waterfront as a distinct area with unique features and with specifc functions within the story lives of the city’s inhabitants. These features are also corroborated by historical examinations and by public consultation rounds. In view of this, the development of a maritime strategy to strengthen the affordances of the waterfront is a welcome and timely intervention. An early draft of the maritime strategy claims that “a maritime identity and the relationship between the built city and the sea are central to how the built environment along the shores of Helsinki is being developed” (Helsinki City 2013a, 17). As will be seen in the following chapters, the urban development in Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama continues to focus on connections with the city centre, rather than on relationships with the sea and the shores. Much remains to be done to put the aims of the maritime strategy into practice.

Narratives of planning: Telling the future of the waterfront Planning can be considered as storytelling (narrative in planning), and local narratives can be drawn upon during various stages of the planning process (as narratives for planning). There are also a wide variety of stories that are generated around planning projects without being directly authored by planning agencies. Such narratives of planning are defned here as the set

44 Narratives for, in, and of planning of stories told about a given planning project, independently of a planning department: stories told by locals to each other, newspaper coverage, literary fction describing the development area. Despite being somewhat peripheral to the planning process proper, these narratives tend to be important for the way in which the results of planning will be perceived and experienced. Planning departments, as well as investors and building contractors, have obvious reasons for trying to infuence and actively steer these. In longterm planning practices, narratives of planning may be commissioned and then fed back into narratives in planning in the guise of local perspectives. Urban branding is one of the most explicit and most extensively researched forms of narratives of planning. It has become one of the most conspicuous strategies with which planning-related narratives are put to use and has been analysed by several theorists in explicit narrative terms (see Jensen 2007; Russell, Mort, and Hume 2009). In the context of growing global competition, cities increasingly draw on symbolic politics in which city narratives are used to create an urban brand (Mommaas 2004). It is important to emphasize (to the point of repetition) that narratives of planning have a very different status than narratives in planning, with narrators who are considerably less responsible for the truth value of their statements. When a media article or a post on social media denounces a new development as a planning disaster, or when it extolls the virtues of a plan for kick-starting a renewed sense of community, eyebrows may be raised, but the narrator can hardly be taken to court over such claims. When a planning document promises a certain percentage of social housing or public access to a stretch of waterfront, by contrast, there can be real legal and political repercussions if the eventual development does not live up to expectations. Narratives of planning are distinct from narratives in planning in terms of their intended audience, as well as in terms of their narrators. Planners are expected to direct their narratives to all the citizens who are affected by the planning project (even though, in practice, planning documents tend to function more as communication between present and future planners, and as an inter-agency expression of established common ground). Media representatives, branding agencies, or politicians talking about the very same project are more selective in their intended audience. In terms of their timeframe, too, narratives of planning differ from narratives in planning. Narratives of planning comprise stories told long after a development has reached its completion, as well as narratives that come into being the very moment a planning process is announced. Several kinds of narratives of planning, such as media or branding narratives, are to some degree hybrids: narratives with a double authorship, produced outside a planning department but susceptible to manipulation by planners. Most importantly, narratives of planning differ from narratives in planning in that they do not directly affect the material and built infrastructure on the ground. This is an important point when examining participatory practices in planning, which tend to suggest that inhabitants will be enabled to infuence narratives in

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planning – the kinds of storyline that will fnd their way into the built environment – whereas participation still often takes the form of a commentary round following planning proper and potentially constitutes no more than narratives of planning. In the narrative mapping outlined above, the focus was on narrative characteristics such as character development, genre, plot, and metaphor. Another important focal point for analysis is that of “actor” or “actant” – the entity or person who is described as initiating or carrying out an action. It is possible to look at actors at the basic level of the sentence, or at the level of the global narrative and its plot. In both cases, an examination of actors indicates the persons or institutions that are presented as having agency in particular narratives. In linguistics, the actor is the entity who, in a sentence, causes something to happen, and is typically associated with the main verb in the sentence. In social theory, and more particularly in Bruno Latour’s infuential actor-network theory, an actor is defned more broadly as a participant in the course of action; “any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor” (Latour 2005, 71; original emphasis). A closely related approach from literary and narrative theory is the actantial model proposed by Propp and Greimas, which looks at the relationships within the grammar of texts (Greimas 1966). A narrative analysis of the various actors in narratives in and of planning can provide a frst way of coming to grips with the competing ideologies at stake in planning processes. In his narrative analysis of the Thames Gateway development, for example, Philip Cohen applies the actant model from literary studies to planning in order to show that abstract ideas, rather than human beings, are the central agents in the planning of the Thames Gateway, and that, regardless of a rhetoric of openness, the narrative represents only one dominant voice (Cohen 2008, 118). A comparison between the actors in different kinds of narrative can illustrate how certain actors (such as particular citizen groups or governmental agencies) remain blind-sided or how their roles differ from local contexts to planning contexts. Ruth Finnegan, in her narrative examination of Milton Keynes, notes that, in the planners’ “tales of building new cities the heroes are … the developers and their organisations, working in combination with the ‘people’”, which contrasted “with the acting and narrating ‘I’ and the friends and family portrayed – and expected to be portrayed – in … personal narratives” (Finnegan 1998, 11–12). Media narratives may be aligned with dominant narratives in planning, but they can also choose to present rather different protagonists from the planning texts, either to tell a better story (by focusing on one individual’s experiences) or to cater to the interests of their specifc readers. Although the most important actors in the narratives in the planning of the Helsinki waterfront are arguably the planners and the plans themselves, the most important actor at sentence level in media narratives is sometimes the price of housing, the upward curve of which is the main point of interest (see Vilén 2013).

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Some narratives of planning may be particularly imaginative in how the future of a planning area is given shape. One fascinating alternative narrative of planning in the context of early twenty-frst-century Helsinki is the shadow plan for the 2016 City Plan. This plan, Pro Helsinki 2.0, was developed by the group Urban Helsinki and published in 2014 as direct competition to the offcial City Plan. The plan had a high media profle and was openly acknowledged by the Helsinki City Planning Department. It has arguably been remarkably successful in infuencing features of later urban planning in Helsinki, in particular in relation to “increased density, tram-based mobility and city boulevards” (Horelli and Damyanovic 2019, 168). Pro Helsinki 2.0 in part grew from, and was aligned with, the most infuential social media planning platform in Helsinki: “the Facebook group Lisää kaupunkia Helsinkiin (A More Urban Helsinki),” a group set up in 2009 and counting almost 17 000 members in 2018. The Facebook group aimed to infuence planning and to create a more densely built city (Niitamo and Sjöblom 2018). But infuential platforms that by-pass more established methods of communicative planning raise new questions about legitimacy: whose story is told, what are the mechanisms that decide how that story is told, whose interests gain visibility? Horelli and Damyanovic note the predominantly male composition of the group’s core members, a gender bias which has: consequences for reduced opportunities to opt for a discussion on, for example, the integration of density with quality requirements. Besides gender, there is very little discussion or interest in age, disability, ethnicity or immigration-related issues, nor in sexual orientation, all of which might have spatial impacts. (Horelli and Damyanovic 2019, 168; see also Niitamo and Sjöblom 2018; Mäenpää, Faehnle, and Schulman 2017) Among the most imaginative narratives of planning are literary novels that engage with the development of an area, city, or region and that are set in a near or far-away future. Finnish literature (in both offcial languages of the country) has seen a boom in dystopian and near-future literature during the past few decades (see Isomaa and Lahtinen 2017). Several of these novels refect, at least in passing, on urban development in the (near) future. Esa Mäkinen’s novel Totuuskuutio (Truth Square; 2015), for example, provides an Orwellian contemplation on fake news and near-future societal disintegration, but also imagines the southern shores of Helsinki as inundated, with the wow architecture that was planned in the early twenty-frst century constructed and already in disuse, and with the wealthier population living in gated communities. Young Adult novels such as Annika Luther’s De Hemlösas stad (City of the Homeless; 2011) and Anders Vacklin and Aki Parhamaa’s Beta: Sensored Reality (2018) describe a partly submerged

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Helsinki in, respectively, the near and more distant future. In both cases, massive migration and radical climate change have changed the city’s linguistic landscape as well as its built environment. Among early twenty-frstcentury speculative fction, Antti Tuomainen’s Parantaja (The Healer; 2010) stands out for how it engages with tropes from the Helsinki City Planning Department’s narratives in planning; I will return to Tuomainen’s Parantaja in Chapter Five. Among literary fction, other, older genres, too, can provide insightful refections on city planning. The near-utopian planning of upper-middleclass suburbs such as Kulosaari (east of Helsinki centre) and Munkkiniemi (west of Helsinki centre) has been documented and re-enacted in the now largely canonized works of Finland–Swedish authors Henrik Tikkanen and Kjell Westö (see e.g. Ameel and Kankkunen 2017). The socio-spatial dynamics assembled along the Helsinki metro line crucially inform some of the most mesmerizing crime fction from Finland, with M.A. Joensuu’s Harjunpää ja pahan pappi (Harjunpää and The Priest of Evil; 2003) a particularly evocative example. And novels with less of an immediate documentary relevance may provide fascinating insights into alternative ways of seeing and experiencing the city. Key insights from late twentieth-century fction can be found in the works of Leena Krohn, in which a city closely resembling Helsinki typically remains unnamed but is nonetheless uncannily recognizable, or in Henrika Ringbom’s Martina Dagers Längtan (The Longing of Martina Dager; 1998), in which an otherwise recognizable Helsinki is radically changed by the insertion of a river where the city’s main traffc artery is situated. As long as Kalasatama, Jätkäsaari, and other Helsinki waterfront sites such as Kruunuvuorenranta remain largely unfnished, readers of fction with interest in these areas will perhaps have to satisfy their needs with near-future novels such as Tuomainen’s Parantaja and the novel commissioned by Helsinki City to celebrate Jätkäsaari, Hannu Mäkelä’s Hyvä jätkä (Good Chap; 2009; see Chapter Five). But, would it be unreasonable to hope for a literature of the redeveloped Helsinki waterfront to come into being, following in the footsteps perhaps of Westö and Tikkanen, Krohn, Joensuu, and Ringbom, as the frst generation along the water grows up or grows old, sometime in the 2020s, 2030s, or 2040s, producing a new set of imaginative narratives of planning for the future?

Conclusion Urban planning is increasingly conceived as a form of “persuasive storytelling” (Throgmorton 1996), with planners actively engaging in “city storywriting” (Healey 2000, 527–528). Three distinct types of narratives in the context of urban planning can be identifed: narratives for, in, and of planning. These categories originate in specifc contexts; they are aimed at particular audiences and authored by particular narrators. The threefold taxonomy of narratives in the context of planning proposed in this chapter

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aims to dispel some of the conceptual unclarity that continues to surround the study of planning narratives. It also provides a hermeneutic tool allowing scholars, planners, and the general public to talk in more precise terms about the authorship, context, and objectives of planning narratives. Narratives in the context of planning are not detached from the actual developments in the built environment and in people’s lives. On the contrary, they lie at the core of how planning functions and how it shapes everyday environments. Narratives in planning are constitutive (in addition to being persuasive; see Throgmorton 1993, 121) and have their material effects on urban developments. In the case of Helsinki’s long waterfront, the material effects of narratives for, in, and of planning are only now taking shape, and it may be too early to fully gauge the extent to which the dominant planning narrative of this area as an integral part of the urban centre will transform into stone and concrete, and into people’s everyday experiences.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter have been published elsewhere in two separate articles (Ameel 2016a; 2016c). 2 The corpus of a narrative mapping would be quite similar to that of Stephano Boeri’s “Eclectic atlas”: “heterogeneous texts (reports, photographic surveys, geographic and literary descriptions, classifcations, research reports, qualitative investigations, essays and articles, anthologies and monographs, collections of plans or projects)” (Boeri as quoted in Greenspan 2005, 312). The difference between Boeri’s approach and the one proposed in this book lies in the methodological approach of narrative mapping, which puts a strong focus on a dynamic understanding of place within plotlines and genres and concentrates on how dynamic relationships are rendered in metaphor. 3 Van Hulst (2012) has further developed Throgmorton’s approach, arguing that storytelling can provide a model of and for planning. 4 For more contextualization of the term “concrete suburb” (a translation of the Finnish lähiö), see the description in the glossary. 5 See Professor Kimmo Lapintie’s twitter reaction on 8 November 2018 arguing that planners have to learn to be better at arguing their case (see also Malmberg 2018).

4

Emplotting urban regeneration Narrative strategies in Kalasatama

The development of the Kalasatama1 area is part of a grand overhaul of Helsinki’s post-industrial waterfront (see Introduction).2 Located due north-east of the Helsinki centre, this former container harbour is being redeveloped into a working and living environment for 10,000 jobs and 25,000 inhabitants. Construction started in 2011 and is set to be fnished by 2040. Important factors in the area’s development have been the opening of the metro station by the same name in 2007, the redevelopment of the former gas works site Suvilahti, immediately adjacent to Kalasatama, into a cultural centre (see Krivy 2013), and the creative temporary use of the site (Hernberg 2012). Areas close to or within the borders of Kalasatama are the Teurastamo3 area, which was developed in a mini-meatpacking district, and the functioning power plant Hanasaari at the southern tip of Kalasatama. Immediately east of the area is Helsinki’s outdoor zoo, as well as the recreational area Mustikkamaa, which has been connected to Kalasatama via a new pedestrian bridge constructed in 2016. In many of its basic features, the development of Kalasatama draws comparisons with international examples of waterfront redevelopment. Some of the key challenges and opportunities here are similar to those in Hamburg’s Hafencity, New York’s urban waterfront, the London Docklands, and other developing waterfronts: contaminated soils, the dereliction of underused post-industrial zones, questions of public access, and the promise of upscale housing close to an urban centre with ballooning housing prices. Links to international models were drawn quite explicitly by the city planners. The naming of nearby Teurastamo as a “meatpacking” district is a nod to New York. The establishment of a new cultural hub, Suvilahti, draws comparisons with the success story of Bilbao’s waterfront redevelopment, as well as with other successful redevelopments of former gas plants. Plans for the future development of the Hanasaari plant found their inspiration in London’s Tate Modern. And temporary use in the context of waterfront development had been successfully pioneered elsewhere – for example, with Berlin’s city beach (see e.g. Stevens [2010] 2011). What stand out in comparison with these international examples are the public ownership of the Helsinki waterfront (which is largely owned by the state and the city) and

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the fact that Kalasatama is one of several large-scale waterfront areas being developed simultaneously along the Helsinki coast. In texts produced by the Helsinki City Planning Department, planning for the area is repeatedly described in narrative terms. The offcial website of the Kalasatama project claims that, “Kalasatama has a co-written tale, which took form together with co-operation partners” (Helsinki City 2015a; see also Helsinki City 2014b), thus explicitly framing the development as part of a narrative that is produced in partnership with local actors. Following this statement of Kalasatama as a “co-written tale”, the website argues that the “new Kalasatama district will be built with all due respect to the various layers of the area’s past, while nurturing continuity” (ibid.). These claims suggest that the development sees itself – or wants to be seen – as engaged in storytelling, as a curator of sorts of (earlier) local stories, in line with the recent “story turn” (Cohen 2008) in contemporary urban theory and planning. What are the key storylines that appear in a narrative examination of planning in Kalasatama? And what tensions and contradictions arise from the various stories told in planning documents and in narratives of planning in the area?

Emplotment as spatial and narrative practice Emplotment provides the frst, central concept for approaching narratives in Kalasatama’s planning, not least because of the semantic double entendre of the term, encapsulating the meanings of both spatial “plot” (location) and narrative “plot” (narrative intrigue; see Introduction). The use of “emplotment” as a narrative concept outside the feld of literary studies is primarily associated with the work of Hayden White and his examination of historiography in terms of narrative. White uses “emplotment” to denote the processes by which events are contextualized into meaning-making totalities, hereby receiving “the formal coherency that only stories can possess” (White 1981, 19). Drawing on the work of Northrop Frye, White distinguishes four “modes of emplotment”: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. The difference between romance and satire is, in part, one of world-view. In White’s words, “Romance is fundamentally a drama of self-identifcation symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his fnal liberation from it – the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend” (1973, 8–9). A narrative that follows romantic emplotment, then, is “a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness” (9). By contrast, satire is “the precise opposite of this Romantic drama of redemption; it is … a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the world rather than its master” (9). The difference between tragedy and comedy is not in their world-view, but primarily in their ending. In its resolution, comedy resolves tensions: “hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations” (9; original

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emphasis). By contrast, tragedy ends with “the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits” (9). In the process, however, all is not lost as, for the readers, “[t]here has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest” (9). In planning theory, Hayden White’s examination of narrative tropes within historiography has also been applied to planning histories (Kramsch 1998). Mareile Walter’s examination of narratives of Karlskrona in the master plan Översiktsplan 2030 points to emplotment’s usefulness for an analysis of urban planning in the context of post-industrial harbour development. Walter argues, for example, that Karlskrona’s strategic narrative of a future sustainable city “contains many elements that, according to Frye (1957), belong to the classic formula for a comic plot” (Walter 2013, 167). Mareile Walter’s insightful reading of Kalsrkrona’s planning narratives hints at the broader possibilities of a narrative analysis of planning on the basis of emplotment. But it also illustrates how literary approaches such as those by Frye and White are often applied in rather limited ways by scholars from outside the humanities. In the case of Walter’s reading of Karlskrona’s planning in terms of comic emplotment, there is not a single quotation from the source text to substantiate the analysis – as readers of Walter’s text, we are completely dependent on her reading and her rewriting of the planning narrative. Text and context remain out of sight – in other words, everything that has made Karlskrona’s Översiktsplan 2030 specifc in terms of wording, language, narrative context, audience, and public. Summarizing, emplotment is a narrative strategy that situates a specifc event (or events) within a larger narrative framework; a strategy that gives sense, structure, coherency, and causality to what otherwise would remain a mere enumeration of actions. Especially when considering non-fctional texts that bear little resemblance to literary narratives, such as policy documents, the analysis of a text’s emplotment strategies – in other words, of how narrative elements direct the reader towards a coherent plot – can be particularly benefcial. Unlike texts of literary fction, few planning documents have a strong authorial voice, explicit plot lines, or distinct character dynamics. All planning narratives, however, will exhibit some thematic, linguistic, and stylistic features that situate the planning area on a geographical map and within a narrative intrigue. These narrative strategies carry out what the literary theorist Paul Ricoeur has called the “mise en intrigue” or “situating into plot”, an “operation that draws a confguration out of a simple succession” (Ricoeur [1984] 1990, 65; see also Kaplan 1993, 172). Narrative beginnings are of singular importance in enacting “emplotment” and in introducing the recipient of the narrative to a specifc setting that is embedded in an (often intuitively recognizable) framework of the plot, with its own logic and moral. Like endings, beginnings provide a sense of direction to the reader. What Yuri Lotman claims of endings goes equally for compelling beginnings: that they attest “not only to the

52 Emplotting urban regeneration conclusion of some plot, but also to the construction of the world as a whole” (Lotman 1977, 216; see also Uyttenhove, Keunen, and Ameel 2021). I have argued elsewhere that, in opening settings of literary fction, and the city novel, in particular, spatial descriptions tend to reverberate with moral and social, and in some cases also clearly outlined gendered and ethnic, geographies (Ameel 2015). In beginnings, a matter of double “emplotment” is at stake: of placing a location on the map and, simultaneously, preparing the reader for a causal sequence of events to unfold. Beginnings have been described as carrying something of the prophetic, which has led Edward Said (following Hayden White) to describe beginnings as “inaugural gestures” (Said 1975, 192). The kind of decisive emplotment carried out at the beginning of a narrative could be called “inaugural emplotment”: the prophetic, forward-looking manner of positioning a spatial–temporal node such as, in our case, the development of Kalasatama, within a larger, coherent narrative.

Situating Kalasatama within a plot The opening paragraphs of the commentary to the partial local master plan of the area are a case in point for how the “inaugural emplotment” of Kalasatama is carried out in planning documents. One would hardly expect a fight of rhetorical imagination in the opening sections of this kind of document, which is bound to follow a largely predetermined structure. The opening sections of the commentary are intended to locate the development area geographically with the help of a sequence of sections entitled, respectively, “Location of the development area”, “Framing the development area”, and “Background”.4 But in the way such geographical data are narrated, other, cultural and rhetorical, modes of positioning are performed. The opening setting of the partial local master plan of Kalasatama begins with the following one-sentence description under the heading “Location of the development area”: The development area is located in the eastern coastal area of the Helsinki inner city [kantakaupunki], north of the Long Bridge. (Helsinki City 2008b, 4; my emphasis) Two rhetorical arguments are made in this opening sentence. First, the area is located within the “inner city”, which is a rhetorical argument concerning the relationship between the development area and the overall city, rather than a factual statement. Second, the foregrounding of the spatial marker “north of the Long Bridge”, in the very frst sentence of this defning document, is particularly intriguing. “North of the Long Bridge” is not only fairly imprecise, but it is frst and foremost a social and cultural-historical marker, rather than a strictly geographical marker (see Ameel 2014b, 161– 163). Situating this area “north of the Long Bridge” places it on a social and

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cultural map with blue-collar roots, associated with the historical workingclass districts such as Kallio and Sörnäinen, located in the east and southeast of the area (Figure 4.1). The link with Helsinki’s blue-collar cultural history is further strengthened in the opening of the section “The development phases of the area”,

Figure 4.1 The area of Kalasatama, as shown in the partial local master plan documentation. The “Long Bridge” referred to in the plan is not even visible in the photograph and is situated to the south-west of the area. © City of Helsinki, 2008.

54 Emplotting urban regeneration which begins by painting a picture of a divided city, in which the eastern part (where Kalasatama is situated) is described as distinctly blue-collar: Helsinki has traditionally been socially divided in two. The labourers and the industry were from the beginning situated in the eastern and south-western parts of the city centre, whereas the western parts had been the mainstay of the bourgeoisie and administration. (Helsinki City 2008b, 5) Although there is indisputably some truth in this statement, it raises several questions. The frst question, of course, is why this particular story is foregrounded. The second question is that this story could also be told in completely different terms. The east–west divide of Helsinki, although historically not entirely inaccurate, is also both contentious and part of broader rhetorics of the historical centre’s cultural dynamics. The oldest part of the historical centre, containing the biggest concentration of power (Kruununhaka), is situated east of the central railway station; the area immediately east of present-day Kalasatama, Kulosaari, has long been an upper (middle-)class stronghold; in the late nineteenth century, the western parts of Helsinki did contain industry (such as an iconic sugar factory), undeveloped wastelands (much of present-day Töölö), and working-class slums (the villas of Eläintarha/Töölönlahti). Foregrounding this particular story of Helsinki’s cultural and social divide is part of a larger rhetorical strategy to link the area to the largely gentrifed (or gentrifying) Kallio–Arabia axis, renowned for grass-root artistic projects, creative industries, and booming housing prices.5 This link is established partly implicitly, and without overt acknowledgement of the consequences of such emplotment (as happens in the opening, which positions the area in working-class Helsinki), and partly explicitly, when the partial local master plan places the location of Kalasatama both within range of the “science–art industry axis” towards the Arabia and Viikki areas and within the extension of the city centre (Helsinki City 2008b, 19). In describing the characteristics that historically defne Kalasatama, literary narratives, too, are drawn upon to strengthen the imaginative emplotment of the project area within a narrative of Helsinki’s social geography. In an interview, Hannu Asikainen, project manager of Kalasatama, mentions the stories written by the renowned writer Kjell Westö, which “are largely situated on the shore and in the history of Sörnäinen’s waterfront” (Valli 2012a, 12) as a cultural background for the area. The endeavour to emplot the “story of Kalasatama” within a Helsinki literature describing the eastern city centre is, however, again a highly selective operation. The author referred to, the Finland-Swedish Kjell Westö, is much more renowned for having written about north-western Helsinki, Munkkiniemi, and surroundings, in particular (see Ameel and Ainiala 2018). And it is striking, again, that in this interview the link between Kalasatama and Sörnäinen (to the

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west of the area) is sought, rather than the links between Kalasatama and other areas (such as Kulosaari, an upper-middle-class area immediately to the east). The key storyline brought into play in the various emplotment strategies of Kalasatama is the area’s development as an integral part of the city centre, a distinctly “urban” district, with close links (also culturally and historically) to the gentrifying, “creative” districts in the north-eastern parts of the city centre. In the strategic plan of the Helsinki region, the projected identity of Kalasatama is said to consist of “industrial and labour history and the positive image factors of the neighbouring area of Kallio, which are, for example, urban life, tolerance and urbanity” (Helsinki City 2009a, 28). The emplotment goes back to some of the earliest recorded visions for the area. In one of the frst documents published by Helsinki City to envision the future of the developing harbour areas, “New coastal areas in the inner city”, tentative identities were proposed for both the Eastern Harbour (the area of Kalasatama) and West Harbour (of which Jätkäsaari is a part; see Chapter Five). The proposed symbolic tagline for the Kalasatama area was that of a “New City of Labour” (Helsinki City 2000, 25–28). This proposed identity emplots the area, again, within the existing associations of the adjacent working-class district Kallio/Sörnäinen, even though the document does acknowledge that Kalasatama cannot be simply a continuation of cultural life there (40). The idea of a “New City of Labour” was meant to have material consequences in the built environment and was explicitly connected to new forms of living and working, as well as to new styles of homes, such as lofts (26). A fascinating annex to the document “New coastal areas in the inner city” is an outline of the meanings associated with the term “urbanity”. It is an overview of how the built environment in concrete suburbs differs from that of the city, and what this difference means for social life (Helsinki City 2000, 41). The annex gives a clearly negative image of the concrete high-rise suburbs and guides the reader to see urbanity in terms of the built environment and social life, with “urban” characteristics to be implemented (in the view of this document) in both Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari. The undesirable features of the concrete suburbs, according to this document, are the existence of only one central location for services and shopping, as well as the distinct predictability of life. By contrast, among the desirable characteristics of an “urban” environment are small, dispersed units of shops and services, a sense of unpredictability and contingency, and a vibrant social life within the faceless crowd at street level. These “urban” characteristics reverberate with earlier thoughts within urban studies, notably Jane Jacobs’s vision of street life and the modern urban condition. The document presents a clear view of how the built environment can be instrumental in creating an ideal city by providing density and compactness, temporal layeredness, a variation of styles, heterogeneity, and services located in relatively small units (Helsinki City

56 Emplotting urban regeneration 2000, 41).6 The 2000 document concludes that a turn towards strengthening the “citiness” and urbanity of Helsinki is felicitously made possible by the freeing up of the formerly industrial shores (73). An enhanced urbanity can be accomplished by aiming for functional, social, and cultural diversity. Special mention is made of how important it is to “plan public space for public use, in particular along the shores”, and to provide locations for services, business, and workspace at street level (73). Eventually, the idea of Kalasatama as a “New City of Labour” was not retained. But several of the aspects of its imagined identity continue in the subsequent planning document of 2008 and are also evident in the city’s 2009 strategic plan. The commentary to the partial local master plan argues that “[t]he identity of Kalasatama is made up of the history of industry and labour and the positive image factors of the neighbouring area Kallio, such as urban lifestyle, a physically urban environment, young adults, respect for diversity, and unfnishedness” (Helsinki 2008b, 54). Urbanity was again linked to specifc choices in the built environment, but there was a subtle change in focus towards a hint of social exclusivity, with mention of “rooms with a view, loft-apartments, foating housing, and separate housing enclaves” (ibid.). What stands out in these planning narratives is an endeavour to link the Kalasatama area to a sociocultural image of traditional working-class areas in the historical north-eastern inner city, connecting this association to a particular vision of the area in terms of the built environment, lifestyle, and living preferences. The close attachment to the city centre is constructed both in material and symbolical terms. In planning documents, inclusion in the centre is repeatedly emphasized (Helsinki City 2008b, 19), as is the “urbanity” of the area (ibid., 24), also in terms of traffc solutions (ibid., 26), types of park (ibid., 36), and the urban morphology of the built environment (ibid., 40). But there is a notable tension between the planning emphasis on the area’s centrality, on the one hand, and, on the other, historical views of the industrial waterfront as a distinctly peripheral area (see Lehtovuori 2012), or the cognitive maps of inhabitants of Helsinki, for whom areas such as Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama have effectively long been blind spots (see Laitinen 2015b). The narrative construction of this area’s location in narratives in planning hovers between an acknowledgement that this area is not yet perceived as located in the city centre and the assertion that it will be so in the future. This can be seen in the tentative range of terms used to describe the area’s location. The commentary to the partial local master plan argues that the area is “close to the centre [keskusta]” (Helsinki 2008b, 54); on the development’s website, it is similarly advertised that it is “near the centre [keskusta]”, but also that it is “in the eastern inner city [kantakaupunki]” (Helsinki City 2018a; added emphasis). The area’s location in the “inner city provides the basis for the planning of the urban fabric; and this will express itself in effciency [i.e. density], the diversity of

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the city profle, and vibrant city life”. (Helsinki 2008b, 24) The urban fabric proposed in the plan is by consequence “explicitly city-like – urban” (ibid.). The in-between status of the area in the planning documents as being already situated in the inner city (which provides the premises for development), while simultaneously being part of an environment that will become a more integral part of the historical city centre, seems to have given rise to a particular neologism that can be translated as “internal city” (sisäkaupunki). The commentary to the partial local master plan notes that Kalasatama “has every possibility to develop into a part of the internal city” (Helsinki City 2008b, 37). The term seems coined for the occasion, perhaps invented because the more usual terms (inner city [kantakaupunki] or city centre [keskusta]) are areas to which Kalasatama is already said to belong.7

Metaphors of Kalasatama: “In the armpit of the city” Imaginative use of metaphors further strengthens the sense of Kalasatama as being emplotted within the larger narrative of the expanding city centre, an expansion that is (or so the plot implies) carried out in terms of its function (distribution of services and commercial activities), morphology (building height, building block structure), and mental cartography. Emphasizing the importance of rhetorical fgures of speech, Fischer and Forester have argued that problem-setting stories in policy documents tend to be constructed around “generative metaphors”, linking “casual accounts of policy problems to particular proposals for action” and connecting “accounts of ‘is’ and ‘ought’” (Fischer and Forester 1993, 11). Similarly, and drawing on Ricoeur, Kaplan has argued that metaphors “have the ability to bring together what at frst seem ‘distant’ into something ‘close’” (Kaplan 1993, 172). Kaplan’s description resembles literary scholar Paul de Man’s characterization of metaphor as a rhetorical trope that enables one “to recover what is absent” (de Man 1979, 47). Perhaps most important of all, metaphors are drawn upon when factual, down-to-earth wording is missing, when both author(s) and reader(s) are called upon to take a fight of imagination in order to make sense of what is being described. As critic James Wood points out, metaphor “is analogous to fction, because it foats a rival reality” (2009, 107). Metaphors are the language of epistemological uncertainty and coincide with the coining of new meanings. Metaphors in planning are not considered here as external to the material city and the processes that shape the material world; rather, they are seen as central to how problems and their solutions are imagined and formulated, and to how cities’ material morphology is framed and shaped. In the urban planning visions of Kalasatama, metaphor is indeed what bridges the gap between the existing present and the imagined future, concretizing in language the changes envisioned in planning. A frst, surprising metaphor with which Kalasatama has been advertised in a range of websites, brochures, and media reports is that of the development

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area as being situated in the “armpit of the city” (see e.g. Wilska 2012). The fact that the metaphor does not translate well (in Finnish, it does not sound unsavoury in the least) hints at the culture- and language-specifc properties of metaphors. In the English translation used in the offcial leafet, the slogan “in the armpit of the city centre” is translated as “Culture and life close to the heart of the city” (Helsinki City 2014c), which retains, but transforms, the original body metaphor.8 The metaphor implies a close and intimate relationship between this new development area and the city centre. There is a sense of cosiness and intimacy as if the district in question is envisioned as cuddling up to the warm body of the city. Neither of these associations is entirely innocent: the conceptualization of the city as body is a metaphorization with a long tradition in city writing and urban studies. In the early modern period, it heralded rational ways and new technical innovations in thinking about circulation and control in cities (Sennett 1994, 263–264). It re-entered urban planning thinking in the early twentieth century in the work of Patrick Geddes, and again in the so-called systems view of planning, which became dominant in the English-speaking world from the 1960s onwards (Taylor 1998, 62). In literary fction, it has also been consistently associated with a moralizing view of the city, and the capital or metropolis as the “body politic” and a mirror of society at large (see Williams 1973, 146). If the idea of the city as the body is, thus, far from innocent, so is the idea of Kalasatama as cuddling up to the city centre. As argued above, metaphors are used when more precise wordings go missing, and the use of this particular metaphor points to one of the central challenges involved in developing Kalasatama: how to defne this area and its position vis-à-vis the centre? Is this to be a village-like, new city district with an entirely new identity? Or merely one of the many sleeper districts along the metro line? Or is it an extension of the city centre? Choosing a particular storyline is not simply an issue of city branding. Particular narratives have practical and material repercussions: they are instrumental in guiding norms and visions in terms of projected building heights, street width, and the number of square metres allocated to local services and shop functions. The naturalizing metaphor of a district cuddling up to the warm body of the centre emphasizes the organic aspect of the area and its relationship with the centre, perhaps as a counterweight to Kalasatama’s present reality (in the 2010s) of what looks, in many respects, like a post-industrial ground zero, with ongoing construction and few trees or natural environments. The emplotment of this area is carried out also with the help of two other metaphors used in the same promotional text, although the implications are somewhat different. Kalasatama, which is frst introduced in terms of a “lagoon to my taste”, is described in highly evocative terms: Kalasatama is all about doing things together; it’s an ecosystem for all of us. Located a stone’s throw from the cultural offerings of Suvilahti

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and always within striking distance of the delicacies of Tukkutori market, Kalasatama is everything a bold pioneer could wish for! The Kalasatama forerunners look out to sea, as they always have. The sun will soon rise upon the majestic towers of the Kalasatama Centre, the skyscrapers of this pocket-sized metropolis. (Helsinki City 2015a; see also Helsinki City 2014b) The frst metaphor of interest is that of the “lagoon”, which evokes images of a pastoral, exotic, and natural environment in which man can recreate a new, wholesome relationship with nature. The second metaphor sets this pastoral imagery in further perspective: the new inhabitants of Kalasatama are described as “settlers” and “forerunners” (or, following the Finnish original, “pioneers”), transposing the national-romantic imagery of a Finnish “frontier myth” evoked in literary classics such as Väinö Linna’s Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Under the North Star; 1959–1962) to an urban setting. A settler rhetoric also draws on a Judeo-Christian view of nature as subjected to mankind’s guidance. In media representations internationally, the trope of the pioneer has also been used in relation to Kalasatama smart city project (see below). An article in the Huffngton Post advertises Kalasatama by noticing “[i]t will be fully developed by 2030 to house 20,000 people and provide 8,000 jobs but already has 3,000 pioneering residents living in it” (Abu-Fadil 2016, np). The implication of settler rhetoric is that of a spatial tabula rasa, the fction of a virginal space. However, as Robert Beauregard shrewdly points out, “[p]laces are never empty” (2005, 54), and planning tends to involve a “form of discursive displacement”, in which “[p]lanners and designers substitute a professional narrative for a multitude of shared histories, collective remembrances, and personal experiences”. The imagined emptiness of the area, implied by the reference to pioneers and settlers, can be seen as one of the strategies to prepare the ground for grand schemes that have little or no grounding in the area’s past, such as the “majestic towers” of the Kalasatama Centre (see below). Similar to the metaphor of the city as a body, natural metaphors – for example, that of the “lagoon” – are not without their moral and political implications. Zygmunt Bauman has traced the implications of such natural metaphors in legitimizing processes of exclusion, of “weeding out” otherness (1991; see also Pinder 2005, 50). Tim Cresswell has come to similar conclusions in his discussion of metaphors in (social and cultural) geography related to nature and the body: [b]ehind the weed (and seed) metaphor lies the ugly history of the more generally organismic metaphor, city as ecosystem. … The city as ecosystem is not just theoretically inappropriate; it is a way of acting which has serious consequences in people’s lives”. (Cresswell 1997, 336; original emphasis)

60 Emplotting urban regeneration In many respects, the elements of emplotment noted above – such as the discursive locating of a peripheral post-industrial area within the inner city, close to the “heart” of the historical centre, and the description of this inclusion and integration in terms of pioneers moving into an ecosystem – are in line with romantic and comic modes of emplotment, as outlined by Hayden White. Regardless of whether we posit the city, the planners, or the inhabitants as the protagonists of these narratives in planning, the plot development aims at a triumphant re-establishment of balance. It contains both features of the “drama of self-identifcation” and “reconciliation” (following the romance plot) and features of the “drama of redemption” (following comic emplotment; White 1973, 8–9), with city inhabitants fnding a renewed sense of purpose as pioneers of a new form of urbanity, and with previous ruptures in the urban fabric (in the form of industrial zones close to the heart of the city body) reconciled and redeemed with the mediation of urban planning.

Diverging narratives: Urban centre or shopping mall? In addition to the narratives in planning and those commenting upon the planning proper, a number of other stories and visions are told about Kalasatama, narratives that relate to the area’s imagined sociocultural identity and to ways in which services and cultural activities are going to be planned and organized in the area. These narratives illustrate the extent to which the development of one specifc area can give rise to a variety of (potentially conficting) narratives. One notable parallel narrative is that of Kalasatama as a “smart city”. It projects Kalasatama as “a model district of smart city development”, aiming to “develop services and solutions for improving livability, to seek new operating models and to offer a growth platform for new enterprises” (Helsinki City 2014c, np). Kalasatama’s smart city project began in 2013 and is advertised as the “World's most extensive smart city platform” (Hel.f 2018, np). Kalasatama is projected to constitute a platform for experimenting with “smart” services, with a “focus on smart mobility services, effective waste management, reducing food waste and co-creating local services”; some 70 companies are involved in the project (Helsinkismart 2018, np). To a certain extent, the narrative of Kalasatama as a “smart city” is detached from the plans for the built environment, and it deals primarily with questions of services, social media and the use of information technology, private–public partnership, and experimental business innovations. It can be considered as a narrative of planning, a storyline that is added on to and partly subsequent to the planning of the area. The relevant urban planning documents (Helsinki City 2000; 2008b; 2009a) do not mention the “smart city”. But there is also a sense in which the metaphor of the “smart” city is part of larger rhetorical storylines pertaining to Kalasatama. It feeds into the view of Kalasatama as an area with “cultural capital” (Helsinki 2008b,

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54), a pioneering and distinctly “urban” area with an international appeal. However, reading the narrative of Kalasatama as a “smart city” side by side with the planning vision for the area reveals friction and tensions rather than a clear alignment. The way the future inhabitants of Kalasatama are seen as interacting with their broader environment in the smart city narrative is not entirely compatible with the view of vibrant public space, street-level shops, and dispersed services, as found in the planning texts. The stated aim of Kalasatama’s “smart city” strategy is “one more hour a day” (Fiksukalasatama 2018), with the focus on providing individuals and families with the means to make their lives as effcient as possible. The idea of an effcient everyday life, in which daily chores are presented as annoying tasks that have to be carried out as quickly as possible, is aligned with a broader view of Kalasatama as it appears in connection with the shopping mall REDI (see below) and the area’s location as a hub within transport-oriented development. There is little room in such a view for the city as vibrant urban public sphere, in which lively street life and a functioning public space are seen as conditions for the good city. Although the professed aim in the plans (Helsinki City 2000; 2008b; 2009a) continues to be the development of Kalasatama as a distinct “urban” environment and an extension of the city centre, there has been a gradual shift in focus towards a development of Kalasatama as a transport hub, with a maximization of effciency, consumer interests, and return on investment. Nowhere is this shift more visible than in the transformation of the public-oriented “Kalasatama Centre” into the semi-private shopping mall REDI. The most conspicuous parallel narrative of Kalasatama is related to the development of the commercial centre of the area. Originally called simply “Kalasatama Centre”, the development was renamed “REDI” in a move that shifted the focus from creating a public service centre to developing a private building project and a shopping mall. REDI is advertised by Helsinki City as “a new high-rise landmark at the eastern gate to the inner city” and comprises eight towers, which “will be the tallest high-rise buildings in Finland” (Helsinki News 2015, 3). At the centre of REDI is a large-scale shopping mall. In offcial communications from the city, REDI is alternatively referred to as the “shopping mall”, as the “centre of Kalasatama” (Helsinki City 2015c, 6, 7), or as the “hub of Kalasatama” (Helsinki City 2016). An important shift happened between the publication of the 2008 plan of the area and the publication of the detailed plan of 2011 (see Ilmavirta 2018). The 2008 plan established that commercial space in Kalasatama by the year 2030 should be 20,000– 25,000 square meters, half of which, at maximum, could be built in a single large retail unit or a shopping mall. Anything more … would threaten the economic viability of the street-level shops in the area, and hence, jeopardize the fundamental aim of the plan. (Ilmavirta 2018; see also Ameel 2016b)

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The plan of 2011 presents a considerable transformation of those ideas: the volumes have … changed dramatically … The shopping mall space that is allowed to be built in Kalasatama has multiplied to 60,350 square meters. This is more than two and half times the maximum overall commercial space in the neighbourhood and approximately fve times the shopping mall space that was allowed in the master plan. This is heavily in confict with the planning offces’ evaluation … In one of the city’s most important regeneration project [sic] for decades, Helsinki is allowing a huge shopping mall to be built against its own planning policies and evaluations. The development of Kalasatama seems to be detached from the values the planning aims to achieve. (Ilmavirta 2018, 26) On offcial websites, the name “REDI” is explained as an old slang word for “roadstead” or sheltered waters off a coastline, which evokes, consciously or not, the “lagoon” image from the marketing quote discussed earlier. Few Finns, however, will recognize this word or its maritime references, and the most logical connotation is that of a Finnish spelling of the English word “ready”. Linguistically, it is a hybrid term that is easily misunderstood. The project itself is similarly referred to in offcial websites as a “hybrid between a shopping mall and a city centre” (SRV 2015, np), which will include several of Helsinki’s “frst skyscrapers”. The emphasis on “frst skyscrapers” can be seen in the context of an implied story of Helsinki as still on the road towards fully realized modernity, and as catching up on the international competition. Rather than drawing on a narrative of extending the Helsinki inner city and its positive characteristics, the way REDI and its skyscrapers are presented foregrounds international models of waterfront development. The argument for the construction is thus, quite literally, that Kalasatama is “following in the footsteps of the world’s trendiest dockland areas” (Redi 2016, np). In media coverage and marketing, narratives of this largely commercial venture have gradually overshadowed narratives of planning that had earlier focused on Kalasatama as centrally located city district. From halfway through the 2010s onwards, it is not “Kalasatama”, but the name “REDI” which is used in the media and in promotional narratives to describe the “largest urban building project in Finland” (Redi 2015, np). Similar to narrative strategies to emplot Kalasatama, REDI makes use of the metaphor of the city (district) as a body, suggesting that the shopping mall will play a central role in Kalasatama as the area’s defning identity marker. REDI is referred to by the project manager and by the offcial website of the Planning Department as the “heart” of Kalasatama and as the “landmark of the eastern city centre” (Redi 2015, np). On the ground in Kalasatama, too, REDI has staked out its share of Kalasatama. One of the promotional strategies since halfway through the

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2010s has been a conspicuous publicity tower dominating the northern gateway into Kalasatama, advertising the “largest shopping mall in the city centre”. By contrast, references to the toponym Kalasatama or to the area’s distinctive identity are less visible in the linguistic landscape – for example, in signs in the built environment (Figure 4.2). In several respects, the narratives and metaphors used in relation to REDI diverge from the emplotment of Kalasatama in planning narratives. Whereas planning documents emplotted a development of Kalasatama that oriented itself towards the city centre as a natural extension of the urban fabric, the emplotment of REDI focuses on the maximum commercial exploitation of the area’s location and contains several suburban or anti-urban narrative features. Kalasatama’s key narratives, those of its projected “urbanity” and of its perceived location in, or close to, the city centre (traditionally not the location of shopping malls), were no deterrents to the construction of this shopping centre, in which “the commercial activities of Kalasatama will be concentrated” (Helsinki City 2015b, np). In the background of these opposing visions of Kalasatama’s future is a tension between fundamentally different conceptions of “urbanity” and “citiness” that goes beyond the easy black-and-white distinction between “inner city” and “concrete suburb” discussed above (see Helsinki City 2000, 41). Building height is one of the bones of contention. Here is not

Figure 4.2 REDI publicity tower in Kalasatama. © Lieven Ameel, 2015.

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the place to unpack the complexities of these competing strands, but some features within these diverging storylines can be pointed out. Verticality, density, and compactness belong to the features of urbanity, as mentioned in planning texts published by Helsinki’s Planning Department (see Helsinki City 2000, 41). But there are considerable differences of opinion about how such density and verticality should be achieved, and what kind of density constitutes the desired urban environment. The kind of urbanity proposed in the frst narratives in planning for Kalasatama comes quite close to what Perlman has called “the mantra of the new urbanism: low rise, high density – made visually interesting by an absence of standardization” (2010, 329– 330). But, rather than a view of high density and relatively low-to-mid-rise (fve to seven storeys), again typical of Helsinki’s inner city, in combination with a densely used grid of street-level public space, typical of the historical city centre, the developments around REDI have become structured around exceptional high-rise, with mass transit that is set apart from the street level and guides city dwellers away from public spaces into the semi-public spaces of the shopping mall. In sum, in its scale and in its distribution of commercial activities, the commercial centre with its cluster of skyscrapers runs counter to the Planning Department’s vision of the urban characteristics of the city centre, both in terms of ideal building height (fve to seven storeys) and in terms of preferred small-scale, street-level commercial facilities (see also Ilmavirta 2018). A telling feature of how REDI is being emplotted within a broader narrative of urban development that is not looking inward towards the city centre but outward, towards the suburban fringe, is the imagined view which inhabitants will have from the top foors of the towers. Panoramic vistas are associated with cognitive power and with providing a sense of coherent meaning to landscape (de Certeau 1984). In real-estate advertisements promoting the high-rise apartments, the panoramic views are framed as an aesthetic commodity to be consumed, embodying the fnancial and cultural capital of these homes and their owners. Signifcantly, the view suggested in the advertisement is not one of the city, but one of the natural environment due east and south-east from Kalasatama. It is reminiscent of the promotional strategies used in one of the best-known examples of Finnish post-war suburban development, Tapiola, which was advertised as an evocation of a Finnish national-romantic landscape in a suburban context (Figure 4.3). A more recent advertisement, marketing the upscale apartments in REDI’s Loisto tower, hammers home the same national-romantic image of an idealized waterscape (SRV 2019). A young professional comes home to his high-rise apartment; he has received a present in the form of a small lighthouse (in Finnish, loisto), which he puts on a decorative table, then turns to admire the view of the archipelago – with virtually no references to the city in sight (Figure 4.4). In the autumn of 2018, when the shopping mall opened its doors, REDI landed in heavy weather. In media narratives, the picture was far from rosy:

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Figure 4.3 “Beautiful landscape apartments”, with an artist’s image of a view of the eastern Helsinki waterscape, evoking images of the lakes of inner Finland. © Lieven Ameel, 2018.

Figure 4.4 Screenshot from the advertising video of Loisto. © SRV, 2019.

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clients did not fnd their way to the shops, and the mall was considered by some to be chaotic and labyrinthic (Mykkänen 2018). The leading architect of the mall argued that the perceived chaotic aspect was caused by the decision to mimic the feel of an Italian renaissance city, such as Siena or Florence (Talouselämä 2018). This claim (which was quickly ridiculed in both social and traditional media) adds a further dimension to the contested question of how urbanity is understood in visions of the area, visions that had moved from the original idea of an extension of the city centre to the creation of a semi-public shopping mall, in the footsteps of international waterfront redevelopment, and fnally to the recreation of a renaissance inner-city feel within a privatized space. In terms of its imagined urbanity, Kalasatama has come a long way, from hopeful “urban renaissance” to an imitation-Siena within a shopping mall.9 It is notable that, when voices argued that REDI had been a failure in the autumn of 2018, this meant frst and foremost the failure to function as a space of consumption and proft maximization; a failure to attract large crowds from across the greater Helsinki area. There was no real refection on how REDI is failing or succeeding as service centre and “heart” of the growing community of Kalasatama inhabitants, or on what kind of effect REDI has or will have on the surrounding public space.

“How we live in 2033” What other visions of the future city come into play in Kalasatama, and how do they relate – if at all – to the narratives in and of planning of the area, including Kalasatama’s smart city aspirations? What kind of agenda do these visions set for the future city? One revealing document is provided by SRV, the developer of REDI, in the form of the pamphlet “How we live in 2033” (SRV 2013). The pamphlet was presented as the fnal report of SRV’s brainstorming on future living, held in 2013. It was part of a charm offensive to promote Kalasatama’s development and to market the high-end apartments planned for the area; the intended audience – although unspecifed – was likely not the general public, but potential clients and business partners. Several of the invited authors are prominent thinkers in urban studies and urban policy, among them Mari Vaattovaara, a professor in urban geography at the University of Helsinki, and Osmo Soininvaara, former leader of the Finnish Green Party, then vice-president of Helsinki city’s urban planning board, and a prominent advocate of a denser, more urban Helsinki. The most fascinating section in the pamphlet deals with what the (unspecifed) authors call “positive segregation”. The text, entitled “Segregation is good – how will individualization change the future of living?” (SRV 2013, 7–13), reads like a developer’s talk caught on an open microphone. Segregation, the authors assert, has been misunderstood. They claim that “[s]egregation is good” (7), and that the future city, as promoted by SRV

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in Kalasatama, calls out for segregation: “Future living needs segregation: exclusion, excluding, differentiation. … Segregation creates recognisability, predictability, and security” (9). Of course, the authors do not openly state that racial or ethnic segregation is intended here; rather, they speak of segregation on the basis of “identity and lifestyle” (9), with the suggestion that these have become more important than socio-economic factors. The text may well be well intended but reads like a cynical effort to advocate for socio-economically homogeneous environments under the veil of cultural preferences. It remains unclear where this “good” segregation leaves inhabitants who have fewer possibilities to choose from – perhaps they are allowed to thrive in places where only old-fashioned “negative” segregation has taken root? The text promises nice neighbours and a sense of community at a reduced price tag (which seems strange given Kalasatama’s price per square metre is well above the average in the greater Helsinki area) and asserts that this “good” segregation will be benefcial for a sense of community, as “it will be more probable that a sense of community comes into being where inhabitants are like-minded” (10). Again, Kalasatama has come a long way, from an original vision of urbanity as comprising ideas of diversity, vibrant public space, and unpredictability, to a vision of the city of the future where like-minded people stick together and where segregation based on shared lifestyles creates a safe sense of predictability. In “How we live in 2033”, the authors remind the reader of the fact that “positive segregation” – the congregation of an exclusive set of people with the right lifestyles and particularly demanding needs in terms of services and urban experiences – cannot be brought about by private means alone. It has to be facilitated by urban planning: But positive segregation does not come into being only through the work of the inhabitants. … It can be supported by public policy choices and urban planning. (9–10) Of course, this pamphlet from SRV cannot be equated with the political consensus within Helsinki City and its Planning Department, and it has to be dissociated from actual planning documents that are produced by the City Planning Department. It is not a narrative in planning, but a narrative of planning – commenting upon, and trying to shape the perception of, contemporary planning, as well as the direction of future planning. But this narrative of planning, produced by an important partner of Helsinki City in this area, shows some of the directions in which thinking on future urbanity has moved during the frst decades of the twenty-frst century. And its focus on living preferences that are supposedly blind to socio-economic or ethnic backgrounds also permeates some of the arguments that are found in Kalasatama’s smart city paradigm, with its emphasis on services for affuent, demanding, tech-savvy, and busy urbanites.

68 Emplotting urban regeneration There are hints in the planning documents of Kalasatama that SRV’s ideas for a public role in enabling “good” segregation have – to an extent – been incorporated in some of the planning of the area at an earlier stage. In its overview of new types of urban living, the 2008 commentary to the partial local master plan proposed what looks almost like a gated island community for “demanding and socially narrowly defned groups”: New forms of housing are also proposed on an island separated by a canal, north of the Kulosaari bridge. The island will have a semi-public character. Only people who have a reason to be there will go there. The island would be partly outside of the urban public space and will demand a new kind of urban planning. The island can also be seen as an alternative [as compared with detached houses in garden suburbs] for living environments that are aimed at quite demanding and socially narrowly defned groups in the greater Helsinki area. (Helsinki City 2008b, 40) In the local detailed plans, the proposed island was eventually not retained. A small channel provides some sense of seclusion for the building blocks (Helsinki City 2014e). But the quote above exemplifes some of the contradictions at the heart of the twenty-frst-century waterfront: on the one hand, there are real opportunities for providing more housing in a city with an overheated housing market and for enhanced access to public space. On the other hand, what can be inferred here is also the desire to lure middleclass families and affuent elderly citizens back from garden suburbs outside Helsinki’s municipal boundaries with the promise of elevated panoramas and high-quality, even exclusive, living environments.

A meshwork of contradictory storylines The examination so far may paint a comparatively critical image of narrative tensions in the development of Kalasatama, with competing visions of urbanity, community, and the imagined “good” city in different narratives in planning (Helsinki City 2008b; 2011a) as well as in related narratives of planning (SRV 2013; Hel.f 2018). It suggests that private interests and the need to attract affuent citizens have tilted the dominant storylines away from the more diverse, street-based vision of urbanity that was announced by the city around the turn of the century. It is important to note that the picture has to be further complicated by also adding storylines that remain partly subdued in narratives in planning and also that the narrative dynamics in and of planning of Kalasatama are still, in part, emerging. Some of the most interesting narrative threads in the planning of Kalasatama, especially in view of international comparisons with other contemporary waterfront developments, remain somewhat implicit in the planning texts or in the media narratives about the planning texts. This may be

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owing to the fact that they relate to questions that are governed by other city departments than the Planning Department, or because they relate to issues that are taken for granted in a Finnish or Helsinki context. I call these underdeveloped storylines – storylines that could have been developed more explicitly as part of the narrating in and of planning, especially in view of their consequences for the urban built and lived environment. I will briefy sketch some of the more important of these underdeveloped storylines. The frst element is the aim of Helsinki City and its Planning Department to have a mix of different housing solutions in terms of private ownership, social housing, and intermediate forms. The most important intermediate form comprises Helsinki’s own housing price-and-quality control system, HITAS. Although there is much debate concerning the effciency and possible drawbacks of HITAS (see e.g. Loikkanen and Lönnqvist 2007; Yle 2012), the aim of Helsinki City is to have all new developments constructed according to the 20–40–40 principle: 20% social housing, 40% intermediate forms, and 40% unrestricted private market. This distribution key is also applied to prestigious and potentially highly desirable upmarket areas, such as the waterfront districts of Kalasatama, Jätkäsaari, and Kruunuvuorenranta. In the planning documents for Kalasatama, there are only passing references to this principle; there is one mention of the fact that the offcial “Helsinki housing programme provides the basis for the housing form of the residential plots in the area” (Helsinki City 2008b, 60). Kalasatama is effectively being constructed following these principles. Especially in comparison with international large-scale waterfront developments, such as the early twenty-frst-century development of the Manhattan waterfront or the London docklands, the Helsinki housing programme does set ambitious aims for mixing social, private, and other forms of housing in the context of highly desirable neighbourhoods. Some references are made to this quite remarkable feature in narratives of planning (see Soininvaara 2011). But, given the importance of mixed housing for the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the city, the limited reference to Helsinki’s regulated housing mix in narratives in planning is striking, and this is a storyline that could have been more explicitly developed. A second and partly related element is the degree of public land ownership and the extent of public access to the Helsinki shore. Similar to the Helsinki housing programme, this is not something specifc to the newly developed post-industrial harbour areas, which is perhaps why little reference is made to this feature in narratives in and of planning. Again, in particular when compared with international examples such as contemporary waterfront development in New York or London, the rigorous aims of accessibility in planning the Helsinki waterfront are somewhat obscured by the general lack of references to these aims in narratives in planning. A third feature, which has gained substantial media attention and has also spawned considerable academic research, while being largely absent from narratives in planning, is temporary use in Kalasatama. The shores of

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Kalasatama have seen a wide range of temporary (cultural) use of the area (see Hernberg 2012; Lindberg 2012). One of the most widely mediatized examples is the DIY public sauna Sompasauna, located on the southern tip of Kalasatama – in effect one of the rare anarchistic constructions in the city (see Bird, Fransberg, and Peipinen 2016). Temporary use in Kalasatama has not been unequivocally lauded; Maros Krivy, in his examination of temporary use and the Suvilahti area adjacent to Kalasatama, has argued that “non‐planned, temporary use as an end in itself … is transformed [in the case of Suvilahti] into a strategy (‘means’) to obtain a specifc objective (‘additional value’)” (Krivy 2013, 1741). But, to inhabitants of and visitors to the area, temporary use, from open-air concerts to the DIY sauna, from an actively promoted graffti wall to the Ihana café, provides services, sites for self-expression, as well as new experiences and unexpected vistas towards both Helsinki and the developing area. In such instances, temporary use can amount to minor insurgent practices (see Hou 2010), small but effective place-making tactics with which citizens take an active role in the production of their environment and the narratives that it generates (Friedmann 2010; see, however, Shaw 2020). The function of such temporary use could have been more fully foregrounded in narratives in planning. A fourth feature in the development of Kalasatama that is relatively underrepresented in how the area’s development is narrated to Helsinki’s citizens is the area’s smart city vision for open data. Kalasatama’s smart city narratives tend to revolve around the promise of effciency, encapsulated by the “one more hour a day” claim, in texts published by the city as well as in the media. I argued above that this narrative runs counter to the city’s own vision of the good city as centred on vibrant public space, contingency, and unpredictability. But the Helsinki smart city district projects also include solutions that are aimed at community-building, such as Kalasatama’s Nifty Neighbour (Nappi Naapuri) project, “a social media for neighbourhoods” (see Helsinkismart 2018; Saad-Sulonen and Horelli 2017). Perhaps most important of all, the city actively addresses one of the most pressing problems in the smart city paradigm: what happens to the data provided by citizens? Helsinki actively pushes for open access to data, in efforts that are coordinated by Forum Virium (see Forumvirium 2019). A ffth feature is the active investment in public art and culture-based place-making strategies. Among these, the “percent for art principle” stands out: “the practice of spending a certain portion of a construction project’s budget on art” (Pulkkinen and Hannus 2015). Kalasatama is one of the areas where the “percent for art principle” is applied: 70% will consist of permanent artwork, 15% of temporary artwork, and 15% of events. The frst public artwork in Kalasatama is Timo Heino’s Line Drawn in the Water, a 12-metre piece that consists of a canoe raised on a curved metal pole and was completed in 2014; it references historical and contemporary sea-faring technologies as well as the area’s maritime history (Helsinki City 2018c). Kalasatama also features imaginative use of place names (including the names of streets and public squares or quays), with historical references

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to the area’s blue-collar history, to its maritime history, and to ships that had their home port in the area, as well as to the islands erased in the construction of the harbour during the twentieth century (see Lehtonen 2018). The public artwork in the area and the evocative place names do not amount to narratives proper, but they do have a clear narrativity – the ability to evoke stories about the area (see Chapter Two; Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu 2016, 139). The kinds of story that are evoked are also – to a degree – aligned with Helsinki City’s broader storylines for Kalasatama as a formerly blue-collar district with strong maritime ties. Again, this could have been more explicitly developed in the city’s narratives in planning. The various art projects carried out in Kalasatama, mostly coordinated by the Eskus Performance Centre under the umbrella of “Kalasataman taidetalkoot” (Kalasatama’s joint art project), have as one of their primary goals strengthening the sense of community, performing a “place-making” operation through cultural activities (Eskus 2015). Both Kalasatama’s smart city project and the art project by Eskus emphasize the active cooperation between city, inhabitants, and companies, supporting the idea of a Kalasatama narrative that is “created in cooperation” and told in a spirit of togetherness. The Kalasatama smart city project and the work of the Eskus Performance Centre have seen considerable community engagement. But, in the planning of Kalasatama, planning texts show little evidence of participation or deliberation beyond the minimum legal requirements. Similar to contemporary planning in Jätkäsaari, the urban development here can be seen as “planlead”, with “(limited) involvement of the public” (see Othengrafen [2012] 2016). Regardless of the many narrative characteristics that can be found in the planning texts (in the sense of narratives used explicitly to promote the area and the invitation to the public to engage in storytelling about the area), it has been argued that the planning of Kalasatama is defned by a relatively low degree of communicative action and deliberation. When it comes to planning for resilience, it has even been argued that the degree of communication with the participants involved has been low: in a comparative examination of resilience to fooding, Heleen L.P. Mees found that, in the case of Kalasatama (and the planned foating district in Kalasatama, in particular), there was “hardly any participation; participation was restricted to information meetings and legally compulsory participatory evenings”. As a consequence, Mees argued, decision-making had a low degree of legitimacy (Mees 2013, 263). In a separate, related publication by Heleen Mees, Peter Driessen, and Hens Runhaar, both the “quality of participation” and the “quality of deliberation” were considered to be low: “decision-making is in the hands of public offcials” and “deliberation among public and private actors does not occur” (Mees, Driessen, and Runhaar 2013, 678). With sea levels set to rise, fooding risks are more than ever worth public deliberation. But Mees notes that, from 2014 onward, the national government will no longer compensate damage due to fooding, and there had been no risk communication to citizens (Mees 2013, 261).

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Conclusion Narratives in planning documents, as well as narratives of planning in media (and other) coverage of Kalasatama, make use of narrative strategies that “emplot” an area and its development. This involves a double process of locating events within a geographical location and within a narrative intrigue. Metaphor is one of the key rhetorical devices used to direct emplotment. In the case of Kalasatama, planning narratives make efforts to link the area’s development culturally and historically to Helsinki’s north-eastern historical working-class districts and aim to project the development of the area within the narrative of an expansion of the city centre, both in terms of its built environment and in terms of its functions. Metaphors used in the promotional texts disseminated by the city further embrace this narrative in terms of a natural extension of the city. There are also counter-currents in the way the development of Kalasatama is envisioned. Some of these emphasize the area’s future identity as a close-knit pioneer community connected by information technology innovations. A particular case is that of the emplotment carried out by narrative strategies that were used in relation to REDI. Time will tell how these partially competing narratives will transform into the built and lived environment of the future Kalasatama, and to what extent the vision of a district in the “urban” fold of the city centre, including vibrant street life and small-scale storefront businesses, is compatible with the construction of a large shopping centre explicitly envisioned to become the “heart” of the area.

Notes 1 Literally: fsh harbour. 2 Parts of this chapter have been published elsewhere as a separate article (see Ameel 2016b). 3 Literally: slaughterhouse. 4 It should be noted that the commentary to the partial local master plan is a highly generic document, which leaves little room for creativity. In the Planning Department, standardized forms are used, with much of the text already given, and blank spots for the planner to fll in. 5 The district of Arabia, north of Kalasatama, is named after the ceramics factory of the same name and is located along the shore of the Old Town Bay (Vanhankaupunginlahti), near the site of the founding of the city in 1550. 6 The author of this section is Pasi Mäenpää, a scholar with a distinctive interest in city as materialized narrative; see, for example, the publication Sanat kivettyvät kaupungiksi (Words petrify into the city; Mäenpää et al. 2000), co-edited by Mäenpää and published in 2000. 7 The term is explained in more detail in the conceptual section of a 2014 Helsinki City Planning Department publication, in which it is defned as describing an “area larger than the inner city” and bordered by the frst ring road; the term had been used before in another Planning Department publication in a slightly different way, denoting a somewhat smaller area (Helsinki City 2014d, 17).

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8 An academic article published by researchers at the City of Helsinki Urban Facts similarly made use of the “heart” metaphor when positioning these new areas within Helsinki: “The new harbour in Vuosaari to the east of the city centre gave the city the opportunity to build a signifcant number of dwellings and premises on excellent spots close to the very heart of the city and the waterfront. … The new residential areas, e.g. Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama, combine proximity to the heart of the city with a thrilling environment” (Holstila et al. 2016, 188). 9 In 2019, REDI proudly announced that it was awarded the prize for the best new carpark at the European Parking Awards (EPA 2019). It is again a reminder of how success is measured in REDI, and how far the development has come from earlier visions of Kalasatama as an “urban” environment with vibrant street life.

5

Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari

Jätkäsaari is one of several locations on the Helsinki waterfront that came under development at the beginning of the twenty-frst century, following the relocation of industrial harbour activities to the eastern part of the Finnish capital.1 Jätkäsaari is located in the south-western corner of the Helsinki peninsula and is also referred to as the West Harbour. Strictly speaking, the West Harbour (Länsisatama) denotes both the functioning passenger harbour and the areas of Jätkäsaari, Ruoholahti, Eiranranta, Munkkisaari, Salmisaari, Hernesaari, and Telakkaranta.2 Construction, which began in 2009, is projected to reach its conclusion around 2030 when the area is planned to be home to 21,000 inhabitants and 6,000 jobs (see Othengrafen [2012] 2016, 137–174; Helsinki City 2018b). In its broad outlines, the context of Jätkäsaari bears a number of similarities to international examples of urban waterfront development: a post-industrial waterfront area close to the city centre, with changing port functions and pressures to add new housing stock to a congested market. The planners actively drew links with existing developments, notably with Hammarby-Sjöstad in Stockholm (Helsinki City 2008a, 43). Other examples nearby include Ørestad in Copenhagen; Matti Kaijansinkko, the Jätkäsaari project manager, was one of the architects involved in the development of Ørestad in the 1990s. In the nineteenth century, what is now Jätkäsaari used to be a set of small islands and rocks with fshing activities, a few holiday mansions, and a hill that was used for sledging in the winter (Helsinki City 2008a, 11; Helsinki City 2009b, 14–19). In the 1910s, the area was turned into a harbour and connected by railway to the central railway station. Harbour expansion continued throughout the twentieth century. With the relocation of freight activities to Vuosaari around the turn of the twenty-frst century, the area became available for development. The frst inhabitants moved into Jätkäsaari in 2012 (Figure 5.1). Important factors in the area’s positioning within the city are its closeness to the historical city centre and its position adjacent to Ruoholahti, where there is a metro station, a large shopping centre, and the Cable Factory cultural centre,3 all in relatively easy walking distance for the inhabitants of the developing area. Jätkäsaari is one of the waterfront areas with unimpeded

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Figure 5.1 Information pillar in Jätkäsaari. © Lieven Ameel, 2015.

visual access to the open sea, and a walk along the water offers views of the city’s historical centre, the open sea, and islands (Pihlajasaari, a popular recreational destination, Melkki, and Lauttasaari). In contrast with Kalasatama, there is little or no temporary use in the area, although some can be found in the adjacent Hernesaari area. Particularly important for the development are the ongoing activities of the West Harbour, which has become the largest passenger harbour in Europe and is still an active cargo harbour, with considerable traffc passing through the area. In the planning process of Jätkäsaari, narratives can be found in manifold forms, including planning documents that run into the hundreds of pages, offcial websites with historical stories of the area, and the graphic identity created for Jätkäsaari by the marketing agency BOTH. The most conspicuous narrative element in Jätkäsaari’s planning process was the commissioning of Hyvä jätkä (Good Chap), a literary novel written by Hannu Mäkelä (2009), to be distributed to everyone moving to Jätkäsaari. Although there

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are few historical landmarks in the area, efforts have been made to integrate buildings with historical value in a way that activates their “narrativity”, their ability to evoke a story (see Chapter Two). Such buildings include the harbour magazines designed by Lars Sonck (integrated into the Clarion conference hotel, see below) and the Huutokonttori, the building where harbour labourers came to solicit work, which has been transformed into an info centre, library, and exhibition room showcasing the development. What are the key storylines that appear in a narrative examination of planning in Jätkäsaari? And what tensions and contradictions arise from the various stories told in planning documents and in more localized narratives of planning in the area? In the frst part of this chapter, I argue that one of the key tensions that appears from an examination of the narratives for, in, and of planning of Jätkäsaari is the disagreement over closeness to or distance from the historical centre and what it means to be “urban” in the context of these new waterfront developments. The frst part of this chapter looks at the plans for a Clarion Hotel in Jätkäsaari, which illustrate several of these tensions. The relevant narratives (also within the texts emanating from the Helsinki City Planning Department) oscillate between a focus on urban fringe versus city centre; between high versus medium building height; between a vision of global harbour versus village-like, inner-city urban community. The second part of this chapter examines the novel Hyvä jätkä (Good Chap) and shows how the dominant genre in this novel, the Bildungsroman, is also the dominant generic frame found in the planning of this area. One specifc aspect that arises from analysing the novel side by side with planning narratives is the discrepancy between the dominant narrative of the area as a “man’s island” (with a pun on the name of the area, literally “chap’s island”) and the alternative idea to develop Jätkäsaari around the theme of a “women’s city”. In the third and fnal part, I consider a range of other narrative elements that are relevant for the dynamics at work in the development of the area, including the naming and the linguistic landscape of the area, as well as the sustainable and “green” storylines in the planning.

Dominant narratives in planning of Jätkäsaari The dominant story told in narratives in planning of Jätkäsaari is that of an area that forms an integral part of the city centre. It is a narrative that, in effect, realizes in language the processes set in motion by planning. The story is told in many of the extensive textual narratives produced by the Helsinki City Planning Department (Helsinki City 2008a; 2009a; 2009b). One of the opening sentences in the section “Urban construction objectives” of the commentary to the partial local master states that, “Jätkäsaari will continue the densely built environment typical for the city centre” (Helsinki City 2008a, 13). One objective of the development of the harbour is to turn the area into “an energetic city district” which is “part of the city centre

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[keskusta]” (Helsinki City 2014f, 15). The following text, part of the impact assessment in the partial local master plan of Jätkäsaari, is exemplary in how it tells the story of a changing Helsinki as well as Jätkäsaari’s role in the overall development: Jätkäsaari is a part of Helsinki’s southern district, to which also EtuTöölö, Kruununhaka and areas south of these belong. The number of inhabitants in this area has declined during the last four decades from almost 150,000 to 96,000, in other words, with more than 50,000 people. The construction of Ruoholahti has raised the number of inhabitants momentarily. The losses due to out-migration, however, have continued. In the year 2003, for example, 539 more people moved away from the southern district than into this area. The construction of Jätkäsaari will improve the vitality of the inner city [kantakaupunki]. (Helsinki City 2008a, 60) This particular story of Jätkäsaari as being situated in the Helsinki centre, and of its development as benefting the city’s viability, reappears several times in various, and sometimes very diverging, narrative forms. In its most basic form, it posits the city planners or the city plan itself as the agent of change for the better of the city. It is a prototypical recovery (or restitution) narrative, describing decline (in inhabitant numbers), intervention (by the plan), and proposed recovery (for the restitution narrative, see Frank 1995, 75 ff.). The narrative quoted above not only tells a regeneration story, but it also makes several rhetorical arguments, in specifc wordings: it posits the earlier loss of inhabitants as undesirable, it equates urban vitality with the number of inhabitants, and it marks Jätkäsaari as an area identifed with the central, core area of the Finnish capital.

Simple story, complex story, and micro-narrative The story narrated in the above quotation is only a small fragment of the partial local master plan (which totals 66 pages plus appendices), and this plan is only one document among the dozens of planning documents pertaining to the area of Jätkäsaari. What is the relation of such a particular and quite limited narrative to the complete narrative product constituted by all of the planning documents of a particular area? In narrative terms, and drawing on Patrick O’Neill (2005; see also Prince 1973), we could defne such a limited narrative fragment as a “simple story” which in turn is part of a “complex story” (in our case, the total of relevant planning documents). In its most typical form, a “simple story” tends to have a clearly outlined protagonist or protagonists who tries/try to overcome obstacles in order to achieve certain ends. A “complex story” is then a combination of various “simple stories”, in which storylines, obstacles, sub-achievements, helpers,

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adversaries, and so on are added to the main storyline. In the story above, the planners can be seen as the protagonists, who aim to improve the overall vitality of the city by developing Jätkäsaari. The various “simple stories” encountered in the rest of the partial local master plan can be considered as added storylines that outline the challenges of the area and the solutions that are proposed to achieve the stated ends: measures are taken, for example, to ensure smooth waste management (Helsinki City 2008a, 46) and noise reduction (ibid., 51), and to overcome challenges posed by contaminated soil (ibid., 48–59). One additional concept, complementing the distinction between story and narrative, simple story and complex story, will have to be introduced to complement our toolbox for examining policy and planning narratives: the micro-narrative. As pointed out in Chapter Two, it is crucial for a story that it involves a change of situation. A typical change in situation can be formally described as follows: A > B > A¢ In its most simplifed form, A presents the original situation, followed by change B, which results in a modifed situation A′. A specifc narrative can tell this story in a range of progressions: chronologically, retrospectively, or with gaps in what is narrated. A micro-narrative4 differs from fully-fedged storytelling in that it does not involve recounting all three stages outlined above (A > B > A′), but only one of the three, referring to the other two implicitly. Typically, this takes the form:

[ A > B > ] A¢ A micro-narrative, then, describes a change of situation only by implication; the full chain of events is suggested rather than narrated in full. It is a narrative that tends to be presented in the form of one sentence and may resemble an advertisement slogan. In planning, micro-narratives are of particular importance, as they tend to encapsulate strategic planning objectives. In the case of Jätkäsaari, the prevalent micro-narratives argue that this area, until recently underdeveloped and situated at the shoreline fringe of the capital, is going to be an integral and distinctly “urban” part of Helsinki’s city centre. In offcial documents (including internet sites and offcial brochures) emanating from the City Planning Department, micro-narratives of this story are often, in one form or another, among the frst arguments, or they function as the title of the text. On the Planning Department’s Jätkäsaari website in 2013, the frst sentence states that “Jätkäsaari will become an urban part of the city centre, with on-street shops and cafés” (Helsinki City 2013c, np). In the partial local master plan, there are several micro-narratives that evoke the same strategic vision. An intriguing sense of immediacy is added in the Finnish original of the text because it uses the present tense to express the future. This is perfectly normal in the Finnish language, which lacks a

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clear future tense. Literally, the text says that “Jätkäsaari is an urban part …”, and the context makes it clear to the reader that the narrative describes a transformation about to take place in the immediate future. The narratives presented by the Planning Department pose as factual statements (of the type “Jätkäsaari is … located in …”) but are describing a slowly changing situation which they are actively shaping. It is illustrative of Throgmorton’s insight that rhetoric is not only persuasive but also constitutive (1993, 121). Following John Austin’s analysis of the speech act, these are narrative acts that perform something close to a perlocutionary function (1962, 101–107). The description of Jätkäsaari as city centre does not communicate factual information about a present situation, but actively shapes the world, by informing the audience’s and planners’ vocabulary of this specifc area, and by concretely steering the development on the ground. Micro-narratives are incidentally also frequently picked up by the media and by private companies involved in a project, and they are foregrounded in narratives that comment upon planning (narratives of planning). Several private and public partners of the Helsinki City Planning Department use micro-narratives that are remarkably similar to those found in planning documents to defne the area: “Jätkäsaari, which will be built on the site of a former container harbour, will be a frm part of Helsinki’s city centre” (Lemminkäinen 2013, np); “the newest property is built in Jätkäsaari, part of the city centre and near the open sea” (Hoas 2012, np); “the former container harbour Jätkäsaari will change into an attractive residential area in the city centre by the year 2023” (Ramboll 2014, np). In all three cases, the texts are arguably aimed not at the general public, but at potential clients or partners, audiences that need to be won over for commercial purposes. In such cases, micro-narratives perform a function akin to that of advertising slogans. Locating Jätkäsaari discursively in the inner city of Helsinki activates a number of associations with relevance for the development, and these associations are made explicit in the frst lines of the Helsinki City website that introduced Jätkäsaari in 2018: In Jätkäsaari, you live in the inner city [kantakaupunki], which means dense and sheltered closed building blocks, as well as cafés, restaurants, and on-street shops. Services are in walking distances and with the tram you can get easily to various destinations. (Helsinki City 2018b, np) The emphasis on Jätkäsaari as a new, but distinctly “urban”, the city district, which extends the existing fabric of the city centre, is closely bound up with the broader narrative in planning of Helsinki’s development following the turn of the twenty-frst century. The post-war development of the city, which included sprawl, suburbanization, and decreasing inhabitant numbers in the centre, appears to be countered with a narrative of innercity renaissance promoted by, among others, political actors who have

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Edward Glaeser’s Triumph of the City (2011) on their bedside table (see e.g. Soininvaara 2013). An important aim of the city is to attract families with children to stay in the inner city, an aim in which the city has been largely successful (Helsinki City 2009b: 36; Lilius 2019). Some of the narratives in planning outlined above are primarily concerned with giving future inhabitants a general idea of what the area might look and feel like, but it should be emphasized again that several of these narratives are not merely superfcial embellishments to the tangible developments on the ground. The narratives found in the planning documents proper, in particular, have a thoroughly performative character: they will translate planners’ visions into the stone, glass, and concrete of the built environment, with consequences, in particular, for building height, housing block structure, public transport solutions, and service allocation. The narratives of Jätkäsaari as part of the city centre signal a commitment to “closed building blocks”, “on-street shops”, and “urban” forms of public transport such as trams, as illustrated in the quote above.

Narratives for planning in Jätkäsaari All planning would do well to start out from a survey of existing narratives of the site – the kind of narrative mapping outlined in Chapter Three. In the case of Jätkäsaari, no locals (in the strict sense) could have been consulted to provide narratives for planning, as the area has not been inhabited since the late 1910s. However, even a cursory examination of the literary and historical accounts of this area may shed light on the kinds of narrative this area has in store, especially if we consider Jätkäsaari as part of Helsinki’s long shoreline, an area with a distinctive identity. One of the crucial stories that can be found in several of the narratives in the literature and historical documents of this area is that the waterfront functions as a place largely outside the normal urban fabric, a peripheral area in transformation (see Chapter Three). It is a storyline, in other words, that is diametrically opposed to the dominant storyline of Jätkäsaari as integral part of the inner city. This is not to say that local narratives for planning are entirely absent from the narratives in planning. In the case of Jätkäsaari, several forms of local stories are present in planning documents, but only in the form of rewritten and summarized narratives. In the partial local master plan, the history section provides less than half a page of text, starting with the historical overview in 1913, when the building of a cargo harbour in the area began (Helsinki City 2008a, 11; see also Helsinki City 2009b, 14–19). The relevant section is not only very brief but also presents a particularly selective overview of the history of the area. The earlier history of the area as a small group of islands inhabited by fshermen and used by Helsinki’s citizens as a recreational area is only tangentially referred to. There is no information on how or why historical storylines were selected, and there are no original local narratives (diary entries, letters, historical documents) or direct references to these.

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In the planning documents relating to Jätkäsaari, narratives by affected parties, such as the inhabitants of the neighbouring areas, are generally not recorded as individual stories; instead, they feature exclusively under the guise of reactions to the planning processes, as commentaries to narratives in planning. Inhabitants of neighbouring areas were invited to give their opinion as part of standard planning procedures, and planning documents include references to the interaction with citizens during the preliminary planning phases as part of the section “Opinions expressed” (Helsinki City 2008a, 64–65; Helsinki City 2009b, 88–89). In this case, too, all local stories are available exclusively in the rephrased form, although the partial local master plan refers the reader to the City Planning Department web page, where the orally presented comments have been made available in written form.

Jätkäsaari’s identity marker: The hotel controversy The planning practices surrounding a specifc area may continue for years or even decades, and successfully disseminated narratives in planning may subsequently be picked up in local narratives of planning and be fed back into the planning process as genuinely local narratives for planning (see Figure 3.1). In Jätkäsaari, this process can be seen at work in the case of a controversial hotel project. The case, which took several years to be resolved, also illustrates the procedural and communicative nature of planning, in which narratives in planning are continuously adjusted to refect changing societal and political preferences. In the background of Jätkäsaari’s hotel project is the importance that planners of the area attached to creating a clear identity marker and landmark (with the towers acting as “markers of the area’s identity” and “entrance gates”; see Helsinki City 2009b, 39, 45), as well as a new taste for high-rises in Finnish cities in the early twenty-frst century. The frst plans for Jätkäsaari allowed for a tower hotel of up to 16 storeys (ibid., 45) – a fairly radical proposal from the perspective of Helsinki’s historical skyline. In 2012, changes were proposed to allow for a 33-storey tower (Helsinki City 2012a), to be constructed by a Norwegian private investor. Upon completion, it would have been the highest building in the Helsinki peninsula. When local voices challenged this ambitious high-rise project, they did so by using and adapting the stories narrated by the Planning Department itself, embracing the narrative of Jätkäsaari as part of the centre in their argumentation against high-rise. After all, a height of fve to seven storeys is presented as typical of Helsinki by the City Planning Department itself (Helsinki City 2008a, 4). If Jätkäsaari was supposed to be part of the city centre, it followed that high-rise buildings did not ft the profle. The independent blogger Arto Pesonen was one of the commentators presenting this view: “Jätkäsaari is part of the inner city [kantakaupunki]”, hence, the tower hotel does not ft the area (Pesonen 2013, np). Opponents ranging from local groups to the Helsinki City Museum (Helsinki City 2012b, 2)

82 Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari drew on the narrative of Jätkäsaari as part of the city centre to contest the building of high-rise in this area. The groups opposing the project comprised a range of individuals, local organizations, and offcial instances (cf. Berglund 2012). A residents’ association representing inhabitants from seven southern Helsinki districts sent a worried letter to UNESCO in early May 2013, complaining about the impact of the hotel on the world heritage site of Suomenlinna and implying that the hotel project lies within, or affects, both the “historical centre of Helsinki” and the “UNESCO World Heritage buffer zone” of Suomenlinna (Etelaiset 2013). In an offcial report commissioned by the Planning Department, the Helsinki City Museum did not support the hotel project, arguing that it was not in agreement with the scale of the “uniform Helsinki centre [keskusta]” (Helsinki City 2012b, 2). Similar to the City Museum, locals who presented written objections drew on the narrative of Jätkäsaari as part of the city centre. No word-for-word transcriptions of their argumentation are given in the offcial documents, but the following summary of citizens’ arguments puts the case clearly: They [the planners] want Jätkäsaari to be part of the old city centre, in which case it should conform to the profle of the city centre in terms of building height. (Helsinki City 2012b, 6) In the Planning Department’s offcial reaction to the objections made by the City Museum and by other actors, the status of Jätkäsaari was presented as ambiguous, as being somewhere between an integral part of the inner city and a peripheral district. The Planning Department argued that there was a distinction between the “new” and the “old” centre and claimed that the location was so much on the margin of the centre that the hotel would not interrupt the “homogenous urban structure of the inner city [kantakaupunki]” (Helsinki City 2012b, 3). In its defence of high rise in this area, then, the Planning Department distanced itself from its own dominant narrative of the area and tried to make a case that Jätkäsaari was both within the city centre and, simultaneously, outside the “historical”, “core” centre of the city. Some public commentators sided with this position. Blogger Hannu Oskala, for example, associated with the Green Party, which was part of the city’s governing coalition at the time, argued in his blog that the urbanity of Jätkäsaari was different from that of the “old” city centre, which was why he did not oppose the hotel project (Oskala 2013, np): I would on no account support building a 33-story tower in the old inner city [kantakaupunki]. … Jätkäsaari, however, is not the old inner city – it is a new district, with a new look.

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Centre or periphery? As some of the commentators pointed out, the Helsinki City Planning Department had added to the confusion by publishing maps that alternately included and excluded Jätkäsaari in the historical inner city. In a document produced by the Planning Department, “High-rise building in Helsinki” (Helsinki City 2011b), most of the city centre and its adjacent neighbourhoods are designated as “Area A”, where signifcantly higher buildings are not allowed. Jätkäsaari, however, is excluded from this area and falls under a special “Area B”, where a high building is allowed (see also Pesonen 2013). Two maps in the report are of particular interest. In the frst map (see Figure 3.2), Jätkäsaari (south-west from the circle representing the core of Helsinki) is marked as part of the “expanding inner city” (kantakaupunki). In the second map (see Figure 5.2), the same area remains outside “Area A”, where no signifcantly higher buildings will be zoned. It is notable that, in the strategic spatial plan of Helsinki, Jätkäsaari is again unequivocally designated as part of the “main city centre” (Helsinki City 2009a, 18; see Figure 5.3). Opponents and defenders of the tower hotel alike invoked the imagined link between Jätkäsaari and the city centre and took sides in the issue of whether, and to what extent, Jätkäsaari was an integral part of the city centre. In this case, the strong rhetoric of the Planning Department, which emphasized Jätkäsaari’s character as part of the centre and the inner city, backfred. In May 2013, the city council voted down the plans for a 33-storey hotel by one vote (43 to 42; Helsinki City 2013d). In November 2014, it gave the go-ahead for a considerably downsized hotel of 16 storeys, the scale proposed in the original design (Helsinki City 2014g). Although the outcome refects general uneasiness on the part of Helsinki politicians and voters to accept radical high-rise buildings in or near central Helsinki, it also refects how narratives may move from one context to another during planning processes. Examining how storylines are transformed from narratives for planning into narratives in planning and back illustrates that a similar story can be used either to oppose or to support specifc narratives. It also points to the diffculties local parties may have in putting across their own narratives of a specifc area and its development. After all, this narrative interaction was, to a considerable degree, defned by frameworks set out by the dominant player: the Planning Department. The recycling by opponents of the plans of a story told by the department itself reveals some of the cunning, but also some of the impotence, of local voices trying to counter dominant narratives on their own terms. In Jätkäsaari, the material effects of narratives for, in, and of planning are only now taking shape, and it may be too early to fully gauge the extent to which planning narratives of this area as an integral part of the urban centre will transform into stone and concrete, and into people’s everyday

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Figure 5.2 Area A: “No new buildings that are signifcantly higher than the present height scale are planned”. © City of Helsinki, 2011.

experiences. In the case of the Jätkäsaari hotel tower project, it is a narrative that has, in any case, been effective in downsizing the projected high-rise tower hotel.5 What emerges from this examination of competing storylines is the importance of stories that “travel” between different types, and the position of narratives with ambiguous status. When categories partly overlap and where narratives have hybrid authorship, such as in the case of local narratives that are gathered in participatory processes (partly narrative for and partly narrative in planning), but are selected and rendered by planners, the

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Figure 5.3 A map of Helsinki in the strategic spatial plan, with Jätkäsaari denoted as part of the city centre (E2 on the map). © City of Helsinki 2009.

examination of stories and their transformation is of particular relevance for dissecting power struggles and the appropriation of local counter-narratives.

Narratives of planning in Jätkäsaari Narratives of planning – as outlined in Chapter Three – can be anything from local stories of the development area told orally or on social media to literary fction (such as Zola on Haussmann in nineteenth-century Paris), media narratives, and branding. In the case of Jätkäsaari, the branding and media narratives of planning show a varying degree of complicity with the narratives forwarded by the Planning Department. The awardwinning branding campaign by the design agency BOTH (Both 2013), for example, can be considered as an example of a hybrid type: a narrative of planning that remains close to the narratives in planning that appeared almost simultaneously. An equally interesting case is presented by Jätkäsaari’s Facebook page: emanating from the Planning Department, it can be considered to be part of the Planning Department’s narratives (narratives in planning), but, in the way it reposts and links narratives by other users, it also directs a particular way of telling stories of the area (narratives of planning). At the height of the hotel controversy, Jätkäsaari’s

86 Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari Facebook page was forwarding posts by vocal defenders of the hotel project (Helsinki City 2012c). Narratives of Jätkäsaari produced by the media and by private companies function more independently, but, as noted above, there tends to be a noted similarity between micro-narratives found in planning documents proper and those published in media narratives of planning. The following micro-narrative from the construction magazine Talotekniikka, for example, reads almost like a direct adaptation from a promotional brochure for Jätkäsaari: “Jätkäsaari is one of the most recent developments in Helsinki. It will become an urban and unique part of the city” (Talotekniikka 2012, np). Narratives of planning can refer to a development area in spectacularly imaginative ways, and they can go a long way in questioning and contesting dominant narratives. Antti Tuomainen’s novel Parantaja (The Healer; 2010), an apocalyptic novel which is partly set in a future 2030s Jätkäsaari, gives a revelatory perspective on the vision of Helsinki’s waterfront development as posited by Helsinki City Planning Department (see Ameel 2018b). Much of the rhetoric of Jätkäsaari’s planning narratives is bound up with the idea of integrating the formerly peripheral waterfront into the central city. By contrast, in Parantaja, this vision is crumbling under the strains of global upheaval. As a result of a future ecological catastrophe, Jätkäsaari (and similar zones currently being developed in Helsinki) returns to the status it has had for much of Helsinki’s modern history: a marginal zone, outside the borders of the decent, the moral, and the normal. Society in this novel is punished for its hubris, and the areas that had been reclaimed from the city’s watery fringes are the frst to go. The discouraging image of Jätkäsaari in Tuomainen’s novel only makes sense when read against the backdrop of the optimistic narratives present in the planning of this area. It naturally feeds into the pre-planning narratives of the area as an essentially liminal space, while simultaneously contesting the Planning Department’s narrative with its focus on the area’s centrality. In Chapter Four, emplotment was taken as one key narrative concept with which to examine planning texts side by side with narratives of planning. In the second part of this chapter, genre, and the genre of the Bildungsroman, in particular, will be used as a key framework with which to approach different kinds of narratives of a particular site, across planning and fction.

A Bildungsroman for a waterfront development The aim was to make Jätkäsaari – a central section in the three-tier West Harbour development project – known in a new kind of way. (Laitinen 2015a) Now Jätkäsaari has become well-known … the marketing side is important, because apartments have to get sold so that construction is continued, and also to ensure that it would not become a sleeper city, it has

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to get business activities, it has to get public transport going … and all this boils down to that it is well-known …. Nobody will invest in business in a place they don’t know … it would remain empty, such an area, windy and grey. (Laitinen 2015b) With the above words, Timo Laitinen, the former project manager of the West Harbour development in Helsinki,6 recounted the aims he had in mind when taking the unusual step of commissioning a literary novel to accompany the planning of Jätkäsaari, Helsinki. The novel in question, Hyvä jätkä (Good Chap), written by the locally renowned author Hannu Mäkelä,7 was published in 2009 and is being distributed to all new inhabitants of the area. The use of literary fction to accompany urban development raises several questions about the interplay between different kinds of narrative in the context of planning, as well as about their intended function. Should cultural products in planning be examined primarily in terms of marketing and place-making, as the quotes above suggest? Or would it be more astute to consider them as part and parcel of the broader narrative strategies involved in planning? I argue that, by producing a dense, intertextual interrelationship between fctional narratives, complex cartographic material, and planning narratives, the novel written by Hannu Mäkelä draws attention to the literary and narrative characteristics of planning itself. In doing so, it invites us to look with new eyes at other texts and practices coming from the city and its Planning Department. Hyvä jätkä was published in a period when other marketing efforts for the area were well under way. The most notable of these were the highly mediatized concert of Madonna in Jätkäsaari on 6 August 2009, 1 day before the local detailed plan for Jätkäsaari became effective (Helsinki City 2009a; see Laitinen 2015b), and the marketing campaign for the area was launched (Both 2013). Hyvä jätkä tells the story of the area in the decades running up to the 1910s when the area was transformed into an industrial harbour. It focuses on the coming of age of one fctional inhabitant of Jätkäsaari, Johannes Fri. Johannes, born in 1895, lives together with his mother on the island and matures in the course of the novel into a young man who practises many of the various urban trades Helsinki has to offer, from construction worker to brewery hand, from bakery boy to labourer in a shipyard. He experiences a political awakening during the volatile frst decades of the twentieth century, and his life is formed by the dichotomy between experiences of the sea and experiences of the city.8 The novel’s subtitle, “a narrative”, suggests that this is a work of mere fction which relates to the planning of Jätkäsaari only tangentially in that it deals with the history of this area. The novel’s epilogue, written by Hannu Mäkelä, emphasizes that the author had a free hand in selecting and structuring his material, an argument that has been corroborated through

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interviews conducted with both the author and Timo Laitinen, who commissioned the book (Mäkelä 2009, 313; Mäkelä 2015; Laitinen 2015b). When taking into account the material surrounding the text, such as the blurbs (on the inside of the dust jacket and on the back of the book), the epilogue, the photographs and the fragments describing the history of the area in an appendix, as well as the map of the area in the book, a more complex picture appears of the book’s relation with the other narratives produced by the city and its Planning Department. Such materials surrounding the literary text proper have been called by the literary theorist Gérard Genette “paratexts”. They are “thresholds of interpretation”, crucial for how the reader approaches and interprets a work of fction. Genette has argued that such material constitutes the “fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text” (1997, 2). The blurb on the inside of the dust jacket, written by Timo Laitinen, provides the frst such framework for interpreting the events described in the novel. Laitinen writes that Hyvä jätkä was conceived as a condensed narrative of the cultural and personal narratives of the area and, in particular, of stories from the area before harbour activities began in the late 1910s. He adds that the aim of the book was to give the future inhabitants and users of the area an insight into the history of Jätkäsaari and the people that used to live on the island. Most of the other paratexts, however, draw the readers’ attention not so much to how this book describes the early twentieth-century past, but to the fact that the events described in the novel are intimately connected to the area’s twenty-frst-century future. The historical descriptions added as appendices at the end of the novel, for example, look forward to the time when Jätkäsaari’s transformation, to be fnalized in the 2020s and 2030s, will have taken place and when the area will be connected to the Helsinki centre by tram no. 8 “once and for all” (Mäkelä 2009, 312). It is a statement that frames the history of the island (as it appears in the literary text proper) in teleological terms; the struggle to integrate the area into the city centre will have reached its logical fnal stage once the current planning development is completed. One of the most revealing paratextual elements is the map of the area (reproduced in the frst and last spread of the book), which shows the location of the original rocky islands in the area, the contours of which were erased by the construction of the harbour in the 1910s. Overlaying these are not the outlines of the city of Helsinki at the time of writing, but those as they will appear in the late 2020s when construction of the area will have been completed (see Figure 5.4). This palimpsestic map shows the complex temporal dimensions within which the fctional text operates: it describes events in the area leading up to the 1910s but looks forward to events that lie in the future (from the point of view of the time of writing). The historical events described in the novel are not only to be seen as leading up to the present time but are explicitly framed as events that should be interpreted in terms of future developments – and vice versa. The map, with its orientation

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Figure 5.4 Map of south-west Helsinki around 1900, with superimposed contours of the city around 2030. © City of Helsinki 2009.

towards a future dictated by the Planning Department, contextualizes this novel as a literary text that resembles urban planning documents. This contextualization is also carried out by another paratextual detail – the mention that Hyvä jätkä is published by the Planning Department of the City of Helsinki – an institution that is obviously more associated with policy documents than with publishing literary novels. In addition to the paratextual elements of the text, the genre of the novel, too, invites the reader to consider the events in the novel as commentaries on the planning narratives pertaining to Jätkäsaari. The novel is constructed as a Bildungsroman, a “novel of development”, and the plot offers not only the description of a young man’s coming of age but also that of a marginal urban area (Jätkäsaari), the transformation of which is rendered in terms of a late nineteenth-century urban utopia – all within a text that is aimed explicitly at early twenty-frst-century readers who are moving into the same area and who will be living in what is, in effect, a building construction site. One of the dominant genres of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Bildungsroman (see Bakhtin 1986; Boes 2006) is not without its political and socio-economic underpinnings. It is the “‘symbolic form’ of modernity”, as Moretti points out (1987, 5), and it has a special relation to narratives of society’s development, the rise of the middle class, and

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accelerating processes of modernization and industrialization. These processes tend to be couched in terms that underscore the linear and teleological (if often bumpy) road towards progress. More to the point of this study, the Bildungsroman is also bound up with a character’s integration into the urban environment: in its most conventional form, “it depicts a young man abandoning provincial roots for an urban environment to explore his intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual capacities. Whether nurturing or inimical, this new environment proffers the possibility of attaining wisdom and maturity” (McCarthy 2005, 41). Hyvä jätkä tells of the emergence of what is at frst described as a marginal character, and the integration into a modernizing, urban environment, in a twofold manner: frst, in the way it renders the evolution of the protagonist, and second, in the way, it describes the transformation of the protagonist’s spatial double: the island Jätkäsaari. Protagonist and area are described as living in a close relationship, and the character’s development is presented as largely determined by his spatial surroundings. This close connection is made evident in the play of words in the title – the protagonist is the “good chap” (Hyvä jätkä) of the title, but the “chap” (jätkä) in question can also be interpreted as an abbreviation of the island’s name (Jätkäsaari; “chap-island”), and the title suggests positive qualities both for the protagonist and for the island he inhabits. Like Johannes Fri, son of a Swedish-speaking father and Finnish-speaking mother, moreover, the island is presented as having a double linguistic identity. In the novel, it is referred to by its Finnish name, Jätkäsaari, its Swedish name, Busholm, as well as by the Helsinki slang name Byysa (a Finnicized form of the Swedish name). Framing parallel developments of a character and their surroundings as symptoms of society’s change is thoroughly in line with the generic features of the Bildungsroman (in particular in its realist form), a genre that tends “to emphasize the deterministic relationship between protagonist” and environment (Keunen 2001, 426–427; see also Bakhtin 1986). Thus, in Hyvä jätkä, the protagonist’s slow incorporation into society, from being a poor fsherman’s son to self-taught construction worker and baker’s boy (in turn constructing and feeding the city), is described as in tune with the growing interdependence between the island and the rapidly developing Finnish capital. The modernizing processes culminate in the physical linking of the island with the mainland by means of an embankment that Johannes helps to construct and in the development of the harbour, which will in turn gather pace and feed the further growth of the capital. The upward mobility of the protagonist is physically mirrored in the transformation of the built environment, but, as so often in novels that describe the changes from cyclical to more linear experiences of the world, the way in which these transformations affect the protagonist is far from unambiguously positive. Given that this is a novel commissioned for an urban development project, it is striking that the relation between urban planning and the affected citizens is not without its strains. The development of the city

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and the expansion of the harbour enable the protagonist to become a fullgrown member of the city community, but, in the process, he also loses his home. As the harbour expands, citizens of the island have to move out. Urban development is described as a violent process that devours its children: “When the war [the First World War] would be over, the harbour would most probably devour us slowly, and we would be out of the way, buried under streets and warehouses” (Mäkelä 2009, 245). The image of a harbour able to “devour” its own children implies a metaphorization of the modernizing city as a hungry and demanding monster, an image that resonates with the widespread literary trope of the city as a heathen Moloch, set loose by modernization. The description echoes a whole range of similar evocations of modernity in Finnish Helsinki novels written around the turn of the century, several of whom Mäkelä had consulted when doing background research for his novel (Ameel 2014b, 92–96; Mäkelä 2009, 314). Marshall Berman points out that the literature of modernity is a relentless parade of “people who are in the way – in the way of history, of progress, of development; people who are classifed, and disposed of, as obsolete” ([1982] 1989, 67). In Berman’s reading, the literary embodiment of such obsoleteness is the innocent couple Philemon and Baucis in Goethe’s Faust, whose fate is reminiscent of that of Johannes’s mother in Hyvä jätkä: she is a fgure of the past, desperately clinging to the offcial document she believes will entitle her to her place in an environment that is transformed beyond recognition. To Helsinki’s urban developers, Johannes Fri and his mother are not only disposable but, for all practical purposes, also invisible. Representatives of the planning department visiting the island are described as exhibiting utter disregard for the original inhabitants: they trot around people’s backyards with measuring sticks to draw the future plans of the area, literally treating them as if they were not there (Mäkelä 2009, 206). Fri is, as his (Swedish) surname suggests, a free man, but his powers, like that of the island he inhabits, have to be reined in and channelled through processes of education (Bildung, development) in order to be made useful for society. The protagonist refects on his own position in society in terms that mirror the island’s relation with the outer world, moving reluctantly from seclusion to inclusion. When he considers becoming more active politically, he refects that he would prefer to be “on the side lines, just as he had been until now. But can one be on the side lines all one’s life?” (Mäkelä 2009, 246). Gradually, the island becomes connected to the mainland, and the protagonist’s chosen isolation is challenged. He is drawn into society – a development that is also concomitant with a slow, upward social mobility. As the palimpsestic map in the book exemplifes, the novel gains much of its meaning from the complex dynamics between the description of the area’s transformation in the early twentieth century and the implied visions of planners at the time of the novel’s writing. It acts, then, not as a refection on the past, but as a mediation between the past and the future. A crucial fgure who links turn-of-the-twentieth-century planning visions to those

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in the early twenty-frst century is the secondary character Onkel (Uncle), based on Julius Tallberg. Tallberg is a historical character (1857–1921), a successful businessman and active member of the city council, who had a considerable infuence on Helsinki’s development around the turn of the twentieth century. He had envisioned the development of Jätkäsaari into a garden-city-like urban villa society, a project that is referred to in the novel as well as in the historical appendices (Mäkelä 2009, 80–84, 305–306). Several of the visionary talks aimed by Onkel at the young Johannes Fri can be interpreted as being aimed, at least implicitly, at present-day readers: And then he [Onkel] painted me his picture in broad strokes and bright colours, so that I, too, could see how in Byysa [Jätkäsaari] a complete city would rise up, built of villas and houses, where the new homes of people were waiting for their inhabitants, where there would be paths and roads, a swimming pool and parks, schools and shops. And a church, too! (Mäkelä 2009, 82) This passage illustrates the complex functioning of a literary text that is set in the past but communicates with the future. With the beneft of hindsight, the reader of Hyvä jätkä knows that Tallberg’s original plans to turn this area into an integral part of the city came to nothing during the frst decades of the twentieth century. The promise of a utopian urban environment remained unfulflled. The island was integrated into the modernizing urban fold of the capital, but, in the course of this process, Jätkäsaari was turned into an industrial harbour area and closed off from Helsinki’s inhabitants. This past dream of a future development that was never realized is, at the time of writing the novel, presented as a vision that will be realized by the twenty-frst-century plans for Jätkäsaari’s future. That is what the map in the text, with its superimposed cartographies of past and future, argues: the visions presented in the novel will come true in the twenty-frstcentury plans of the Planning Department. This orientation towards the future is acknowledged in the epilogue to the novel, which admits that the commissioning of the book “is about the future development of Jätkäsaari” (Mäkelä 2009, 313). The irony of the novel’s double perspective is that, at least in a number of details, the future vision of Tallberg has been shelved for a second time. During several phases in Jätkäsaari’s recent planning, plans for a swimming pool and for a church island were on the table (Helsinki City 2008a). Hannu Mäkelä was particularly charmed by the church plan (Mäkelä 2015). Plans are subject to change, however: the church will not materialize, and the fate of the swimming pool, too, remains uncertain.9 Hyvä jätkä not only describes the development of a protagonist and the area he inhabits, it also offers a detailed account of the aesthetic and experiential layers of meaning attached to this particular area, in particular in

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terms of the important dynamics between peripherality and centrality acted out on the waterfront. The liminal experiences of the island in the novel are largely in tune with the narrative mapping in Chapter Three, which establishes that liminality is a key feature in cultural narratives of the Helsinki waterfront. The island, as it is experienced by the protagonist, appears as a liminal space of possibilities in which the spectre of death and the possibilities brought about by the sea are constantly present. The fear of death associated with the waterfront is forcefully present from the opening pages when the protagonist is introduced to the reader as a young boy who has lost his father at sea and whose mother lives in constant fear of the boy’s drowning (25). On several occasions, the protagonist feels the sea called out to him as if it were death itself (85). At the same time, however, the sea also provides the family with food and work. The boy learns to fsh, and the mother, who works as a cleaning lady, cleans the dirty sheets of the city’s bourgeoisie in the seawater. The sea thus presents a threatening, but also cleansing and bountiful, force of nature. The island is not only closely connected to this overwhelming presence, it is repeatedly identifed with the sea: “The island was a part of the sea, it was impossible to escape that” (40). Closely intertwined with this liminal identity is also the sense that space is continuously in fux, that it never reaches a stable and fnal form. The protagonist senses that, “nothing in the world ever remains the same, or in the same place. The only thing that was eternal was change” (85). The second striking element in the way the area is experienced in Hyvä jätkä is the way this is an area defned by, and facilitating, the polyphony of the city. It is an area where a rich variety of cultural and linguistic narratives intersect. The protagonist’s father is Swedish-speaking, whereas his mother is from Finnish-speaking inner Finland, a bilingual heritage that refects the linguistic balance in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Helsinki when around half of the capital’s population spoke Finnish and the other half Swedish. The close co-existence of Finland’s two national languages is also refected in the different names given to the island in the novel (see Mäkelä 2009, 20) and in the numerous reference to Helsinki slang, a sociolect richly interspersed with words borrowed from Swedish (for explicit examples, see e.g. 71; for Helsinki slang, see Paunonen and Paunonen 2000). Jätkäsaari is also experienced here as an environment with close links to Finland’s immediate neighbours. It is an area where Russians are visibly present, and not only in the form of oppressors (Finland was part of the Russian Empire until 1917): the protagonist’s fancée has a close friend who is Russian. The fshermen on the island have long-standing commercial ties with Tallinn and with Sweden. The area’s close historical ties with Estonia, Sweden, and Russia, by way of age-old historical trade links, are made evident on several occasions. In sum, Hyvä jätkä is a Bildungsroman in which the development of both the island Jätkäsaari and the protagonist is described in similar terms: both are developing and maturing under circumstances that describe the

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modernization of Helsinki and the development of the Finnish nation-state. The Helsinki waterfront is described as a liminal space of possibility, defned by its nearness to the sea; a border line between nature and culture that is in constant movement. In ethnic and linguistic terms, this is also a diverse urban environment, with meaningful and long-standing international contacts, and with a varied linguistic cityscape.

Planning as Bildungsroman In the way it frames the history of Jätkäsaari, and in the way its paratexts guide the reading of the text, Hyvä jätkä invites intertextual readings of this novel and contemporary urban planning documents pertaining to Jätkäsaari. The invitation to read such planning documents in terms of their narrative features is further strengthened by Finnish planners’ own comments concerning the narrative characteristics of their activities (Koivu et al. 2013, 13), as well as by recent developments in urban (planning) studies that point to an increasingly narrative understanding of planning (see Introduction). Similar to Hyvä jätkä, the planning documents of the area contain narrative features that resemble those typical of the Bildungsroman, projecting the development of Jätkäsaari as the integration of a marginalized character into the natural urban fold of the city centre. In the planning documents of Jätkäsaari (Helsinki City 2000; 2008a; 2009b), the most prominent protagonists are the area itself (and, in some instances, the City of Helsinki), as well as the planners (or planning). Inhabitants or locals affected by the planning are largely absent as protagonists – a fact that may indicate the extent to which this planning development has been conceived of in terms of a rather traditional, modernist top-down project, rather than as part of a postmodern “collaborative” or “communicative” planning paradigm (Innes 1995; Healey 1997). The key story of Jätkäsaari’s development as narrated in planning documents is that of reintegration into the centre of the Finnish capital and, concomitantly, of a regeneration of Helsinki’s centre. Urban development is argued to enable the formerly peripheral area to fulfl itself as an integral part of the city centre (Helsinki City 2008a, 8, 13). The interaction between Jätkäsaari and the city is envisioned in terms of a mutually benefcial relationship. The new development is argued to decidedly “increase the vitality of the city centre and to improve the conditions for the development of the city” (Helsinki City 2008a, 8). Development of Jätkäsaari (and other similar, formerly industrial areas) “increases the number of inhabitants of the centre, sustains the population of the centre and the economic basis for the city and it will also enhance the regional balance between living and working areas” (Helsinki City 2000, 15). Development will not only sustain the existing urban balance; it is also argued to reverse a negative evolution, countering the earlier decline in numbers of inhabitants in the Helsinki peninsula (Helsinki’s southern district) during the four

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decades running up to the planning, and introduced as a counter-measure to this downward trend (Helsinki City 2008a, 60; see above). In this sense, the story of Jätkäsaari is couched in terms of a turning point, drawing thus on a widespread metaphor that features prominently in literary, media, and flm narratives (see Nünning and Sicks 2012). The metaphor is explicitly used by the Planning Department, which posits the development of Jätkäsaari and Helsinki’s industrial harbour front as a “historical turning point” (Helsinki City 2000, 19) in the history of the Finnish capital. This “turning point” is not only understood in terms of an upward surge in population fgures but also in the way the new plans present a radical new vision of the city and its development. The development of the Helsinki waterfront is presented as a clear break with the earlier, post-war urban development that had resulted in semi-self-suffcient concrete suburbs separated from the historical centre (Helsinki City 2000, 5–17). Instead, the relocation of the industrial harbour activities will enable an expansion of the city centre in which the notion of “urbanity” takes on a key role. Urbanity, which is understood as a combination of features of the historical centre’s built environment, its social functions, and its mental associations, will be extended almost like an antidote to the trailing areas immediately adjacent to the inner city – areas that have remained underdeveloped but that, with the aid of planning, will be drawn into the benefcial development of the inner city (Helsinki City 2000, 38–43; see also the discussion of urbanity in Chapter Four). It is, in effect, the story of an “urban turn”, in tune with international talk of an urban renaissance popularized by Edward Glaeser and others (see Gleeson 2012). This turning point not only runs counter to the earlier direction of Helsinki’s urban development, but it also literally moves in an opposite geographical direction: instead of moving inland and away from the centre towards the northern suburbs, as had been the case in earlier suburban development, it expands the urban core towards the southern shoreline of the Helsinki peninsula and its surroundings (Helsinki City 2000, 15–17). The narrative of Jätkäsaari’s development in planning documents resembles the plot structure of the Bildungsroman in several respects – frst of all, in the manner it presents a story of mutually benefcial integration, under the aegis of a world in transition. In the Bildungsroman, the relationship between a developing protagonist and a changing society is informed by a tension between what both are and what they could be. Summerfeld and Downward point out that the Bildungsroman describes how a protagonist’s emergence coincides with the world’s, and is at a transition point from one era to another. Becoming in transition creates tension, and frequently, a sense of contradiction, most evident in the protagonist’s vacillation between the ideal and the real, between potentiality and actuality. (2010, 170–71)

96 Genre and metaphor in planning Jätkäsaari In the planning of Jätkäsaari, the integration of the marginalized protagonist (Jätkäsaari) and its environment (the surrounding areas in Helsinki) involves similar strains. In the projected outcome, however, these are resolved, resulting in a harmonious and mutually benefcial relationship. It should be noted that planning narratives envisioning Jätkäsaari’s development describe a rather passive integration into the urban environment, in which several of the personal characteristics of the island are erased to enable the city to fulfl its potential. Agency does not belong to the peripheries, but, rather, to the centre that absorbs them. By contrast, the novel Hyvä jätkä envisions a much more complex relationship between peripheral environment/character and the inner city. Throughout the novel, the protagonist struggles to keep his sense of agency, his ability to move independently, as well as the relationship to the sea that is one of his – and the island’s – identity markers. In this sense, the almost religious experience the protagonist has when he learns to kayak on the sea, late in Hyvä jätkä, acts as one of the counter-narratives to the powerful story of development-as-integration visible in the novel. The Bildungsroman’s ideal, of course, had strong ideological undercurrents. It envisioned a wholesome individual in harmony with a wholesome society, a vision that was refected in enlightenment visions of a harmonious spatial environment that could lead to a well-educated citizen able to maximize his or her contribution to society (see e.g. Rabreau [1997] 2013; Zukin 1992, 492). Similarly, in the planning of Jätkäsaari and Helsinki’s waterfront, a causal connection between a good environment and a good human can be discerned. In an early planning document produced by the Helsinki Planning Department examining the effects of development on the city’s post-industrial waterfront, the project of expanding the sense of “urbanity” is not only argued to be benefcial for the city’s development, it is also described as a project that makes for better citizens. The report explicitly argues that one of the main strengths of urbanity is that it facilitates “citizens’ development into good individuals, who alone and together are able and willing to develop human culture” (Helsinki City 2000, 1–2). This utopian vision of better citizens through a better city, reminiscent of turn-of-the-twentieth-century planning paradigms (see Wilson 1991, 69), is explicitly upgraded in terms of twenty-frst-century concerns of a globalizing, increasingly multicultural world: distinctly “urban” environments are also understood to be better environments than concrete suburbs when it comes to integrating immigrants (Helsinki City 2000, 67). The Bildungsroman was not only supposed to describe education and development; in its ideal form it was a literary genre that was also meant to educate the reader. Bearing this in mind, one of the ways in which the lengthy explanatory sections of planning documents (Helsinki City 2000, in particular) can be approached is that these constitute narratives aimed at educating the reader in a more “urban” attitude to the city. The same could be said of several of the promotional brochures and websites produced by

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the Planning Department in relation to Helsinki’s long shoreline during the past decades: they constitute endeavours to educate their readers towards new modes of urbanity and towards a new appreciation of the inner city and the kind of “urban” experiences it engenders.

“Man’s island” or “women’s city”? The link between a good urban environment and a good human is established in the marketing narrative of Jätkäsaari by way of a metaphor that has also been feeding into the media coverage of the area, as well as in Planning Department leafets and offcial social media profles of the development area. The predominant metaphor used in framing the transformation of Jätkäsaari is the identifcation of the area with a male fgure, an association based on the name of the area (jätkä = “chap”). It is no coincidence that the metaphorization of the area resembles the close, almost symbiotic relationship between the “good chap” Johannes Fri and the island Jätkäsaari in the novel Hyvä jätkä. The slogan for the marketing campaign, “Hyvä jätkä” (Good chap) was, in fact, inspired by Hannu Mäkelä, author of the book by the same name (Mäkelä 2015). When interviewed, Timo Laitinen, who was responsible for commissioning the novel, emphasized the importance of the book among the overall branding activities: “the book was an extra factor in all this [marketing], and provided a story. A story that could support these [other marketing efforts]” (Laitinen 2015b). In the marketing campaign that heralded the use of the “good chap” metaphor, Jätkäsaari’s attractiveness was staged in distinctly gendered and masculine terms. Large, black-painted containers were distributed at the site of the planning area, featuring slogans in which the island’s name was abbreviated to the masculine jätkä (“chap”) and describing the area as having a masculine sex-appeal (see Figure 5.5). Narratives inspired by the marketing campaign’s focus on the area’s industrial past, a gendered can-do attitude, and a masculine attractiveness have also appeared in social and traditional media. The offcial Facebook profle of the planning area, for example, tended to abbreviate the name of the area as merely jätkä and used slogans from the marketing campaign to frame news about the area (Helsinki City 2012c). Metaphors provide a bridge between the present state and a future possibility, between what “is” and what “ought” to be (Fischer and Forester 1993, 11). In guiding particular readerly associations and excluding others, metaphors can be instrumental in picturing seemingly logical or natural courses of action (see Cresswell 1997). Although the metaphor of the city as body has a considerable history in urban studies, it is not unproblematic (see Chapter Four; Sennett 1994; Gunder and Hillier 2009, 33). The metaphorization of Jätkäsaari in gendered or corporeal terms is far from “natural” and could have been constructed on entirely different associative grounds. Body imagery was also used in one of the most mediatized alternative plans

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Figure 5.5 Container with the slogan “This chap has got an island – and it’s a big one”. In the background, Jätkäsaari under construction and the tramway turnaround. © Lieven Ameel 2016.

for Jätkäsaari, which proposed the development of the area in the form of a hand, with additional artifcial channels to create what would have looked like additional fngers from a bird’s eye view (Lehtovuori and Lehtovuori 2007).10 Intriguingly, in an early draft of the area’s development, the proposed identity of the area was “women’s city” (Helsinki City 2000, 27–28). This concept, which draws on the long-standing feminine metaphorization of Helsinki as the Daughter of the Baltic (see Ameel 2014b, 20–23), posited the area as “the gateway of the white daughter of the Baltic” and “as such as a front window of Helsinki’s and Finnish culture” (Helsinki City 2000, 27–28). The “women’s city” would have been meant to convey “the production of Nordic gender equality and Finnish female energy as a built environment” (Helsinki City 2000, 27). The link between Jätkäsaari and the metaphorization of Helsinki as the Daughter of the Baltic was also made in the opening speech given on the occasion of the start of construction in Jätkäsaari. Helsinki’s mayor, Jussi Pajunen, claimed that, by opening up the waterfront, “the daughter of the Baltic is submitting herself to the sea, her former hunting grounds” (Mattila 2008; see Chapter Two).

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The two contrasting metaphorizations of the area’s possible (gendered) identity also shed some light on the lack of deliberation with regards to strategic visions of the Helsinki waterfront and its development. There has been no public discussion of the “women’s city” vision of Jätkäsaari compared with that of the “good chap” identity – like the later marketing campaign of the area, the vision was initiated from within the city, without consultation with the public (for the top-down planning in Jätkäsaari, see also Othengrafen [2012] 2016). The proposed identity of “women’s city” was quietly shelved, without consultation. It is important to note that this is not the frst time in the imaginative production of Helsinki’s identity that a female-gendered vision is given the cold shoulder. A vision of Helsinki as a “women’s city” was also part of the promotional brochure for the Helsinki European Capital of Culture campaign in 2000. Considerable controversy was caused by one particular picture which, some claimed, could be interpreted as that of a Russian or Estonian prostitute and, accordingly, was not representative of the preferred kind of “women’s city” (see Cantell 1999, 229–244). A similar controversy had already surrounded the iconic Havis Amanda statue, the allegorical image of Helsinki as Daughter of the Baltic, a century earlier (see Kalha 2008). To what extent do narratives – and genres such as the Bildungsroman or metaphors such as the “women’s city” – matter for concrete developments on the ground? What could have changed if the Planning Department had chosen to follow the metaphorization of the area in terms of a “women’s city”? At the very least, one could argue that such a choice would have had its effect on the street names – none of the streets in Jätkäsaari is named after a woman, although several are named after male composers.11 It is hard to gauge what the effect could have been in terms of built infrastructure. In terms of investment in art, culture, social services, and other immaterial infrastructure, the comparison between Jätkäsaari and its counterpart in the east of the Helsinki peninsula, Kalasatama, is revealing. The same early document that proposed the concept of the “women’s city” for Jätkäsaari advocated for the concept of “City of Labour” for Kalasatama (Helsinki City 2000, 25–27), with the aim to strengthen the links between the area’s ties and the historical blue-collar districts immediately adjacent to it. Later planning documents have embraced this identifcation of Kalasatama with Helsinki’s gentrifying formerly blue-collar districts of Kallio and Sörnäinen, and with the area’s location within a “science–art industry axis” towards the Arabia and Viikki areas (Helsinki City 2008b, 5–7, 19, 37; see also Chapter Four). Funding has been allocated to support creative artist collectives that feed into this cultural identity, and the area has been given over to temporary use to foster its identity as a creative hub (Hernberg 2012). All of these developments largely contrast with the current lack of such cultural amenities in Jätkäsaari. The “male” associations of Jätkäsaari in marketing and cultural narratives of the area seem to have had a subtle effect on the soft infrastructure

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of the area (including the choice of services and convergence of cultural amenities), which is only now taking shape. Since the inauguration of building construction (in 2008), activities and symbols associated with “boyish” interests have been gravitating towards the area. A survey published in May 2017 showed that, among age groups, people in the bracket 25–35 years old are particularly interested in Jätkäsaari, and men fnd Jätkäsaari more interesting than women (Kauppalehti 2016). Jätkäsaari’s prime attraction at the time of writing is Verkkokauppa, a large electronics retail shop. The building features a computer console museum (the only museum in the area) and an actual MIG fghter jet on the roof. In the spring of 2015, a large statue of a peeing boy, called Bad Bad Boy, found a temporary place in Jätkäsaari. The statue was originally created for an art festival in Örebro, Sweden, in 2013, from where it was transferred to Helsinki’s South Harbour for the Helsinki Festival in 2014. The statue, rented by Verkkokauppa, is being marketed as a symbol of Jätkäsaari (Figure 5.6). Summarizing, it would be too easy to dismiss visions such as that of the “women’s city” or the marketing of Jätkäsaari’s development as an attractive “good chap” as being merely important for marketing an area but otherwise removed from urban realities or materialities. The planning document that introduced the vision of the “women’s city” repeatedly emphasized that city

Figure 5.6 Jätkäsaari is being marketed with the art installation Bad Bad Boy. © Lieven Ameel 2015.

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planning is ultimately about re-enacting (cultural) ideas into material urban surroundings: “Society needs the materialization of ideas, ideologies and values. City living should be part of this materialization. The city should be thought of as the production of culture” (Helsinki City 2000, 27–28). The emphasis in this document on the materialization of ideas in the built environment is a reminder of the material consequences narratives have in planning. The narrative of Jätkäsaari as an area that will be integrated into the fold of the city centre where it ultimately belongs has had substantial consequences for its built environment. The emphasis on the identity of the area as an environment that extends the urban fabric of the centre is visible in building height, in the distribution of space for commercial activities, in the focus on public transport (tram transport, in particular), and the housing block structure (see e.g. Helsinki city 2009a, 28). All these features can be seen as translations into the built environment of the dominant narrative of a logical and mutually benefcial inclusion into the fold of the city – with features of the genre of the Bildungsroman feeding into a grand twenty-frstcentury narrative of urban renaissance. Planning involves the telling of a story. In doing so, it negotiates between competing visions of the site’s past as well as of its proposed future. The commissioned literary novel Hyvä jätkä, while constituting a unique endeavour to root a redeveloping environment within its broader literary and culturalhistorical narratives, also gestures at the narrative complexities involved in the planning of this area. Given the fact that it is distributed by the city to all new inhabitants of the area, it can be considered as part and parcel of Helsinki’s “persuasive storytelling” activities (Throgmorton 1996). Features of the genre of Bildungsroman, with its roots in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ideal of progress and the mutually benefcial integration of individual development into the good society, are not confned to the novel. They can also be found in the stories recounted by planning documents, which envision the integration of a peripheral area into the body of the city centre and the concomitant recovery of the inner city. It should be noted that in literary history, the classical, optimistic, Bildungsroman has long been superseded by critical modulations of the genre – such as the novel of disillusionment (see e.g. Boes 2006, 237) – which actively contest assumptions about the makeability of urban society through the socialization of the individual. The continuing appeal of the Bildungsroman as narrative frame of reference for planning texts is thus curiously dissociated from developments in literature. In bridging the gap between a planning area’s present state and its envisioned future, metaphors provide a crucial conceptual link. But the choice for one particular metaphorization may also exclude contrasting views and be decisive in guiding future courses of action. In the case of Jätkäsaari, the metaphorization of the city district as body encapsulates the identifcation between developing city and citizen, adding a specifcally masculine layer of meaning. Ultimately, these narrative elements guide developments on the

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ground in relation to the built environment, to immaterial infrastructure such as temporary cultural amenities, as well as with regards to associations guiding future (and, to a considerable extent, still unforeseeable) decisions.

Lost opportunities for planning with narrative Jätkäsaari is an area that speaks to the imagination: a newly developing city district close to Helsinki centre, with stunning views of the open sea as well as of the city centre, seen from new vantage points. The area carries traces of the Finnish capital’s varied past, from references to a small fshing and summer holiday community erased by the industrializing harbour to more recent cruise activities. In this fnal section, one last set of narrative elements in the planning of Jätkäsaari will be briefy examined, including narrative elements related to the new park in the area, sustainable and “greening” storylines in the planning documents, narrativity on the level of the housing block, questions of naming and the linguistic landscape of the area, and, fnally, storylines emphasizing either an outward-looking or inward-looking imagined identity for the area. The aim is to complete the narrative examination of the area by adding a number of less conspicuous but important storylines, and also by including some thoughts on what could have been narrated differently. Park “Good Hope” In Chapter Two, I introduced the idea of a building’s or area’s “narrativity” – its ability to evoke particular stories. One of the most evocative places in Jätkäsaari is the new city park, “Hyväntoivonpuisto” (Good Hope Park).12 In its fnished form, the park will be 500 metres long and 88 metres wide (Helsinki City 2009b, 52). For its construction, the land was raised 1–7 metres above its original level, and the park forms the highest elevation in the area. In planning documents, it is described as the “most important public space of the area” and an “important factor for creating [the area’s] identity” (Helsinki City 2010a, 18, 11). Matti Kaijansinko, the head of the West Harbour project, has compared the park to a “green river”, reminiscent of the former riverbed-turned-park in Valencia, or the bend of the River Tiber in front of St Peter’s (Yle 2014). Seen from above, it resembles most of all a crane hook, which reinforces the harbour associations highlighted in the marketing of the area. A crane hook in the shape of the letter “J” (from Jätkäsaari), in a form that is reminiscent of the park’s shape, appears as the logo in much of the publicity material, brochures, and leafets on the area, and is also included on the cover of the commissioned novel Hyvä jätkä. With a bit of imagination, it is also possible to relate the park’s shape to that of a ship’s anchor – a symbol associated in Christian liturgy with hope. Although potentially evocative of powerful narratives, such associations in the visual and naming features of the park remain largely implicit for inhabitants or visitors. It is unclear, for

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example, as to what extent the form of the park has inspired the “J” logo or vice versa. In any case, present and future inhabitants of the area will develop their own associations for the park, its name, and shape, regardless of its implied narrativity. Sledging hill The projected public uses of the Good Hope Park invite fascinating connections with stories of the area’s past. In the consultation rounds for Jätkäsaari, stakeholders had asked the city to include a sledging hill in the plans and had argued that the south-eastern corner of the capital lacked this important amenity (Helsinki City 2008a, 64). Planning efforts did take into account these queries, and the Good Hope Park includes height differences that enable sledging (Helsinki City 2010a, 11). The prospect of sledging activities in Jätkäsaari could have been explicitly linked in narratives in and of planning to how it continues earlier use of public space in the time before the construction of the harbour. In the nineteenth century, several islands with small hills and rocky outcrops – all levelled since – were situated in the area that is now Jätkäsaari. One hill was particularly popular with the children from Helsinki, and the use of the hillside is a good example of how this area was important for outdoor recreation before the area was transformed into an industrial harbour. The return of sledging activities exemplifes how a city may function as a complex repository of collective memory through which historical traces and spatial memories give meaning to a place. Christine Boyer warns that such historical features “must not become frozen attributes outside of the historical context in which they were born, for then these spatial typologies would become memories out of place” (Boyer [1983] 1997, 289). The sledging hill is an example of how faintly memorized activities from local history may be re-enacted in practice, rather than merely referred to in language (such as with plaques or place names). But few inhabitants of Jätkäsaari will be aware they are engaging with a historical activity when sledging downhill in the park; the planning texts do not establish the link between the new hills and earlier, nineteenth-century recreational use of the area. A possibility for adding narrativity by establishing overt links between past and future remained largely unused in this case. One reason for the lack of explicit reference is that the city did not want to name the differences in height a “sledging hill” so as not to become liable for sledging activities and possible accidents. In such a manner, technical and legal concerns may get in the way of the narrative framing of links between past and future practices of public space use. Greening the wasteland It is not only the name, the form, the shape as seen from above, and the possible activities in the park that add to the narrativity of the park. Also important is what lies beneath the park. Below the grass, there is, among

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other things, a car park for almost 900 cars, as well as “Rööri”, the centre point of the area’s innovative waste management system, which is located under the sports area at the southern end of the park. Treated waste converges here by way of an advanced tube system, at a speed of 70 kilometres an hour, after being deposited at waste collection points that are located in each housing block, with fve separate tubes and hatches for different types of waste. The waste disposal system is regularly advertised as a groundbreaking innovation in urban development. But at least as intriguing, but less explicitly acknowledged, is that the park is situated on the site of the most contaminated soil of the area, with the ground unft for housing for that reason (see e.g. Valli 2012b, 9). It is a story that is only reluctantly acknowledged in planning documents, but the story of waste to green space can be particularly evocative, and reusing contaminated soil can be both cost-effective and ecological (see Niiranen 2016). In New York, the transformation of the Flushing Meadows “valley of ashes” into the 1939 world fairground provides an example with international resonance, and a more recent example is provided by the transformation of Fresh Kills into a park (Lindner 2015, 98–99). Foregrounding such transformations can tell the story of how painful post-industrial legacies are creatively transformed. In the literature of Helsinki, there are interesting references that could have been drawn upon. In the speculative novel Oofrin kultaa (The gold of Ophir; 1987) by Leena Krohn, in a city somewhat reminiscent of Helsinki, a waste belt is transformed into a park. One of the protagonists, Pontanus, extols the metamorphosis: This refuse site will soon be full. Next year, or perhaps even before Christmas, it will be closed, and then they will begin to build a big park in its place. It will be levelled, soil will be brought here, lawns will be sown, and fowers and trees planted. It will be a real sight. (49) Could planners have drawn upon a local literary text such as the one by Leena Krohn to enhance the narrativity of this brownfeld-turned-to-park, in a similar way as Robert Moses did, when in the 1930s he referred to the transformation of Flushing Meadows by drawing upon The Great Gatsby (Ameel 2019)? Drawing on cultural cross-references may help provide a fertile ground for metaphors of urban transformations, but such references also come with complex and sometimes contradictory associations. The image of desert or wasteland transformed into a garden has strong Biblical undercurrents, and, in the case of Robert Moses, the reference to The Great Gatsby also drew on American pastoral tropes. In Oofrin kultaa, other associations are at play as well: although the novel contains a dream of the ideal city – tangible in the quote above, which has a Biblical subtext in Isaiah 35:1 – it also has strong apocalyptic undercurrents.13 Maybe it is just as well Helsinki planners did not too emphatically emphasize the symbolic

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transformation of brownfeld into park in planning documents that otherwise only tangentially make a case for the area’s ecological characteristics. Sustainable Jätkäsaari In texts published by the Helsinki City Planning Department, the idea of Jätkäsaari as an example of sustainable or ecological planning is never particularly emphasized, although there are vague references to “sustainable” standards used in the construction of the area. Local media (see MTV3 2018) and international publications have made the case much more forcefully, advertising the area as a leading example of sustainable development: Rob Bowden, for example, in Building Homes for Tomorrow, mentions Jätkäsaari as an example of a “successful and highly sustainable” brownfeld-site development (2009, 27; see also Babalis 2008, 29–40). It remains to be seen to what extent such claims stand up to closer scrutiny. The frst argument found in one of the 2010 planning documents for why this is a sustainable development is the location, which “in itself already supports this aim [of sustainability]” (Helsinki City 2010a, 5). This argument equates the densely built city and its growth model de facto with sustainability. But location is, of course, only one of a range of factors to be taken into calculation. Building on reclaimed post-industrial land is expensive and may be hard to square with ecological goals; in fact, one of the local detailed plans of Jätkäsaari acknowledges that “the conditions of the construction foundations, and the contaminated soil, do not present a good basis for eco-effciency” (Helsinki City 2010b, 58). Sustainability is foregrounded in some of the transport solutions: in the development of the area, public transport and walkability have been foregrounded (Helsinki City 2009b, 37). But, when it comes to one of the important markers for sustainable urban planning in Helsinki, the so-called parking standard – that is, the designated minimum amount of parking places to be constructed per 100 square metres of housing, the planners were not able to introduce the more stringent norms that would have set a clear sustainable example (see Soininvaara 2017). A major change in parking norm policy towards market-led parking construction, with the aim of making new construction less car park-dependent, less expensive, and more densely built, was proposed in 2019; the pilot areas for this new policy are, among others, southern Kalasatama and Hernesaari (part of the West Harbour project; Soininvaara 2019). The most mediatized narratives of sustainability associated with Jätkäsaari are two specifc projects that focus on individual housing blocks: the LOW2NO project, which aimed to construct a housing block on the basis of the principle “from low to no carbon”, and the “Wood City” project, which promoted high-rise construction in wood. The LOW2NO project has given Jätkäsaari some international visibility as an area with an ecological mark (see e.g. Stupar and Nikezić 2011). However, some of the enthusiasm associated with the project has proven to be premature: construction

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was delayed; responsibility shifted from the original initiator, the Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA, to private developer SRV; and the housing block was renamed and constructed later than planned, in 2018. The project has been described as an example of “too little and too much” – too large in its aims, too small in its outcomes, and a project in which the wishes, objectives, and hopes of different actors did not meet (Menna 2013). The Wood City project, a collaboration between, among others, SRV and Finnish forest industry, aims for one housing block of high-rise (up to eight storeys) constructed in wood, projected to be fnished in 2020. The architectural competition – with a focus on ecological and sustainable development – for Wood City was won by a local architecture frm Anttinen Oiva Architects, with a proposal called “Stories”. For our examination of storytelling in the planning of Jätkäsaari, more important than the possible discrepancies between ecological claims and realities in these two projects is the way in which both were developed separately from the planning of Jätkäsaari itself. Both projects comprise experimental housing blocks that are consciously designed to stand out from the surrounding area. Their planning and development were largely carried out outside the Helsinki City Planning Department, with SITRA and SRV in a central role in the case of LOW2NO, and SRV and Stora Enso in the case of Wood City. From the perspective of the planning of the area as a whole, projects such as LOW2NO and Wood City showcase the area as a form of urban laboratory where new ideas about housing and construction are tried out at building-block level rather than at the level of the whole area. Narratives and the housing block As LOW2NO and Wood City show, one of the most conspicuous characteristics of Jätkäsaari in the 2010s (also in media narratives) is the proliferation of clearly outlined clusters of narrated identity that focus on specifc housing blocks or individual buildings. This book is primarily interested in planning above the level of the street, house, or housing block, which is why more local forms of narrative planning are only tangentially mentioned. But the proliferation of housing blocks and buildings with a specifc thematic focus is so striking a feature in Jätkäsaari that it warrants a closer look. In the area, there are several other housing blocks with a themed focus in addition to LOW2NO and Wood City. The buildings tend to be designed in such a way as to enable and enforce a particular kind of living and cohabitation, and inhabitants are expected to subscribe (at least implicitly) to a shared view of community and communal living. One example is the housing block Jallukka, at the address Malagakatu 3. It is a project initiated by the Live Music Association Elmu to develop affordable rental properties for people in the music business (Jallukka 2019). Another example is the housing block Victoria, structured around Finland-Swedish culture and including some 300 apartments, a Swedish day-care centre, a Swedish

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theatre, a gallery, and a restaurant (Kvarteretvictoria 2019). A third example is the Malta co-housing block, initiated by a group of private individuals, with each apartment co-designed with the residents, and the communal areas designed for active interaction with neighbours, with, among other things, communal kitchen, living room, and recreational facilities. It has been called “the largest and most ambitious co-housing project in Finland” of the last 40 years (see Korpela 2012, 336). A fourth example is the Generations Block, an example of multigenerational housing for three generations, including communal spaces, as well as various health care services (Generations 2019). These examples of themed housing blocks proclaim the city, and Jätkäsaari, in particular, to be an urban test case for new models of living and dwelling – but one housing block at a time. Although they arguably exemplify some of the ambitions of the planners and developers in Helsinki, they also showcase the limits of those ambitions. Ambitious aims in terms of low-to-no-carbon construction and ecological building with wood remain confned to specifc blocks. Experiments that are aimed at the inclusion of particular groups, or at enabling forms of co-housing within a centrally located urban environment, such as the Victoria Quarter and the musicians’ house, may attract groups that otherwise might be tempted to move into suburban areas or run the risk of being priced out of the city centre. But the focus on social cohesion, vibrant semi-public spaces, and high living standards within individual housing blocks may come at the expense of the public space of the area as a whole, and that of the streets, in particular. And there is the possibility that such themed housing blocks act as enclaves that reinforce existing entrenched mosaics, with separate semi-public spaces for the Finland-Swedes, for the rockers, for the students, for the elderly. Remarkably, the Victoria Quarter, which opened its doors in 2017, has already inspired its frst literary chronicler: in the last, highly autofctional novel of Finland-Swedish leftist politician and poet Claes Andersson, the protagonist Otto lives in the Malta block opposite the Victoria Quarter after moving back to Helsinki from suburban Espoo. He sees the building of the Victoria Quarter go up and gradually block his view of the sea – an experience that must resonate with many present and future inhabitants of Jätkäsaari. Otto is fascinated by a poem by Martin Enckell that is painted on the concrete façade of the Victoria Quarter and he tries to memorize its opening verses. A reader who cares to look them up on the façade of the Victoria Quarter will notice that the verses evoke a longing for anonymity in far-away cities: “I myself travelled to get lost / in cities and graveyards”. It is ironic that, in the novel, the existence of the Victoria Quarter makes urban anonymity impossible for Otto, who constantly runs into acquaintances on the street: “Finland-Swedish artists, writers, musicians and academic people” living in Victoria, many of them old friends of Otto (Andersson 2019, np). The descriptions of Otto’s life as a socially somewhat awkward pensioner provide a self-ironical counter-narrative to the dominant narrative in planning, which envisions Jätkäsaari to be a vibrant new city district full

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of new beginnings. In Andersson’s novel, Jätkäsaari appears as yet another incarnation of its possible self. Busholmen nästa (Next, Jätkäsaari; 2019) is a novel that is permeated by contemplations of coming death and was published posthumously, and it depicts Jätkäsaari as the last stage in life, an old age pensioner’s last shot at city life before moving to eternal pastures. Planning with diversity? Although Jätkäsaari provides a chequered array of diverse themes and experiments in urban living at the level of the housing block, diversity itself does not feature highly in the narratives in planning of the area. Planning in Helsinki in general has been criticized for its lack of multicultural approaches (Lapintie 2014). In Jätkäsaari, diversity is visible in name only, with oblique references in planning documents to how “urbanity means tolerance and the existence of alternatives” (Helsinki City 2009b, 82). The new population of Jätkäsaari is less diverse than Helsinki on average. In part, this is in line with the geographical distribution of speakers of languages other than Finnish and Swedish in the Helsinki area, with higher percentages of inhabitants with a foreign background in eastern Helsinki. There are several features of Jätkäsaari, however, that would have made this a possible showcase for planning for diversity: the area of Ruoholahti, adjacent to Jätkäsaari, has a higher percentage of foreign inhabitants than other parts of western Helsinki (and higher than Helsinki on average; see Population 2019); Jätkäsaari is also the location of the relocated International School of Helsinki (formerly in Ruoholahti), and the continued construction and ferry activity bring substantial numbers of foreign commuters and tourists to the area on a daily basis. If diversity is largely absent in the planning of the area, the cultural and historical ties of the area to its near neighbours along the Baltic Sea route remain particularly underdeveloped, especially in view of how the area has been advertised by its proximity to the sea. In terms of imaginative emplotment, the location of Jätkäsaari along long-established sea routes that have linked Sweden and Western Europe to the Baltics and Russia provides a missed opportunity. Links to Estonia are conspicuous in their absence. The idea of a closer connection between Helsinki and nearby Tallinn and of a “Helsinki–Tallinn twin city” (Helsinki City 2013b, 60), envisioned famously by Estonian philosopher and literary author Jaan Kaplinski as a possible future “Talsinki” (Grisakov 2014), appears from time to time in the regional planning of Helsinki. In practice, little is visible of these connections in the planning, or in the construction and naming of the built environment. One striking arena where there is a conspicuous absence of historical, economic, and cultural ties that extend from Helsinki’s harbour to the neighbouring Baltic countries, Sweden, and Russia is in the place names of the area. In the general “linguistic landscape” (see e.g. Koskinen 2012) of

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Jätkäsaari – that is, the various written signs in this area, including personal written notes, unoffcial shop signs, and offcial information placards – the presence of people from the Baltics working on the construction sites in Jätkäsaari and the ongoing activities of the brand new passenger terminal with regular connections to St Petersburg and Estonia are made tangible in a scattering of ad hoc signs in Jätkäsaari’s public space. These include leafets advertising insurance and work permit information in Estonian, multilingual signs aimed at truck drivers, and the presence of cars and trucks with Baltic or Russian registration plates.14 But, in the offcial street names (the “onomastic landscape” of place names, as compared with the more broadly defned “linguistic landscape”), there are few references to the immediate international context of the area, especially when one considers that the street names of the area are meant to evoke maritime connections. Place names “conjure up a presence to the mind” (Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu 2016, 140) and can be particularly constitutive of narrativity in planning. The street names of Jätkäsaari do provide imaginative links with the sea, but arguably in a generic rather than culture-specifc manner, evoking far-off harbours such as Malaga, Livorno, Rio, and Cape Horn. The strong local maritime ties of this area, past and present, to neighbouring ports are largely neglected. Sister city Tallinn, St Petersburg, Stockholm, Riga, and Vilnius do not feature among the toponyms of Jätkäsaari.15

Conclusion As has become evident in the course of this chapter, narratives in planning of Jätkäsaari focus on the inclusion of the area within the city centre’s fold. One particular visualization of this dominant orientation is the map of the “expanding city centre”, with arrows pointing to Jätkäsaari, Pasila, and Kalasatama (Helsinki City 2011b, 7; see Figure 3.2). But, within the narratives emanating from the city and the City Planning Department, there are also storylines that point outward towards, along, and across the sea. One fascinating visualization that emphasizes an alternative way of constructing Jätkäsaari’s imagined identity on the basis of the long Helsinki shoreline is the image created for the “Veteen piirretty viiva” (Line Drawn in the Water) exposition in Laituri, the information and exhibitions space of the City of Helsinki in summer 2015 (see Figure 5.7). It is an image of Helsinki seen from above, from a south-western angle, with future Jätkäsaari in a prominent position and with the shoreline accentuated in bright yellow. The maritime connections of Jätkäsaari, its place within the cultural landscape of the Helsinki shoreline, and its outward-looking character towards the sea provide a recurring, if muted, feature in narratives in and of the planning of the area. Media narratives of Jätkäsaari have repeatedly drawn on imaginative connections with the sea, the shore, and the harbour, as when Mayor Pajunen evoked an image of the city as expanding outward into the sea in his Havis Amanda speech (Mattila 2008; see Chapter Two).

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Figure 5.7 “Line drawn in the water.” © City of Helsinki 2015.

The partial local master plan emphasizes that the new public shorelines of the area will complement an existing route of public access to the sea (2008a, 4). In planning documents, Jätkäsaari is described as a “protrusion of the city extending toward the sea and central [Western] Europe” (Helsinki City 2000, 40).16 In the City of Helsinki Strategic Spatial Plan of 2009, the vision for a distinctive image of Jätkäsaari is defned by “[t]he central location, the sea, the harbour and its connections to the past, such as cranes, and the new housing solutions, such as townhouses”, which “will be used to build upon the image” (2009a, 28). In their alternative plan for Jätkäsaari, Lehtovuori and Lehtovuori proposed, among other things, a landmark tower oriented “towards the Baltic, Finland’s traditional cultural route westwards” (2007, 99). In the way Jätkäsaari is currently being developed, narrative connections to the city centre and adjacent areas remain more dominant than maritime connections. In its current state at the time of writing, the shoreline of Jätkäsaari is less accessible than in other developing areas. Limited accessibility is caused in part by passenger harbour activities and by construction, which has closed considerable parts of the seashore to the public. In sharp contrast to Kalasatama, where temporary use (including the Café Ihana, the DIY Somppasauna, and the graffti wall) has provided new inhabitants as well as visitors with an incentive to explore the area and the seashore, there are no temporary cultural activities on the undeveloped shore of Jätkäsaari. When the area nears completion in the 2030s, this detached relation to the

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shores may well change; the continued work within the City of Helsinki towards an integrated maritime strategy (Helsinki City 2016; 2019; see Chapter Three) is placing a stronger emphasis on developing Helsinki along its shores and outward towards the sea and the archipelago.

Notes 1 Parts of this chapter have been published elsewhere as separate articles (see Ameel 2016c; 2016d). 2 The Finnish name for the island, Jätkäsaari, is considered a mistranslation of an original Swedish name, Busholm (Ainiala 1997). The literal translation is “chap’s island”. The general public is likely to identify the “chap” in the name with a blue-collar worker and, more specifcally, with a harbour worker (owing to the association between Swedish hamnbuse and Busholm that led to the mistranslation into Finnish). The “bus” from the original most likely refers not to a harbour worker (hamnbuse) but to a type of ship. 3 The Cable Factory is, apart from the physical building in Ruoholahti, also an organization that is responsible for activities in the Cable Factory building and for the Suvilahti cultural hub, next to Kalasatama. 4 Hayden White’s concept of the “narreme”, while unclearly defned, comes close to that of the micro-narrative as used here (White 1981, 18). 5 There are also plans for considerable high-rise, with towers of up to 24 storeys in the central district of Jätkäsaari. The district will be constructed in 2022–2026. These plans have caused less debate; time will tell how these plans will ft into the earlier narratives of high-rise in Jätkäsaari. 6 The West Harbour development project was not part of the Planning Department, but came directly under the city. 7 Although Hannu Mäkelä (1942) is not the best known of contemporary Finnish authors, he is a versatile, well-respected author of more than a hundred literary works. He has been the recipient of numerous prestigious literary prizes, including the coveted Finlandia prize in 1995. 8 The character’s frst name, Johannes, invites a comparison with another contemporary Johannes: Jussi Koskela, the protagonist in Väinö Linna’s Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Under the North Star; [1959, 1960 1962] 1987). Like Linna’s trilogy, which examined the development of the Finnish nation from a distinct working-class perspective, Good Chap can be approached from the perspective of literary nation-building, with Hegelian undercurrents. Johannes unites various cultural and linguistic attributes of the nation, and the narrative, while moving towards modernization and independence, ends before the traumatic events of the Civil War (in 1918). 9 At the time of writing in 2019. 10 Note that, in the early 1970s, plans for Helsinki’s development proposed an evolution in the form of a hand-like shape, the so-called “fnger model” (Helsinki City 2000, 13). This was evidently inspired by the post-war plans for the development of Copenhagen in the form of a hand, the famous “fnger plan”. The metaphor of “fngers” was used as late as the early twenty-frst century in speaking of green zones in Helsinki as “green fngers” (see Lapintie, Maijala, and Rajanti 2002). See also Korpinen and Silfverberg (1999, 5), who mention Helsinki’s “fngers-on-a-hand city form”. For recent research concerning hand metaphors, see Olesen’s article “Talk to the hand” (2017). 11 Only one toponym referring to a woman – a street named after the female composer Helvi Leiviskä – is currently planned for Jätkäsaari. There are also two

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streets named after the occupation “mess girl”, part of the maritime theme in the area’s toponyms. Otherwise, in terms of gender, toponyms refer to historical men and to male occupations. The name is one of the many maritime names in the area. A remarkably similar connection with wasteland-to-park renewal in a novel with apocalyptic intimations is found in De Lillo’s works, for example in Underworld, which opens with an evocation of the Fresh Kills garbage dump; a novel in which city planners are called “adepts and seers, crafting the future … who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire” (1997, 185; see also Salmela 2015, 86–90). Cf. personal feld notes, 6 August 2014. The Street, Place and Institutional Names Working Group of the city decided on place names that denoted places that were important “for the mercantile shipping of the Helsinki Harbour”; in addition, streets were named after “the names of islands that were covered underneath the artifcial fll” (Helsinki City 2009b, 74). It should be noted that Tallinn, Stockholm, and St Petersburg have place names named after them elsewhere in Helsinki. The Finnish term “Keski-Eurooppa”, although literally translated as Central Europe, is closer in practice to “Western Europe” (countries such as France and Belgium are located there), as it denotes, in everyday usage, what is located between Northern and Southern Europe (often excluding former European Warsaw Pact countries which are referred to as being located in Eastern Europe).

6

Planning with narrative

The previous chapters have focused on existing planning texts and practices in the context of Helsinki’s waterfront development. This penultimate chapter looks at how a narrative approach to planning can inform future planning practices. Aspects of communication constitute the frst and most obvious dimension associated with narrative approaches to planning: questions of how to translate abstract plans into convincing forms of storytelling, as part of a persuasive mode of communication aimed at the general public, stakeholders, and public–private partners. As I have argued throughout this book, however, narrative in the context of planning goes far beyond communication: it is a feature of all planning stages, from the moment questions and problems are framed, to the consideration of possible ways forward, to the fnalized plans and visions for a future city. Particular metaphors and modes of emplotment will inform the way in which a planned area is situated within its broader cultural context, problems will be framed with the generic frameworks that are available, and solutions will take shape along established or imported storylines. In what follows, I consider how a narrative approach to site survey can prepare the ground for planning practices that are more thoroughly grounded within local narratives for planning, drawing on the model of narrative mapping examined in Chapter Three and on recent examples of public participatory geographic information systems. I also examine the possibilities of Bakhtinian polyphony for a multi-voice narrative in planning and suggest planning without closure. I will conclude with some observations on teaching planning with narrative.

Narrative mapping and PPGIS All planning starts with a survey of the planning area. The outlines of existing buildings and streets, the coordinates of accessible locations, height differences and soil properties, patterns of land ownership – all these things can be readily examined with the help of maps and quantitative place data. Narrative mapping adds complementary forms of knowledge to such quantitative data by providing information on spatial experiences, place-based habits, as well as the kinds of imaginative association and spatial interaction

114 Planning with narrative linked with particular places. I explored narrative mapping at more length in Chapter Three, where I proposed that a dynamic and relational mapping of a planning location can be achieved by paying close attention to how a place functions within storied lives, and by structuring experiential data around metaphor, plot, and genre. Narrative mapping draws on questions such as: What developments in a person’s life does a particular place evoke or enable? What experiences are associated with this location? How is the location presented in metaphoric terms? If the location enables particular kinds of activity, experience, or development, can it be associated with a particular generic frame? One promising approach would be to incorporate such questions into existing instruments for participatory planning geographic information systems, or PPGIS, which have become some of the best-established methodologies to communicate with local participants and to gather information as part of planning (e.g. Brown and Kyttä 2013). In its most basic form, PPGIS engages with participants and structures their place-based answers with the help of a map-like interface, producing a set of fxed dots on a map. In the ENJUSTESS survey on urban aquatic environments in the Helsinki region,1 for example, participants were invited to use “an online interface to mark different locations of water environments they use and to indicate their activities at those places”, as well as to provide related information, such as the means of transportation to these places as well as the participant’s home location (Laatikainen et al. 2017, 94). Participants used the map interface to drag and drop digital points relating to different types of activity on a map. There was also the possibility to add written commentaries. The resulting commentaries often concerned waterscapes that were personally or locally signifcant. The result of the survey was a map flled with dots that referred to meaningful places. It was highly suitable for quantitative research, showing the spaces that were particularly popular for waterfront recreation, as well as the average distances from homes to these locations. But, in terms of the information it gave about personal or communal experiences, relationships with other spaces, or the locations’ functions within everyday routines or storied life trajectories, it provided a rather limited instrument.2 PPGIS could be further developed to specifcally incorporate and activate storytelling mechanisms. This would entail the development of different kinds of user interface to enable a location to be embedded relationally within other spaces and in connection to people’s life trajectories. Respondents could be invited to provide more extensive storied descriptions or to organize a particular place on a map along a larger chain of everyday, routine contact points or as part of a life trajectory. Features could be added to allow participants to include different kinds of material or to connect with existing cultural narratives (in literature, popular culture, media) of particular places. One example that goes some way towards a more qualitative and narrative approach is the case of “Hanko of memories and dreams” (Kahila-Tani,

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Kyttä, and Nummi 218), in which a conventional PPGIS was enlarged, and participants were invited to provide information in a variety of forms: written texts, structured answers, and audio material (using PPGIS methods including an innovative media installation), as well as photographs. It was part of an international research project that examined PPGIS methods as tools for social cohesion and that was linked to the planning of a city park in Hanko, a small coastal city some 100 kilometres west of Helsinki, with the local planner interested in gaining relevant experiential information. However, the project arguably confrmed that more dynamic digital platforms will also produce material that is more diffcult to analyse. At least as important as developing new technical platforms to gather information is the need to develop approaches to aggregate and synthesize the information collected. In a comparatively conventional PPGIS survey conducted in 2013 in connection with Helsinki’s City Plan, 4 700 participants provided a total of 33 000 data points, producing a wealth of quantitative as well as qualitative data. Very few of the personal, experiential stories volunteered by participants in the data points made their way into the fnal plans (see, however, Helsinki City 2014h). The place-based narrative functions that are outlined in Chapter Three provide one possible model to analyse such data and to describe relational and experiential place-based knowledge by structuring information in terms of a place’s relations to a broader emplotment within someone’s life, as well as in terms of its associated metaphors and generic frames of meaning. As important as meeting with participants through computer interfaces is meeting them in real life, on site, around the table, or together in front of a blackboard. The narrative approach to gathering and analysing data could also be applied to live participatory workshops or to role-play simulation exercises (for role-play and planning see e.g. Schenk and Susskind 2014).

Planning with polyphony What arises from any narrative mapping will be a multitude of different voices. The challenge posed by this variety of urban voices is one of the reasons why planners have become interested in the mapping and conscious utilization of narratives to begin with. Several theorists emphasize the “plurality of narratives” that arises from an examination of local narratives (Davidoff 1965; Finnegan 1998; Attili 2010; Jensen 2007). This plurality of voices touches on some of the most urgent questions within current planning theory and practice, including the legitimacy of planning, the ability of planners to include otherwise underrepresented perspectives or counternarratives, and the status of different kinds of knowledge. Arguably the biggest challenge in the current postmodern planning paradigm is not just to enable planners to refect on the diversity of narratives, but to provide tools with which to incorporate the local narratives in such a way that “[p]olicies and plans … represent a collective authorship between people

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and planners” (Hillier 1996, 296). One of the principal aims of the “discursive”, “dialogic”, or “narrative” turn in planning practices was to let the hitherto passive recipients of planning narratives become more active parts of the storytelling in which they are enmeshed, to let the “objects” of formerly mono-voiced practices be active producers of the meaning-making that affects them. The last decades have seen the development of a number of methods and conceptualizations towards such a collaborative narrative, such as “authentic dialogue” (Innes and Booher 2010; see also Innes 2015) and Forester’s concept of the “deliberative practitioner” (1999). Approaching the subject from the perspective of narrative and literary theory, polyphony is a key concept with which to distil the urban multiplicity of voices into a single body of the text. It can provide a framework with which to move from a descriptive method for the analysis of narratives towards an integration of various local stories into a new narrative for the future. In literary studies, polyphony is connected frst and foremost with the fgure of Mikhail Bakhtin, who developed his theory of polyphony in an infuential study of the work of Dostoevsky (1984). Although polyphony is not new to urban theory, the connection with Bakhtin’s writing is often implicit (see Dormans 2008; Hubbard 2006, 122; Llewellyn 2004; Sandercock and Attili 2010), although there are notable exceptions (see Holloway and Kneale 2000).3 For the study of urban planning narratives, Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony has particular relevance because of the way it examines different voices within one and the same body of the text. The inclusion of a multitude of voices, in the terminology of Bakhtin, does not come from outside the text to enrich it (as sometimes seems to be the case in adaptations of ethnographic polyphony; see Crang 1992), but it is part and parcel of the text itself, in the form of a dialogic imagination. Instead of one dominant authorial voice, Bakhtinian polyphony entails “a plurality of consciousness”, and the protagonists in a dialogical text are, “not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse” (1984, 6–7; original emphasis). When read against the backdrop of the narrative turn in urban planning, Bakhtin’s descriptions of Dostoevsky’s polyphonic novels read like the current ideal of what contemporary urban planning narratives should amount to: a narrative that “is constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses as objects into itself, but as a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other” (Bakhtin 1984, 18). Interestingly, for our purpose, Bakhtin does not defne polyphony as merely a literary method, but also as a principle of human relationships (cf. Sidorkin 2005, 283). In literary fction, there are a range of possibilities to allow different characters to speak in their own language, from multi-perspective narrations in which different characters take turns speaking to subtle techniques such as the “Uncle Charles Principle”, pioneered by modernist authors such

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as James Joyce – a style which allows the “writer to favour the text with the personality of the characters being described” (Broderick 2018, 149). Formal experiments with collage, quotations, and different kinds of letter type were one way in which the historical avant-garde incorporated multi-voicedness. In the Finnish context, Pentti Saarikoski provides a particularly inspiring example with his call for a “dialectical poetry”, which “would open the space of the text to different voices and discourses” (Veivo 2012, 243). Can planning be truly polyphonic? Is it possible for urban planning practices, with their binding legal procedures and their highly formalized textual and visual outcomes, to include diverging voices that are independent of the authorial voice of a planning department? There are various small-scale operations with which incremental forms of polyphony can be achieved in planning texts. At the most basic level, planning texts can include the verbatim comments by citizens and participants, for example, as they were voiced in participatory meetings, rather than summarizing such commentaries as often is the case (see Helsinki City 2008a). In the context of the Helsinki waterfront, an interesting example of small-scale “polyphonic” planning is the Katiska (literally “fsh trap”) playground in Kalasatama. Local citizens were given the chance to co-design and name this public space in 2014. However, the playground has disappeared from the map almost as fast as it appeared, and the name with it. It is an example of the transiency of codesigned temporary use in quickly developing new areas and the ease with which such places and activities can disappear. One way to gesture towards diverse narratives is to include relevant personal stories within a planning text – for example, as vignettes that are set apart from the main text. There is always the risk that such quotes constitute not much more than mere tokenism on the ladder of participation (see Arnstein 1969). However, especially when quoted in their original form, and with proper information about the context of the original utterance, such diverging voices are able not only to give a sense of the polyphony underlying one particular plan but to bring in some of that complexity of voices into its storytelling. Typically, vignettes with quotes by inhabitants are used to support or illustrate the key arguments within a planning narrative. But Bakhtinian polyphony suggests that a narrative text may contain contradictory narratives, and this consequence of polyphony is worth considering. Would it be possible to include in a plan the stories – for example, by way of vignettes – of how different inhabitants see the development of their city, even if these stories run counter to the dominant current? I am not aware of planning texts that deliberately set out to do this, but including such a truly polyphonic, even contradictory, set of storylines may have unforeseen benefts. It could point the way towards more open-ended planning and keep open possibilities for multiple alternatives, which may limit the path-dependency of a particular plan.

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Planning without closure Planning is concerned with bringing order to the city by reconciling contradictions, fxing borders, designating specifc functions to the exclusion of others. In many respects, plans are expected to provide a sense of resolution to existing tensions, to provide a satisfactory solution to competing or contradictory expectations of land use – in other words, to bring at least a temporary modicum of closure.4 In literary studies, the closure of a narrative denotes not just the ending of a story, but more specifcally the resolution of tensions in a way that gives meaning to all that has come before. In classical tragedy and comedy, the fnal scene is what decides whether a play will be a tragedy (ending tragically) or a comedy (ending well). A meaningful ending is arguably typical to all forms of narrative. Everyday conversations have closing statements, too: a way to wrap up what has been told but also to summarize its meaning and relevance (see Labov and Waletzky [1966] 1997). In everyday storytelling and also in literary texts, closure is associated with the fnal utterings of narration. Planning texts operate in many ways quite differently. Nobody expects people to read planning documents from beginning to end, and it is more productive to think of the plan itself as providing closure to a storyline that is set out in the course of numerous interrelated documents. Although closure is the expected norm in literature and everyday storytelling, there are any number of stories that deny the reader or listener a satisfying ending. In the postmodern era, a deliberate refusal of closure has become part of the dominant mode of storytelling. In planning theory, there is a similar turn away from rational planning theory, “great narratives”, and comprehensive end plans, towards more incremental planning practices. Recent shifts in planning theory and practice have emphasized the need to plan for uncertainty and the importance of fexible and reversible planning, acknowledging that cities never achieve equilibrium (see e.g. Rantanen and Joutsiniemi 2016, 206). Thinking of planning as a deliberate act of storytelling does not mean it is necessary for planners to mechanically follow Aristotelian notions of beginning, middle, and satisfying end. It is also possible to consider narratives in planning that are deliberately open-ended. Telling a story that convincingly moves towards closure can be one forceful way to add rhetorical power to a narrative in planning and to convince the public, private–public partnerships, or various stakeholders of the causal logic of particular decisions. A plan that presents clearly outlined crisis moments, turning points, and a gratifying resolution will tend to be more rhetorically compelling, especially when it couches plot developments in imaginative metaphors and draws on recognizable generic frames. But open-ended narratives in planning may have other benefts. Closure presupposes a stable end position, suggesting little agency for communities or individual citizens to envision alternative possibilities or future change. When the borders of closure are drawn too rigidly, it may impede future adjustments to new challenges and

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be a check on the resilience and fexibility of a city. On similar grounds, Richard Sennett has argued for an “open city”, arguing that planning in the twentieth century focused too much on achieving a closed system. The open city, by contrast, would aim for an open system by incorporating the principles of “porosity of territory”, “narrative indeterminacy”, and “incomplete form” (Sennett 2017). The cases of Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama, areas that will be in unfnished state for decades to come, present a particular opportunity for introducing more open-ended planning. It would have been possible to give a more explicit role to the transformational nature of these areas, in particular given their historical context as catalysts of change. In concrete terms, planning without closure would mean the inclusion of multiple alternative endings, the explicit acknowledgement of doubts and uncertainties, and the incorporation of deliberate contradictions and gaps in planning texts and visualizations. Such approaches are arguably already used to some extent in non-binding strategic planning and are one area in which urban planning can learn from informal spatial planning (see Mäntysalo, Kangasoja, and Kanninen 2015).

Planning for narrative space All planning involves elements of narrative. But is it possible to plan for a narrative space – for a space that evokes and engenders particular kinds of narrative? The urban sociologist Richard Sennett imagines as much in The Conscience of the Eye, in his brief suggestion of “narrative space”, a kind of space that permits “certain properties of narratives to operate in everyday life” (Sennett [1990] 1992, 190). Kevin Lynch’s works The Image of the City (1960) and A Theory of Good City Form (1981), which encourage planners to think of the city in terms of mindscapes consisting of imaginaries and experiences, can be understood as moving in similar directions. Would it be possible to structure planning narratives more clearly in terms of the kinds of activity and the kinds of narrative (of personal and communal activities, possible trajectories, alternative city lives) that are enabled and enhanced through particular planning decisions? Formal features in the built environment arguably have a mnemonic component, bringing to mind past layers of meaning, but they also contain elements that produce new storylines (cf. Lu 2015). Knowledge is embedded as memory in the built structure and in the forms of traditions, but such embedded knowledge also produces the frames within which new narratives are performed. Several researchers have developed thinking on how planning could become more attuned to the story-creating elements of the built environment. Paul Carter, in Places Made After Their Stories (2015), thinks of the planner as a choreographer who is engaged in dramaturgic design that enables performative interpretations of the built environment. Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (1997), edited by Sallie Westwood and John Williams, pays

120 Planning with narrative attention to how particular scripts are evoked and put into action, also by way of planning and policy. Similarly, the Scripts for Post-Industrial Urban Futures research group sees scripts in urban planning and policy as prescriptive “blueprints for the future” and as structuring future spatial activities in cities in transformation (see Buchenau et al. 2018; Buchenau and Gurr 2016). At the level of the building, Dvora Yanow has written powerfully on how buildings – in her case study, community centres in Israel – may tell and evoke particular policy stories, sometimes considerably at odds with the lives and practices of users of these buildings (Yanow 1995). In the plans for Jätkäsaari and Kalasatama, there are some hints as to what kinds of narrative the city planners imagine these areas are to generate, and what kinds of use and activity urban form can invite. The diverse rooftops of Jätkäsaari are aimed to give the users a “Parisian” sense of restlessness (Helsinki City 2009b, 40); on-street shops in Kalasatama are meant to enhance an “urban” feel and vibrant public street life (Helsinki City 2004). An interesting, and quite exceptional, foregrounding of how planning can aim to advance particular narrative space can be found in the planning documents of Kalasatama, where the continuing street network is related to a particular kind of “urbanity” and its “freedom of choice and variety of options”: dead-end streets were avoided in the area, so as not to impose only one option to people moving through space (Helsinki City 2008b, 26). The example of the sledging hill in Jätkäsaari (see Chapter Five), with height differences enabling downhill sledging in the winter, also illustrates how planners carefully considered possible activities – and, by implication, the resulting narratives – of the environment they planned.

Teaching planning with narrative To seriously think of future planners as engaged in “persuasive storytelling” (Throgmorton 1993; 1996), as “writers” negotiating between competing storylines (Mandelbaum 1991; 2000), or as dramaturges of future narrative space (Rannila and Loivaranta 2015) also means it is necessary to consider the kinds of narrative profciency that ought to be included in the education of future planning professionals. Going back to Patsy Healey’s thoughts on planning (quoted in Chapter Two), if the key “challenge for planners is to reconstruct their own ways of thinking and acting to provide creative resources for critiquing and facilitating this work of city story-writing” (Healey 2000, 527–528), what kind of planning education will prepare them for this challenge? Depending on the national and cultural context, people who enter the planning profession will have a background in architecture, in engineering and land surveying, in geography, or urban sociology (see Frank and Silver 2018). Some will have a degree that includes some notion of literary perspectives of the city and of narrative approaches; clearly, the undiminished use of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities ([1972] 1974) in planning and architecture theory indicates that literature continues to have an appeal in

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helping to think about cities and their planning. In urban theory, Calvino’s work is often used by way of crispy quotations intended as invitations to be creative and use one’s imagination. This book has argued throughout that literary and narrative perspectives can be much more than a vague form of inspiration for planners, but can help provide a toolbox to draw consciously on narrative and rhetorical structures when drawing up plans for the future. Two cases of planning education in which I have been involved over recent years provide examples of educational modules, aimed at future planning professionals, with a distinct focus on narrative approaches. The frst example is the Master’s programme in Urban Studies and Planning, a joint programme of the more technically oriented Aalto University (home of engineering and architecture) and the University of Helsinki. Perspectives from the humanities were included in the programme in a number of ways, including several guest lectures on narrative approaches I had the opportunity to teach. One course developed by colleagues as part of the Master’s programme was the 2016 course “Suunniteltu ja koettu kaupunki” (The planned and experienced city). Students from Finnish language and literature, ethnology, history, geography, and planning worked together with the Helsinki City Planning Department on a particular area that was at that very moment up for development: a stretch along the Helsinki waterfront near Hakaniemi. Students drew on a range of different approaches to gather highly diverse kinds of place-based information and developed plans for the area in interdisciplinary groups. For all participants, it proved to be an encouraging experience – one of the teachers responsible, linguist Terhi Ainiala, summarizes that the outcome of the course was that “the city gets more diverse and more layered material than they would have been able to gather with their own resources, [and] the students get multidisciplinary experience, [and] all citizens can have a look at the ready-made plans” (University of Helsinki 2016, np). A somewhat similar course was developed by me and several colleagues from the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology (universities that have since merged): the course “Kaupunki kertomuksena” (City as narrative), organized in the years 2016 and 2017. Students and teachers represented three disciplines: literary studies, architecture and urban planning, and regional management. During the course, the students were split up into small groups, with each group including students from the three disciplines. The express aim of the course was to give students insights into how the city could be approached as narrative by drawing on diverse texts from urban studies, urban sociology, literary fction, and literary urban studies, and also by including a number of case studies. The way in which the course was structured was meant to reproduce situations similar to what multidisciplinary teams of planning professionals deal with when planning specifc areas and negotiating with people from different backgrounds. Special attention was paid to developing skills in interdisciplinary group work, communication, and negotiation (see Chudoba, Rajaniemi, and Ameel 2017). Interdisciplinary teaching modules such as these may be

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crucial for helping urban planning students to develop the narrative competences they will need in their profession.

Notes 1 The ENJUSTESS project took place during the years 2012–2016. 2 The ENJUSTESS project also incorporated targeted interviews and softGIS approaches in addition to more conventional PPGIS methods. 3 In his article on planning as persuasive storytelling, James Throgmorton, for example, drawing on the philosopher Arran Gare, mentions Bakthin’s concept of “polyphonical, dialogical narrative”, seeing similarities between his own views on planning and Gare’s reading of Bakhtin, but this literally does not amount to more than a footnote (1993). 4 My thoughts on path-dependency in planning, and my work in the section “Planning with closure”, are indebted to inspiring discussions with Jens Gurr and Barbara Buchenau. Parts of these sections were written while working together at the Wolfsburg in Essen, Germany, in 2019.

7

Conclusion

Cities are always, in the words of Doreen Massey, “the intersections of multiple narratives” (1999, 165). It is a concept of the city that resembles Robert Park’s famous notion of the city as a “mosaic of little worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate” (1915, 608). The statements by Park and Massey, respectively, refect two different visions of how the city’s narrative complexity functions: as diverse city worlds that closely interact (in Massey’s view) or that, in Park’s view, are merely casually touching each other. The challenge of planners is to be aware of the narrative complexity within which they operate, to be able to survey, to incorporate, and to foster the city’s repository of multiple narratives. Planning, as this book has argued throughout, is fundamentally concerned with narrative. Planning processes and planning documents reveal, shape, or contest existing narratives, and, in planning, power relations and language are frmly entwined. Planners are involved in a form of “persuasive storytelling” (Throgmorton 1996) that looks backwards, by defending particular choices, as well as forwards, in the way they project visions of the future. They act within a broad ecology of narratives, including media narratives, everyday citizen narratives, and cultural representations of space. In dialogue with such various modes of storytelling, planning draws on existing narrative frames and rhetorical elements to select, choose, and formalize particular stories of an area, city, or city region, which are consequently materialized into the built environment as construction gets under way. This book has set out a range of perspectives and methods for approaching the narrative complexity of a planning area, for developing planning with narrative, and for analysing narratives in the context of planning. The framework for such an analysis is provided by the threefold typology that distinguishes between narratives for, in, and of planning. Narratives for planning consist of the existing narratives of a location, prior to planning: everyday stories, cultural representations, historical documents. Narratives in planning include the narrative texts and practices produced by planners or by actors within planning and policy (other agencies within the city, regional government, private actors operating in cooperation with planners). Narratives of planning are the stories of a development area told

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parallel or posterior to the planning proper – for example, in branding or place-making strategies, but also in the way local stories react to and communicate with the planning and development of an area. This threefold taxonomy of narratives in the context of planning provides a hermeneutic tool for scholars, planners, and the general public to talk in more precise terms about authorship, context, and objectives of planning narratives. In the context of the increasing “storyfcation” of planning and policy, and of the “narrative turn” in planning theory, it has been particularly important to start by clearly defning the key concepts for a narrative analysis of non-fctional modes of storytelling, beginning with defnitions of narrative, story, and narrativity. Narrative denotes what happens when someone tells someone else something, on a particular occasion and for a particular reason. What is told is the story. In this defnition, maps, pictures, and elements in the built environment are not narratives, but they can contain narrativity – the potential to evoke a particular story. All planning begins with some kind of survey of the area. A narrative mapping, which aims to chart an area in terms of the stories it has generated, will put a particular focus on metaphor, plot, and the relationships between the location and personal or communal development. The examination of a century of writing about the Helsinki waterfront, in Chapter Three, shows a rich and sometimes contradictory set of cultural meanings associated with the area. The Helsinki shoreline appears in this mapping as a liminal space of possibility for individuals as well for the transformative powers of society, enabling romantic encounters across social boundaries, but also individual moments of contemplation and rebirth. It functions as an environment in which the (social, gendered, ideological) fault lines of the city become apparent. Most of all, this is an area that gains its transformative powers from its peripheral location outside the regular urban fabric, its closeness to the sea, and its connection with other shores. The planning of the two post-industrial waterfront areas examined in this book, Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari, engages in a complex dialogue with these existing cultural narratives of the Helsinki shoreline. The dominant storyline that is recounted in narratives in planning emphasizes how these areas are, or will become, part of the Helsinki centre. It is a storyline of integration that effectively smooths over the profoundly liminal characteristics of the urban waterfront in cultural narratives. Even within the city planning, however, there are a number of storylines that challenge this integrating narrative and that emphasize the waterfront’s particular characteristics. One such storyline relates to the planning of the tower hotel in Jätkäsaari and defned the area as distinctly different from the historical city centre – a narrative strategy which allowed for an unusual high-rise project. A more impactful narrative is the effort by the Planning Department to develop a separate maritime plan for the Helsinki waterfront which approaches the maritime environments of Helsinki (sea, shores, islands, and harbour activities) as a coherent area with specifc characteristics and specifc needs.

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Chapters Five and Six examined, respectively, Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari, with a focus on emplotment, genre, and metaphor. Emplotment involves the double process of locating a set of events within a geographical location and within a narrative intrigue. Metaphor is one of the key rhetorical devices used to direct emplotment. In the case of Kalasatama, planning narratives make efforts to link the area’s development culturally and historically to Helsinki’s historical working-class districts and aim to project the development of the area within the narrative of an expansion of the city centre, both in terms of its built environment and in terms of its functions. The dominant metaphor in the marketing of Jätkäsaari is that of the area in terms of a male, can-do attitude, summed up in the title of the novel commissioned for the area by the city, Hyvä jätkä by Hannu Mäkelä (2009). The dominant genre in this novel, the Bildungsroman, is also the dominant generic frame found in the planning of this area, projecting the development of Jätkäsaari as an integration of a marginalized character into the natural urban fold of the city centre. In both Kalasatama and Jätkäsaari, such modes of emplotment, metaphors, and genre features can be seen to feed into the material characteristics of the built environment, informing the building height, the distribution of space for commercial activities, the focus on particular transport solutions (tram transport and metro, in particular), and the housing block structure. A narrative approach can be applied to all the phases of planning, from survey to participation, from the planning text to the interaction between the eventually built environment and new narratives of place. With the help of narrative mapping, local experiential knowledge can be foregrounded and used to challenge and supplement more quantitative place-based information. For researchers interested in how narratives in planning are rhetorically structured, a narrative approach can provide crucial insights, by drawing on questions such as: To what extent do plans draw on archetypal modes of emplotment or on particular textual genres? Who are the leading characters and actors within the planning storylines – planners, citizens, tourists, developers? What metaphors are used, and how are rhetorical tropes used to provide implied causality to particular decisions? Are there contradictions within the narratives in planning? Finally, narrative approaches can be instrumental in providing insights for developing future planning with narrative. They can identify a lack of cohesion or degree of contradiction within proposed planning storylines, or help identify blind spots in terms of forgotten actors or voices. In its most radical form, planning with narrative can result in planning that allows for greater polyphony, including contradictory voices or multiple storylines, and for planning without closure. From a narrative perspective, some recommendations suggest themselves in terms of how planning with narrative could be further developed. Attending to the role of protagonists is one element that deserves closer attention: planning documents have come some way from the distanced and passive voice still prevalent in the fnal decades of last century, but more

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could be done to ensure that the set of actors and voices in planning narratives displays a genuine diversity and that citizens, too, are visible as actors, in addition to planners and institutional forces. Enabling citizens to speak in their own voice within planning texts, even when their perspectives run counter to planning narratives, is an important element in moving towards a degree of polyphony in planning. Finally, greater attentiveness to the fundamental narrative characteristics of planning can result in planning narratives that are more coherent and more convincing, but also in narratives that are grounded in local layers of meaning and fexible in the face of future change. Similar to literary novels, plans tend to have clearly delineated endings. Cities, by contrast, continue their relentless cycles of change and transformation, regardless of the completion of city plans. To develop planning with narrative, including the possibility of planning without closure or with multiple and even contradictory storylines, is one way to prepare for inevitable change and for future uncertainty.

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Glossary

Words that are underlined refer to English translations of terms used in Helsinki City planning documents. city centre, centre keskusta city plan yleiskaava closure The resolution, at the end of a story, of conficts and tensions. Closure provides a measure of meaning and a purpose to all that has preceded it. concrete suburb The translation used here for the Finnish term lähiö. The concrete suburb is typifed by high-rise concrete apartment blocks located outside the city centre. The term encompasses a variety of socioeconomic, architectural, and historical settings, from 1950s concrete suburbs with modest building heights of four to six storeys, set in the middle of forest settings and typically connected by bus to the city centre, to the 1970s and 1980s satellite towns that sprang up around railway and metro stations, to the more recent concrete suburbs that have appeared with the development of post-industrial brownfeld sites and harbours. Concrete suburbs include areas with high percentages of private home ownership as well as social housing blocks. emplotment The act of situating events, characters, and places in a plot. In the context of planning, emplotment plays on the double meaning of the word plot, which denotes both a spatial location and the development of a story. garden suburb Suburbs with detached and semi-detached houses. In the greater Helsinki area, many of the garden suburbs are located in the neighbouring cities of Espoo and Vantaa. They are generally less well connected via rail or metro than concrete suburbs. genre Recognizable type of narrative text, ranging from very broadly arranged types of text, such as “poetry” or “prose”, to more specifc historical genres, such as the early modern Robinsonade or the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. Such historical genres have specifc and historically identifable stylistic attributes, recognizable plot developments, and stylized character types.

146

Glossary

inner city kantakaupunki local detailed plan asemakaava metaphor The transfer of meaning from a word’s usual context to a new one, typically in the form of an implicit comparison. An example is to talk of a shopping mall as the “heart of the area”, with the implied comparison that an urban area can be compared to a human body. micro-narrative A micro-narrative does not explicitly recount the various phases of a change in situation or narrated equilibrium, but outlines only the fnal stage, with the previous stages implied. It tends to imply a more fully-fedged narrative in the form of one sentence and may resemble an advertisement slogan. In planning, micro-narratives are of particular importance, as they tend to encapsulate strategic planning objectives. narrative A narrative is when someone tells someone else something on a particular occasion and for a particular reason.1 A narrative can take the form of a written textual or orally recounted story. narrative mapping The survey of a planning area in terms of its narrative properties, with particular attention paid to how the area is described in personal or communal life stories. Special attention is paid to questions such as: What metaphors are used to describe the area? What kinds of relationship and function does the area allow or evoke? What kinds of textual genre are used to account for the area’s relationship with the surrounding environment and inhabitants? narratives for planning Local and localized narratives of an area; narratives that emanate from the location itself and that exist prior to the planning process. narratives in planning Narrative activities and texts that emanate from a planning department or more broadly from actors in planning and policy (the city, other agencies within the city, regional government, private actors operating in tandem with the policy actors). Also referred to as planning narratives. narratives of planning The local narratives of an area and its planning as they develop after and simultaneously with the planning process proper. narrativity The potential to evoke a narrative.2 partial local master plan osayleiskaava plot Plot denotes how a story is organized. Plot also includes how and why the structure of the narrative is set to affect the reader and their judgement about what is being told. polyphony Literally “multi-voicedness”, the ability of a text or story to include several different voices and perspectives, undisrupted by an overarching authorial voice.3 story What is told in a narrative. A story tends to involve one or more human-like agents; it presents a world that goes through some kind of (not entirely predictable) change of situation, and the event(s) in the story is/are associated with mental states.4

Glossary

Notes 1 2 3 4

Defnition based on Phelan 2007, 3–4. Defnition based on Ryan, Foote, and Azaryahu 2016, 139. Defnition based on Bakhtin 1984. Defnition based on Ryan 2005, 347.

147

Index

Page numbers in italics represent photographs, while page numbers in bold represent tables. accessibility: of the islands 42; of the shoreline 69, 110 actors/actants 45 agency 28 Andersson, Claes 107–108 Anttinen Oiva Architects 106 Arabia 54, 99 architects, role of 16 architecture/planning, poetic approaches to 16–17 The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning (Fischer and Forester) 18 “armpit of the city”, Kalasatama as 58 Asikainen, Hannu 54 Austin, John 79 Australia 33 Azaryahu, Maoz 25–26 Bad Bad Boy 100 Bakhtin, Mikhail 14, 116 Bakhtinian polyphony 116–117, 122n3; see also polyphony Bauman, Zygmunt 59 Beauregard, Robert 26, 59 Berman, Marshall 91 Beta: Sensored Reality (Parhamaa and Vacklin) 46–47 Bianchini, Franco 33 Bloomfeld, Jude 17 Boeri, Stephano 48n2 Bond, Sophie 33 BOTH 75, 85 Bowden, Rob, Building Homes for Tomorrow 105 Boyer, M. Christine 17–18, 103

branding 29–30, 85, 97, 98, 124; urban 44, 58 Brändövägen 8 (Tikkanen) 35 Building Homes for Tomorrow (Bowden) 105 built environments: and stories 2; and story 25, 119; and urbanity 55 Busholmen nästa 108 Calvino, Italo 120–121 canals, impacts of 2 Cars, Göran 18 Carter, Paul 119 characters xiii Childs, Mark 33 cities 126; as bodies 58–59, 73n8, 97–98, 101; Massey on 1, 123; open 119; Raban on 3; shift towards 11 city centre 40, 41; focus on 39–40; Jätkäsaari as part of 76–77, 79–83, 85, 110; Kalasatama as part of 55–57; one vs. many 41; see also urban cores City of Helsinki Urban Environment Division see Helsinki Planning Department closure 118–119 coastal areas 12; and urban planning 12; see also shorelines cognitive frames 5 Cohen, Philip 45 collaborative/communicative planning 94 communication 113; see also public input complex stories 77–78 Cresswell, Tim 59

Index Damyanovic, Doris 46 data access/use 70 De Hemlösas stad (Luther) 46 de Man, Paul 57 density 12, 39–40, 46, 55–57, 64, 66, 76, 79, 105 dialogic space 14 discursive displacement 59 diversity, in Jätkäsaari 108 Doody, Margaret 12 Dormans, Stefan 3 Downward, Lisa 95 Driessen, Peter 71 Eiranranta 11, 74 Elämänmeno (Saisio) 35 emplotment 7, 14, 50–58, 60, 64, 72, 113, 125 Enckell, Martin 107 ENJUSTESS survey 114, 122nn1–2 Eskus Performance Centre 71 Estonia 108 Facebook 13, 46, 85; see also social media Faust (Goethe) 91 feminist planning 19 ferries 42 Finch, Jason 34 Finland 18 Finnegan, Ruth 45 Finnish Innovation Fund SITRA 106 Finnish language 58, 78–79 Fischer, Frank 57 fooding risks 71 Flyvbjerg, Bent 3, 8, 30 Foote, Kenneth 25–26 Forester, John 18, 57 Forum Virium 70 Foucauldian planning theory 13, 17–19 Frye, Northrop 50–51 Geddes, Patrick 32–33, 58 Genette, Gérard 88 genres 6, 50–51; Bildungsroman 5–6, 14, 76, 86–97, 99, 101, 125 Glaeser, Edward 95 Goffman, Erwin 4–5 “Good Hope Park” 102–105 Green Party 12, 66 Greimas, Algirdas Julius 45 Habermasian planning theory 13, 18 Hanasaari 49

149

Hanko 115 “Hanko of memories and dreams” 114–115 Harjunpää ja pahan pappi (Joensuu) 47 Harries, Karsten 16 Havik, Klaske 17 Havis Amanda statue 22, 99 Healey, Patsy 20, 120 Heino, Timo 70 Helsingin Sanomat 13 Helsinki 3, 8, 9, 23–24, 40, 48, 53–54, 85, 88, 93, 98, 110, 124; and climate change 12; development of 79; diversity in 108; in literature 35, 36, 37, 46–47, 54, 86, 89–93, 95; myths of 21–23; narratives of 77; place names in 70–71, 108–109; waterfront case study 34–35, 36, 37–38; waterfront overview 8–9, 49–50; see also Jätkäsaari; Kalasatama Helsinki City Museum 82 Helsinki Planning Department 13, 15n2, 19, 23–24, 26, 39, 41, 46, 50, 64, 67, 69, 72n4, 76, 78–79, 81–83, 95, 97, 105–106, 111n10, 121, 124 Hernesaari 74 hero’s journey stories 5 high-rise apartments 64, 65, 106 HITAS 69 Horelli, Liisa 46 hotel controversy 14, 81–82, 85–86 housing, guidelines for 69 housing blocks 106–108 “How we live in 2033” 66–67 Huffngton Post 59 humanities/social sciences 16 Hyvä jätkä (Mäkelä) 7, 13–14, 47, 75–76, 87–93, 96–97, 101–102, 111n8, 125 Ihana café 70 Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory (Westwood and Williams) 119–120 Innes, Judith 20, 32 International School of Helsinki 108 islands 8, 42–43, 71, 74–75, 80, 91–92, 103; as gated communities 68; in literature 35, 87–88, 90–91, 93, 96–97 Isosaari 42 Israel 120

150

Index

Jacobs, Jane 55 Järnefelt, Arvid 36; Veljekset 35; Veneh’ojalaiset 35 Jätkäsaari 7, 9, 10, 11, 39–40, 43, 74, 75, 79, 83, 84–85, 91–92; art in 100; Busholmen nästa 108; Cable Factory 74, 111n3; Clarion conference hotel 76; development goals 94–95, 120; diversity in 108; gendered marketing 97, 98, 99–101; Generations Block 107; “Good Hope Park” 102–105; hotel controversy 14, 81–83, 85–86; housing in 69; Huutokonttori 76; identity 81, 98–99, 109, 111n2; Jallukka 106; literature connected with 7, 13, 47, 75, 87–88, 92–96, 101, 107, 125; LOW2NO project 105–106; Malta co-housing block 107; place names in 108–109, 111–112n11, 112n15; planning documents 77–81, 110; planning in 71, 76–77, 94–97; sledging hill 103, 120; storylines 76; sustainability 76, 105–106; temporary usages in 75, 110–111; Verkkokauppa 100; Victoria 106–107; waste systems 104; West Harbour 11, 22; “Wood City” project 105–106; see also Helsinki; West Harbour Joensuu, M.A., Harjunpää ja pahan pappi 47 Joyce, James 116–117 Jyväskylä 19 Kaijansinko, Matti 102 Kalasatama 7, 9–10, 39–40, 43, 49, 53, 66, 109; 2008 plan for 61, 68; 2011 plan for 61–62; described 58– 59; emplotment of 52–57, 72; Eskus Performance Centre 71; identity of 56, 61; Kalasatama Centre 61; Katiska playground 117; literature connected with 7, 47; and metaphors 57–60, 72, 73n8; as narrative 50; Nifty Neighbour (Nappi Naapuri) project 70; place names in 70–71; planning narratives 63, 120, 125; public art projects 70–71; REDI shopping mall 61–62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 73n9; as “smart city” 60–61, 67, 70; temporary usages in 69–70, 75, 110, 117; see also Helsinki “Kalasataman taidetalkoot” 71 Kallio 56, 99

Kallio–Arabia axis 54 Kaplinski, Jaan 108 Karlskrona 51 Kauranen, Anja, Pelon maantiede 35 “Keski-Eurooppa” 112n16 Kluwick, Ursula 12 knowledge 115, 119; and planning processes 20 Kramsch, Olivier 30 Krivy, Maros 70 Krohn, Leena 47; Oofrin kultaa 104 Kruunuvuorenranta 8, 39, 47, 54, 77; housing in 69 Kulosaari 47, 54 Kuninkaansaari 42 Lacanian planning 19 “lagoon” metaphor 58–59 Lahti 19 Laitinen, Timo 86–88, 97 Länsisatama 74; see also West Harbour Latour, Bruno 45 learning processes 20 Lefebvre, Henri 1 Lehtovuori, Olli 110 Lehtovuori, Panu 33, 37, 110 Lempäälä 19 Line Drawn in the Water (Heino) 70 linguistic rhythms xiii Linna, Väinö, Täällä Pohjantähden alla 59, 111n8 literary urban studies 30–31 literature 104, 107–108, 111n8, 112n13; in Helsinki 35, 36, 37, 46–47, 54, 75, 86, 95–96; narration in 116–117; and planning 44, 47, 75; spatial descriptions 52 littoral studies 11; see also coastal areas; shorelines Live Music Association Elmu 106 localized narratives 29 Loivaranta, Tikli 18 Long Bridge 52, 53 Lotman, Yuri 51–52 Luther, Annika, De Hemlösas stad 46 Lynch, Kevin 119 Mäenpää, Pasi 72n6 Mäkelä, Hannu 111n7; Hyvä jätkä 7, 13–14, 47, 75–76, 87–93, 96–97, 101–102, 111n8, 125 Mäkinen, Esa, Totuuskuutio 46 Manninen, Rikhard 18 Mäntysalo, Raine 18

Index maps 9, 23–24, 25, 27n2, 41, 84–85, 88, 88, 91–92, 109; cultural 33; in the maritime strategy 43; narrative mapping 30–34, 45, 113–115, 125 Maritime Helsinki in the city plan 23, 26, 42–43, 124 Martina Dagers Längtan (Ringbom) 47 Massey, Doreen 1, 123 media narratives 45–46, 85–86, 109 Mees, Heleen L.P. 71 metanarratives 5 metaphor 6, 57–60, 72, 73n8, 91, 96–98, 101, 113, 125 metaphorization 6 micro-narratives 78–79, 111n4 “Modern Constitution” narrative 5 monomyth stories 5; see also hero’s journey stories Moretti, Franco 89 Moses, Robert 104 Moslund, Pultz 34 multicultural planning 19 Munkkiniemi 47, 54 Munkkisaari 74 Mustikkamaa 49 narration, in literary fction 116–117 narrative 124; of the city centre 39 narrative analysis 27n2, 38 narrative beginnings 51–52 narrative spaces, planning for 119–120 narrative structures, as cognitive frames 5 narrative studies 1, 4, 21 narrative theory 21; adaptation of 5–6; teaching 4 narratives 3, 22, 34, 48; defned 2, 21–24, 124; diversity in 117; for planning 31–32, 38; of housing blocks 106–108; in planning 13, 19, 29, 31–32, 39, 44, 56, 60, 68–70, 72, 80, 83, 123; interacting 30; literary 35; and maps 24–25, 113–115, 125; from the media 45–46; micronarratives 78–79, 111n4; of planning 13, 29, 30, 32, 43–47, 67–68, 72, 79, 123–124; paired with stories 22; parallel 60–61; and participatory planning 32; of place 17; for planning 80–81, 83, 113, 124; of planning 85–86, 103; in planning 103; and poetic approaches to planning 16–17; questioning 2, 4; situating 26–27, 32, 38; typologies 3, 14, 28

151

narrativity 25–26, 27n2, 76, 102; of place names 71 national land use objectives 23 neoliberalism 11 New City of Labour 55 “New coastal areas in the inner city document” 55–56 New York 104 Nifty Neighbour (Nappi Naapuri) project 70 non-binding strategic planning 119 O’Neill, Patrick 77 Oofrin kultaa (Krohn) 104 open cities 119 Oskala, Hannu 82 out-migration 77 Översiktsplan 2030 51 Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning 18 Pajunen, Jussi 22, 98, 109 Parantaja (Tuomainen) 47, 86 paratexts 88 Parhamaa, Aki, Beta: Sensored Reality 46–47 Park, Robert E. 123 participatory planning 30–32, 44–45, 84, 115–118, 126 Pasila 40, 109 Pelon maantiede (Kauranen) 35 “percent for art principle” 70 Perlman, Janice E. 64 persuasive storytelling 18 Pesonen, Arto 81 Phelan, James 2, 21–22 place-making 19, 124; and public art/ culture 70–71 place names 70–71, 108–109, 111– 112n11, 112n15 place narratives 17 plan-led urban development 71 planners 1, 16–20, 22, 29, 32, 34, 38–39, 44, 47, 74, 81–82, 94, 104– 105, 115, 120, 123; and discursive displacement 59; education 20–21, 120–121 planning 48, 123–124; as Bildungsroman 94–97; collaborative/ communicative 94; hierarchies of 41–42; and literature 44, 47; narrative approaches to 113, 116–117; and narrative spaces 119–120; open-ended 119;

152

Index

participatory 30–32, 44–45, 84, 115–118, 126; storytelling about 43–47; storytelling as 38–41, 43; without closure 118–119; see also urban planning planning departments 44; see also Helsinki Planning Department planning narratives 78, 83–84, 125; of Jätkäsaari 96; of Kalasatama 63; and personal stories 117 planning processes: and knowledge 20; and stakeholders 31; and storylines 19–20 planning rhetoric, and utopia 6 planning theory 30, 118 plot 6–7; defned 6; and Kalasatama 52–57; and waterfronts 36 points of view xiii, 115 polyphony 3, 113, 115–117, 125–126; see also Bakhtinian polyphony “positive segregation” 66–67, 72n7 Potteiger, Matthew 17 PPGIS 113–115 private interests, changing storylines 68 Pro Helsinki 2.0 plan 46 public art/culture 100, 101; and placemaking 70–71 public input 81, 126; low levels of 71; see also communication public saunas 43, 70 public transport 14, 47, 79–80, 88 Purinton, Jamie 17 Raban, Jonathan 3 Rajajärvi, Tuomas 7 Rannila, Päivi 18 reconstitution stories 5 recovery narratives 77 REDI shopping mall 61–62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 72, 73n9 Rein, Martin 5 Richter, Virginia 12 Ricoeur, Paul 51 Ringbom, Henrika, Martina Dagers Längtan 47 Ritson, Katie 12 Robinsonade 5 romance 50, 60; and shorelines 35, 36 Rööri 104 Runhaar, Hens 71 Ruoholahti 10–11, 74, 77 Russia 108–109 Ryan, Marie-Laure 23, 25–26

Saarikoski, Pentti 117 Saglie, Inger-Lise 18 Said, Edward 52 Saisio, Pirkko, Elämänmeno 35 Salmisaari 11, 74 Sandercock, Leonie 6 scenario planning 17 Schön, Donald 5 Scripts for Post-Industrial Urban Futures research group 120 sea-levels, changing 12, 71 Secchi, Bernardo 17 segregation 67, 72n7; see also “positive segregation” semiotics 16 Sennett, Richard 119 Serres, Michel 5 shorelines 12, 35, 36, 37, 86, 93–94, 109; see also coastal areas; waterfronts simple stories 77–78 skyscrapers 62, 81–83, 84 “smart city” narratives 60–61, 67, 70 social media 13, 44, 46, 85; see also Facebook Soininvaara, Osmo 66 Sompasauna 70 Sonck, Lars 76 Sörnäinen 54, 99 Sörnäistenranta ja Hermanninranta see Kalasatama SRV 66–68, 106 stakeholders, and the planning process 31 stories 83; complex 77–78; defned 2; and emotions xiv; simple 77–78; see also narratives story 22–23; and built environments 25 story meanings, and audiences xiii storylines: in Jätkäsaari 76; and planning processes 19–20; private interests impacts on 68 storytelling xii, 124; planning as 38–41, 118, 123; postmodern 118; and urban design 33 suburbs 39, 42, 47, 55, 63–64, 95 Summerfeld, Giovanna 95 Suomenlinna 82 surveys 38; ENJUSTESS survey 114, 122nn1–2; and narrative mapping 32–33, 113–115; and place narratives 17 sustainability 40; into the future 26; in Jätkäsaari 76, 105–106

Index Suvilahti 10, 49, 58–59, 70 symbols, social/ideological contexts 5 Täällä Pohjantähden alla (Linna) 59, 111n8 Tallberg, Julius 91–92 Tally, Robert Jr. 34 Talotekniikka 86 Tapiola 64 taxonomies 28 Telakkanranta 74 temporary usages: in Jätkäsaari 75, 110–111; in Kalasatama 69–70, 110, 117 Teurastamo 49 Thompson-Fawcett, Michelle 33 threefold taxonomy 28–31, 47–48, 123 Throgmorton, James A. 3, 8, 26, 29, 38–39, 79, 122n3 Tikkanen, Henrik 47; Brändövägen 8 35 Totuuskuutio (Mäkinen) 46 tourism 43 triumph of the city 11 tropes xiii Tuomainen, Antti, Parantaja 47, 86 “Uncle Charles Principle” 116–117 underdeveloped storylines 69 unintended spatial uses 2–3 urban centres, expanding 14 urban cores 39–40, 95; see also city centre urban design, and storytelling 33 urban development 94; plan-led 71 urban fabric 56–57 urban humanities 30–31 urban living, increased interest in 40 urban planners 22, 44; education 20–21, 120–121 urban planning 67, 116–117, 120; and coastal areas 12; defning narratives in 21–24; and place-based information 1; role of narratives in 2, 16, 19, 28, 47–48; see also planning urban problems 26

153

urban renaissance 11; narrative strands of 12 urban vitality 77 urbanity 55–56, 60, 63–64, 67, 95, 108 utopia, and planning rhetoric 6 Vaattovaara, Mari 66 Vacklin, Anders, Beta: Sensored Reality 46–47 Vallisaari 42 Vanhankaupunginlahti 8 Vartiosaari 8 Veljekset (Järnefelt) 35 Veneh’ojalaiset (Järnefelt) 35 Venturi, Robert 16 Viikki 54, 99 vision: and the maritime strategy 43; as “smart city” 60–61 Vision 2050 41 von Goethe, Johann, Faust 91 Vuosaari harbour 9, 74 Walter, Mareile 3, 6, 43 waste areas, to green space 104 waterfront development: characteristics of 7–8, 74; Helsinki 23–24, 69; international 24, 49, 68–69, 74 waterfronts 35, 37–38, 93–94; as literary settings 35, 36, 37, 46–47, 93; planning vs. cultural narratives 40; see also shorelines West Harbour 10–11, 22, 26, 55, 74; see also Jätkäsaari; Länsisatama Westö, Kjell 47, 54 Westphal, Bertrand 34 Westwood, Sallie, Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory 119–120 White, Hayden 50–51, 60, 111n4 Williams, John, Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory 119–120 Wood, James 57 Yanow, Dvora 120 Yleiskaavoituksen uusia tuulia 19 zoning 27n2