Dwelling in political landscapes

Yesterday, at the end of the Anthropology conference here in Helsinki, with my friends and co-editors Anu Lounela and Timo Kallinen we launched our new book, Dwelling in Political Landscapes: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives. Published by the Finnish Literature Society, it’s a fine 293-page volume to acquire as a hard copy. It’s also available as open access.

I believe it’s a pretty timely publication. Even the links between climate change and land are now newsworthy. As we write in our introduction to the book, people everywhere are experiencing new hazards and unprecedented situations as their environments change, sometimes at speeds never before experienced. The book’s examples are from the extractive industries, commercial conservation and massive wind-power projects but also from more ordinary, almost imperceptibly unfolding processes of locally disturbing landscape change.

It’s the putting together the here-and-now with the over-there-and-then that helps us to appreciate the complexities and politics of living in this globalized world, with its shocking levels of unsustainability. Making these links stops us from assuming that that power, justice and injustice, or environmental or architectural damages for that matter, always come from somewhere else.

(That’s why as part of Helsinki Design Week, our ad hoc ‘walking collective’ Narratiimi, is kicking off what will hopefully be a series of walks to explore how Helsinki fits into a bigger picture of sustainable urbanism, but more about that later).

Still, if I was to take a walk on this fine Saturday afternoon, I’d probably not have political struggle and conflict on my mind. I’d be venturing out into and becoming part a great urban landscape. My gaze would rest on interesting people, beautiful architecture, sun-dappled sea and verdant parks. I would hear its sounds and feel its air.

These are and will hopefully remain excellent aspects of taking a walk in Helsinki. But with training in anthropology and planning, and some understanding of design, my attention is often drawn to the city’s political things. They are often also ordinary.

I’d find it hard to ignore bits of urban infrastructure that facilitate some personal preferences and complicate others (mostly I notice how much has been built to ease the flow of cars). I’d encounter lots of machines (designed to be inviting) for governing the city with the help of computing, something Shannon Mattern eloquently lays out in this text.

I’m also routinely surprised by new and often strikingly large buildings that go up in just a few weeks.

This very ordinary, perhaps even ugly landscape below, in Sturenkatu, photographed two summers ago, is gone. Now it’s flats.

We can’t have big skies as well as affordable homes (though actually, maybe we could) so what, exactly, should be built in such places is the topic of local political wrangling. But it’s not unconnected from a global phenomenon of accelerated and profit-driven urban growth.

My hope is that a debate that has started among some academics could be pursued in Helsinki too around norms and expectations about urban growth. It could help question imperatives to grow the city for the sake if ” competitiveness” and even maybe reform the planning culture that’s increasingly about light-weight participation and greenwashing if not just in the service of capital.

I made a start in my own chapter in the book, which I tried to write in a way that would not put off non-academics. (Here’s that link again).

And there is hope. For example, an eloquent playwright and director, Juha Siltanen, is quoted in today’s (Finnish language) paper saying that a completely new geography awaits us, demanding new ethics and new scripts (the theatre metaphor works, I think), as expansion ceases to be possible. I like the image of something spreading out, burying landscapes everywhere until there is nothing left for it to cover over.

Helsinki will not be spared the damages if this expansionism continues. More importantly, even here our landscapes are suffused with politics and local choices, no matter how ardently this may be denied.

 

After walking, talking and writing against urbicide

There is both disdain for the past and a worship of it in the modern world. A penchant for novelty made “creative destruction” in cities not just ordinary, but necessary. At least that’s been the view of the capitalists who have made profit from it.

Yet at the same time, “having” a shared history has also helped Moderns distinguish themselves from Others. That’s why, before independence (1917), the emerging Finnish intelligentsia worried about whether or not Finland was the Subject of its own History. If it was, the reasoning went, it should be in charge of its own affairs.

But heritage isn’t just about nationalism. Questions about the value of existing things routinely come to mind these days, as I notice old buildings being abandoned, even left to rot. It’s not just happening in Helsinki, the loss of shared built heritage is an issue in many places. In the extreme case of New York City, Marshall Berman called it urbicide (e.g. in this posthumous text). But still.

So I wrote a letter about just one small but significant part of my own everyday landscape at risk, which should be getting more attention. The newspaper published it but not before in my impatience I had posted it on this blog too – so as not to waste my effort.

In Helsinki as elsewhere, there is much talk about cities as the best place to confront wicked future challenges. That’s where the problems are at their most intense, but it’s also where the innovation and “buzz” characteristic of urban life get scaled up and turned into success and liveliness. This requires imagination and courage, though. Alas, Helsinki’s current real estate policies pull in the opposite direction. An almost incredible example is the situation of the historic hospital area of Lapinlahti.

Lapinlahti is a fabulous asset for Helsinki today, unique and open to all. Ten years ago it was a secluded mental hospital area, closed off from passers-by. Now it brims with initiatives supporting wellbeing, sustainable lifestyle, civic participation and all kinds of activities. It’s thanks to voluntary and non-profit groups [like Mieli, Mental Health Finland], Lapinlahden Lähde and the Tilajakamo Cooperative, and to many low-wage workers, that the old hospital buildings and the magnificent grounds, now owned by the city, are flourishing. An added delight is how the atmosphere at Lapinlahti differs from the noisy mainstream.

Image from https://www.stadissa.fi/paikat/552/lapinlahden-sairaala

So it’s striking that the city doesn’t expressly support all this activity.* On the contrary. In the middle of the Christmas holidays, it launched an ideas competition for developing the area, though it appears not to be primarily about good ideas as much as about attracting one entity, a company or a consortium, to manage the entire site as a whole. The city is probably looking for  someone external to shoulder the responsibility for the maintenance and refurbishment of the site. Fortunately that task is recognized as needing to match the considerable heritage and other values of the place. It comes, after all, from the pen of the architect Carl Ludvig Engel, father of Helsinki’s neo-classical town centre.

According to the competition brief, the city of Helsinki has no use for the buildings, either as a hospital or anything else. In the light of so-called economic realities, municipal leaders perhaps see it as their duty to maximise rental income on city property. The situation bears examining from other angles as well. This is a notable site of cultural history as well as producer of many types of values through its work in the arts and mental health. Beyond it, the ideology of competitiveness that prevails in parts of the administration is threatening efforts to build a city of variety and layers of history and foster the spirit of self-organizing.

Quite certainly, if Helsinki trots out standardised solutions, this will also threaten the city’s appeal and international admiration.

* Posting my letter-to-the-editor on their Facebook page, the folks at Lapinlahden Lähde inserted a small correction to the text, to note that the city has provided grant money for an urban nature centre and citizen participation work.

So anyway, although personally I don’t visit as often as I might, and I’m not an architectural historian, I feel strongly about places with character, breathing space (urban gardening here too, of course) and echoes of history – plus probably millions of other unauditable values like Lappari.

I worry that there aren’t more resources or ambitions to rework the way histories and values other than those of real-estate profits could continue to support life in the city. That explains no doubt why I keep blogging about it. Perhaps I will get to do some more serious research on it too. Perhaps I will even get to walk and talk on the subject soon.

A start was made when delightfully, on 22.5. a small group of like-minded people walked from Lapinlahti to another place where urbanites and urban life are wonderfully energised. Along the way we discussed all the valuable but unvalued things these places give.

From Lapinlahti, dogding the thunder, we progressed to Sähinä. It is also a co-operatively run, brilliantly inventive and much loved centre of cultural life. It too is housed in a building originally built for quite different uses. But this is moving onto other stories.

Lapinlahden kohtalon pitää puhuttaa enemmän

Teksti, jonka lähetin kaksi viikkoa sitten Hesarille mielipidekirjoituksena.* Toissa viikolla kaupunki kertoi, että Lapparin ‘ideakilpailun‘ vastauksia saapui heille määräaikaan mennessä neljä. Joskus kesän lopulla sitten kuulemme, mitä viranomaiset ovat miettineet. Oppiiko kaupungin johto tukemaan kaikkea sitä arvokasta mitä Lapparissa on, vaikkei itseään siitä voisikaan kiittää? Vai kaataako se kylmää vettä niskaan?

Helsingissä puhutaan paljon siitä, että tulevaisuuden haasteet kohdataan kaupungeissa. Niissä ongelmat korostuvat, mutta samalla kaupunkielämälle ominaisen innovatiivisuuden ja ’pöhinän’ tuomat radikaalit ratkaisut skaalautuvat menestykseksi ja elinvoimaksi. Tarvitaan mielikuvitusta ja rohkeutta. Valitettavasti kaupungin harjoittama kiinteistöpolitiikka vetää päinvastaiseen suuntaan. Miltei uskomaton esimerkki ongelmasta on Lapinlahden historiallisen sairaala-alueen nurinkurinen tilanne.

Tänä päivänä Lapinlahti on kaikille avoin, ainutlaatuinen ja upea osa Helsinkiä. Missä oli kymmenen vuotta sitten ohikulkijoilta suljettu mielisairaala-alue on nyt hyvinvoinnin, luonnonkestävän elämisen, kansalaistoiminnan ja moninaisen tekemisen tyyssija. On vapaaehtoisten, voittoa tavoittelemattomien tahojen, Lapinlahden Lähteen ja Osuuskunta Tilajakamon, sekä pienipalkkaisten ihmisten ansiota, että kaupungin omistamat sairaalarakennukset upeine puistoineen nyt kukoistavat. Hienoa on myös se, miten Lapinlahti erottuu tunnelmaltaan hälyä tuottavasta valtavirrasta.

On hätkähdyttävää, että kaupunki ei erityisesti tue toimintaa. Päinvastoin, joululomien keskellä se julkisti Lapinlahden sairaala-aluetta koskevan ideakilpailun, jossa ei tosin etsitä ensisijaisesti ideoita, vaan yhtä tahoa, yritystä tai yritysryhmää, joka pystyisi hallinnoimaan kohdetta kokonaisuutena. Kaupunki kai etsii kyllin leveitä hartioita ottamaan vastuun ylläpitokorjausten ja –kustannusten hoitamisesta (onneksi) kuitenkin niin, ettei alue menetä arvojaan. Onhan kyseessä Carl Ludvig Engelin, Empire-Helsingin pääarkkitehdin, käsialaa oleva, pian 170-vuotias kokonaisuus.

Kilpailukutsun mukaan Helsingin kaupungilla ei ole ”tarvetta rakennusten sairaala- eikä muuhunkaan käyttöön”. Niin sanottujen taloudellisten realiteettien valossa, hallinto ehkä näkee velvollisuudekseen pyrkiä maksimoimaan kiinteistötuottoja. Asiaa kannattaa tarkastella muistakin lähtökohdista. Kyseessä on merkittävä kulttuurihistoriallinen kohde ja monenlaista arvoa luova taiteen ja mielenterveysalan toimijoiden keskittymä. Vallitseva kilpailuideologiaan perustuva politiikka uhkaa ylipäänsä yrityksiä luoda Helsinkiin monimuotoista ja elämän kerroksellisuutta heijastavaa kaupunkia ja aloitekykyä palkitsevaa henkeä. Toki jos tulevaisuuden haasteisiin vastataan vanhoilla standardiratkaisuilla, on se uhka myös Helsingin vetovoimaisuudelle ja kansainväliselle arvostukselle.

Eeva Berglund, helsinkiläinen tutkija.

Kesän muiden tekemisten lomassa voisin itse ehkä perehtyä siihen, miten kohtuusajattelu (Degrowth) saisi tuulta purjeisiinsa myös kaupunkipolitiikassa.

* p.s. Julkaisihan se Hesari sen kirjoitukseni sittenkin – täältä voi linkata.

Totally nuts – trying to work out what’s happening at Lapinlahti, Helsinki

I feel I am a little more confused these days than I have been. Enthused by my typically eclectic reading of academic texts (e.g. this), I’ve been trying to link them to what is happening in or to Helsinki. How are the weird things happening here (and I’m not just talking about yesterday’s elections) connected to news and academic reflections about how urban development is affecting people, the Earth and democracy elsewhere? If the built environment really is crucially important both for social order and individual life, as I believe it is, then how should I understand policies towards it right here in Helsinki?

To help figure out, I am committing to this blog post some rather raw thoughts. They revolve around the fact that I found myself going on three consecutive days to the wonderful Lapinlahti hospital, which is gradually becoming known to at least some Helsinkians as a fascinating place of quirkiness, peace and cultural heritage. But the best things going on there appear to be threatened.

First, the tiniest bit of background (for more, follow the links and/or dream up your own research project on it. It opens doors to countless fascinating streams of historically significant events).

From 1841 to 2008 Lapinlahti served as the country’s foremost mental institution. Most of that time, it was closed off to ordinary residents, a fact recalled in the sign on display at the small Mental Museum operating there.

After the last psychiatric units were rehoused, it remained in city owndership but was left abandoned until volunteers gradually got it back on its feet. They struck a very short-term tenancy agreement with the city and have been able, despite little monetary support, to turn it into a life-affirming, quietly and preciously special place a hub of makers and doers whose future is, however, now uncertain.

Two years ago already I was concerned about this and helped organise a discussion about the contested future of the place. Fed up then as now with planning for shopping, I wrote:

…  Lapinlahti outshines, in every possible dimension, the tawrdy stuff of the retail therapy that Helsinki is currently building …

Its two main tenants were concerned about how their activities, which were then getting off to a good start, would be able to continue. In one wing the Tilajakamo cooperative provides affordable (really affordable) space to artists. In the other, the social enterprise Lapinlahden Lähde rents out space for voluntary and cultural activities with a special focus on wellbeing and mental health.

Instead of taking responsibility for developing the good work already underway here, the city wants someone to take the troublesome hospital area off its hands. 

At Christmas last year, the city launched an ideas competition to come up with a high quality, functionally efficient and feasible “solution” to the “problem” of Lapinlahti. This would involve just one instance (investor? visionary?) to realize it. The brief does require, however that an endangered moth’s protection be secured and the area remain open to the public for recreational uses.

There is also the option to rent the whole to a suitable tenant. Several sources tell me that this is only in the call because of their lobbying. Many talk of the “so-called” ideas competition, adding hand-signal-scare-quotes as they speak.

Indeed, ideas are not in short supply here (see the text here and the video here for instance). Finance is.

Money. The city wants first of all to sell, not to care for or develop. According to an article in Helsingin Sanomat from December 2018 (screen shot below), to make its offer more attractive to investors, the city is even considering rezoning for new building rights on the edge of the park. The first round of the competition closes 31.5.2019.

One explanation for the craziness going on here now is that Helsinki has adopted policies that legally oblige it to manage the structures it owns for profit. Having said that, a city government is also legally obliged to look after its citizens’ wellbeing. It must ensure access to recreational spaces. To me and many others it seems clear that its first priority should be to support the activities that can already be found there. What amazing things could happen if the energy one feels there were supported with just a little bit of funding. The place needs maintenance. It does not need to be turned into luxury.

It also worries me that such a high profile place is so hard-pressed to gain support for activities that support social and use value over financial value. While I was on a guided history tour, former president Tarja Halonen was opening a new exhibition of Roma Culture. I only hope this kind of support will also lead to the material support that we people of Helsinki are bound to need as the threats to people, earth and democracy I began with remain with us.

(No wonder this is tricky to write about. There is so much to care about in Lapinlahti. And so much is endangered here: architectural heritage merges into cultural patrimony merges into personal and family histories merges into social fabric merges into walking in the cemetary and eating together (Loop) merges into the restorative joy of gardening merges into urban planning merges into land use requirements merges into Helsinki’s geography merges into loss of (bio)diversity merges into pollution merges into the growth imperative merges into climate change merges into troubles with Earth systems merges into foreshortened futures merges into school strikes merges into climate anxiety merges into all of the above… Aaarrggghhh. But it helped to write and to meet all those people who work every day to develop good things for us neighbours.)

(On my outings this past weekend, I also went to buy bread from the remarkable baker who can be found on weekends in the red-brick Venetsia building on the right in the picture above. Discovering him was a fabulous bonus. Do try, for instance, his Totally Nuts loaf, sold by the kilo and worth every cent!)

 

 

Not quite an anthropology of the good, just some reflections on being creative and comfortable in Helsinki

Living sustainably isn’t easy when you’re rich

As I write, all who live in Europe must know that we are living climate change. Perhaps this also presages more recruits to the many initiatives of prefiguring more climate-sane and equitable futures.

Like so many of us engaged with environmentalism and other social movements, I struggle to assess and evaluate the role of the countless creative activists whose efforts sustain them and whose work I’ve been following with admiration and interest for the last decade and more. It’s just that their being so wealthy means that however activist and green they are, and however great the ideas they are promoting (like Dodo’s Megapolis events, below, 2009), they/we are still a problem.

In Helsinki you can only have a sustainable lifestyle if you are homeless. For the rest of us, our homes and our engineered surroundings, built to serve consumer pleasures or, rather, industrial capitalism over decades and centuries, undo any efforts at sustainability. This contradiction cannot, however, be grounds for criticising environmentalists in wealthy places, even if the activism alternates with shopping as in the picture above.

A recent report by colleagues, 1.5. Degree Lifestyles: Targets and options for reducing lifestyle carbon footprints, makes clear that becoming a “sustainable civilisation” requires massive shifts in those infrastructures. But the authors also argue that it needs, as they call it, “a groundswell of actions from individuals and households”. Less driving and flying, more vegetable-based diet and, as I view it, probably more convivial hanging out. Also, quite a bit of collective experimentation.

This, by the way, is what is on display in the Finnish pavilion (also the handiwork of good colleagues) of the XXII Triennale di Milano opening tomorrow. The somewhat alarming title of the show is Broken Nature: Design Takes on Human Survival. As ever, I hesitate at the idea that the required humongous reduction in resource exploitation will be spearheaded by people who, as the website puts it, can quip that as human extintion looms, design makes for a more elegant ending…

Yet it also suggests the opposite: the so-called creative classes have been cossetted over the last three decades in economic and urban policy. If they don’t launch themselves into sustainability, how can anyone else in the over-consuming global North do so?

So I find that I keep being interested in the comfortably off – my own “bubble”, if you like. Already as an aspiring anthropologist embarking on doctoral research in the early 1990s, my academic work was about ordinary people in an ordinary place. Later I’ve come to think that I’m eternally curious about the weirdness of the MN or “Modern Normal.

At least in climate terms, “normal” produces “disastrous”. So, we need more research on what this “disastrous” “normal” consists of and what sustains it.

Cue lots of wonderful, great research on grassroots activism that is a struggle to keep up with (or classify sensibly).

The comfortable slot

Although you could talk of a comfortable bubble, I’ve started to think about activists in Germany, the UK and Finland, as being part of the “comfortable slot”. It’s a structural thing.

I’ve been playing with the concept in seminar papers. I use it in a chapter I wrote for a book edited by Francisco Martinez and Patrick Laviolette, due out in a few months, on practices of repair. The book tackles this topical theme through ethnographic analyses of the failures, gaps, wrongdoings and leftovers that are inspiring so much creative research (e.g. discard studies, or social studies of waste, pollution and externalities).

The idea of social arrangements and relations being reduced to a “slot” derives, in a roundabout way, from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s famous (1991) critique of the kind of society that could produce anthropology. He pointed out that anthropology had established itself as a discipline by contrasting an Other, the “savage slot”, with a politically far-from-innocent Self. This was the Christian European “slot” that claims descent from a Golden Age of Greek Civilization, and still models normality as male, white and property owning.

Then, in a much-cited paper from 2013 Joel Robbins observed that something like a “suffering slot” had been shaping the discipline. Later still, Sherry B. Ortner (2016) framed recent anthropology as overwhelmingly preoccupied with the “dark side” of neoliberalism.

She also notes Robbins’ call for an “anthropology of the good … focussed on such topics as value, morality, well-being, imagination, empathy, care, the gift, hope, time, and change” (quoted in Ortner 2016: 58). Many activists that I know could be described as members not just of the European slot but of the most comfortable among them, and still trying to live up to these values.

So my chapter in Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough looks at how ordinary people living ordinary lives in ordinary places are compulsively drawn to repairing the damages brought about by decades and centuries of ordinary industrial capitalism. Or, of the Modern Normal.

Vegan junk food makes a point

On the corner of a small park is a “peaked” kiosk, an icon of Helsinki’s summer months, which used to sell sweets and ice creams. For some time, many of these kiosks were unused. These days, those that are in use are run on short-term leases and often by what you might call entrepreneurial neighbourhood activists.

In 2016, this kiosk got a new identity. Called Jänö (bunny), it began to serve unhealthy vegan food. By serving unhealthy vegan food, it punctured expectations that vegans would be as self-righteous about their health as about their world-saving (both silly prejudices). More seriously, Jänö reused an existing building, putting into practice at a small-scale but in a symbolically significant way, the principle of renovating and reusing rather than tearing down to make way for something new. The business model was an unusual mix of crowd-funding through social media channels and conventional bank loans, involving, I imagine, considerable expertise in the legal structures of co-operative enterprise.

May 2018. Photo by Guy Julier.

I’m not sure who will be running it this year, but I look forward to another summer of liveliness and quirkiness.

Jänö really highlights the contrast between the massive scale of city-sponsored development and “city making” at the grassroots level.

Material environmentalism of everyday life

What’s so interesting is that Helsinki’s most comfortable slot could be expected to just sit back and relax, live their lives and rely on government and the businesses it supports to sustain their comforts. But many clearly aren’t. They may not be protesting so much in the streets (though they appear to be doing more of that too) as protesting through action, by prefiguring. Some vehemently deny that they are protesting. They are just doing stuff.

They are not the “social wildlife” of squats (vilified in Finland, but also admired for their political imagination), or of the early anti-globalisation protests that “respectable society” complained about in the 1990s. More likely they are those with “post-material values” more focused on quality of life than quantity of stuff.

David Schlosberg and Romand Coles coined a term for this: new materialist movements. It’s a varied, dynamic and growing type of environmentalist action. It involves people who are no longer “willing to take part in unsustainable practices and institutions, and not satisfied with purely individualistic and consumer responses”, and more likely to be restructuring everyday practices of circulation: they eat local and low-carbon, prefer cycling, like repairing and making. They aren’t passive consumers, but active participants and avid fans of DIY.

One area in Helsinki that is increasingly relevant in talking of material flows and views of the good life, is the built environment. The conflicts over landscape change (high-rise building), population targets, land use and the sustainability (or not) of today’s construction sector are currently very much on the agenda (as noted here, in Finnish).

Here too, the comfortably off have an important role. And here too, my hunch is that the contradictions hit people personally: architects may be forced to work for big construction to make a living, and still lend their expertise to promoting alternatives. More on this, anon, I hope.

Hundreds of flowers blooming for now

After it ceased operating as a hospital, Lapinlahti old mental asylum spent some years looking very drab.

Thanks to the efforts of alliances of activists from creative and variously comfortable slots, it has now become self-organising world of artists, mental health professionals and associations and of different kinds of sustainable initiatives. One is Restaurant Loop, which I warmly recommend. Together they have made piecemeal improvements to the historic buildings. They serve mental and physical wellbeing, support creative labour and delight us citizens who get to enjoy its beautiful architecture and social vibrancy. I wrote about it almost exactly two years ago on the blog.

As a funky film made by its tenants shows, it is a space of hundreds of flowers blooming. It would be a fabulous place to do an ethnographic study of Robbins’ anthropology of the good in the 21^st century.

Alas, the city is making their lives difficult. Current tenants are apparently to be out of the building by the summer. The city is now looking for an entity with an idea for the buildings – as well as the corporate and financial clout to realise that idea in practice.

The city of Helsinki can only apparently imagine business-as-usual for Lapinlahti: run by a single corporate entity with a strong brand and heroic vision. They appear blind to its multiple functions, organic social networks and above all the amazing way the current tenants continue its long tradition of caring for us all by caring for the vulnerable.

Why? Because the city is obliged to make a profit on the buildings it owns.

A municipality also has many other obligations.

To make those obligations have weight and to really counter the disastrous modern normal, which has its eye on economic growth above all else, is taking a lot of work. But  it is happening. The more the “comfortable slot” participates in building climate-sane and equitable futures, the more quickly I suspect the necessary changes are likely to happen.

On preferring to not cease to exist: a mini book review

I just read Felix Ringel’s engaging if theoretically quite heavy monograph, Back to the Postindustrial Future: An Ethnography of Germany’s Fastest Shrinking City. The title is slightly misleading (as the author admits), but it’s well worth reading, excellent anthropology. It’s a story of when (urban) growth ceases to orient collective effort.

It deals with the fact that cities shrink as well as grow. Personallly I’d have wanted more about how life in such a situation gets arranged and rearranged, and some more on how urban growth became such a fetish in the first place.

But I guess the book’s emphasis is elsewhere, for instance on theory. It makes sophisticated contributions to social science debates on temporality and broadly philosophical questions about emergence and becoming.

This jumped off page 168:

“Instead of waiting for emergent new ideas, many people in my fieldsite … were busy trying to keep things alive. If they had not made the effort, these forms would have ceased to exist.”

The book, after all, describes people and events involved with sustaining. Its protagonists, though preoccupied with the future, are not only anxiously scanning for future potential or seeking ways to control uncertainty and risk (as neoliberalism and academics typically do).  They are busy keeping things alive.

That insight helped me discern something new (for me) about how people in general deal with social and environmental change that they don’t like. Isn’t the activism that fascinates me about keeping alive the things that activists do like? Whether in urban gardens, repair clubs or sharing initiatives, as in the Helsinki I’ve been curious and written about, or in the practical activities of citizens maintaining “their club, association, school or kindergarten” that Ringel writes about, those who are recognised as activists really are making things exist.[1]

In describing life in Hoyerswerda, a shrinking postindustrial city, Back to the Postindustrial Future dwells mainly on something I remember quite a few Germans talking about 25 years ago when I did my doctoral fieldwork there: the “no future” phenomenon, which they referred to using the English words. A key difference is that I was doing research on environmentalism, so the lost future in question was planetary, whereas Ringel’s focus is on a city with supposedly “no future”.

Hoyerswerda was once home to 70 000 residents but over half its population migrated out after German reunification and the dismantling of the local coal industry. Like in so many other parts of the reunified Germany, unemployment “roared” (to use the lovely word from page 5). Ultimately, losing a future the city had grown used to, also meant a disorientating deconstruction of Hoyerswerda’s cityscape.

Things are complicated there, as elsewhere, by investments that were made in the past in large-scale and programmatic futures. Those futures were part of the socialism that was built in and for the German Democratic Republic. They materialised for example in education, or in the building of entire new towns. Other futures have emerged through programmes of integrating the city into a neoliberal global economy, and the “spatially widened, increasingly inclusive metanarrative of change” (p. 51) accompanying these.

Insisting from the start on there being many different futures and future narratives in Hoyerswerda, the book also surveys a depressingly same-y and ubiquitous narrative of urban futures. This is the prescribed optimism of zombie neoliberalism, the dogged determination of so many decision makers to adopt criteria of urban success designed by and for corporate elites.[2]

Drawing explicitly on David Harvey, Ringel sees the situation in the context of global capitalism’s mode of urban development as a competition for foreign investment. He writes, “Like so many other small- and medium-sized cities worldwide, Hoyerswerda failed in that competition – and blamed itself and its wrong image for it” (Ringel 2018: 141).

Yet the story isn’t so simple, and it’s far from over. Although youth continue to leave, new traditions are taking hold in the city. Above all, the book describes a wealth of pedagogical and artistic work centered on dealing creatively with painful loss and experiences of powerlessness. And although the book doesn’t discuss social movements directly, its analyses of how the past and the future are used in the present spoke directly to the question that bugs me decade after decade: how might one best understand activists who explicitly want to influence social and environmental change?

It’s a question that I’ll be pursuing at the Finnish Society for Environmental Social Science (YHYS) annual colloquium in a couple of weeks. In my abstract for a panel on environmental justice, I promised a paper titled ‘The nature of urban growth and the meaning(s) of environmental justice’.

In addition to drawing on Ringel’s work, writing my presentation will also push me, once again, to engage with Bruno Latour’s take on environmentalism.

Latour seems unhappy about how stubbornly environmentalists remain wedded to modern epistemologies that reify nature and science. What they should be doing instead is, as he says in an interview published earlier this year in the journal Social Movement Studies, “rethinking nature and science”. I critiqued his work twenty years ago on this same score, and I think I may have to do so again.

Perhaps this just means that things move rather slowly in academia despite so much talk of urgency and need for change. Then again, many of us are pleading, are we not, for the chance to slow down thinking.

Whether to laugh or cry that I find myself so irritated by the same, massively influential author who so inspired me all that time ago, I’m still rather enjoying all this. Particularly when I see ethnographic engagements still put to wonderful conceptual use in works like Ringel’s Back to the Postindustrial Future. His book is about temporal reasoning and a town and has nothing explicit to say about social movements. Still, I think it has already helped me update my own thinking about that topic. Thank you Felix.

I wonder whether Latour’s new book – ordered already – will do the same. If it does (and maybe even if not) I may do a “review” of that here too.

[1] To put it in a different language that’s also popular, they’re doing ontological design. Or, since all design is ontological in that it makes ways of being and doing possible (or enforces them) as Arturo Escobar might say, they’re doing design. But this is a diversion.

[2] It’s a story unfolding in Helsinki too, as construction continues to make the city attractive to financial interests, tourists and, perhaps, shoppers rather than citizens.

Reading about environmental futures in the heat and ending up thinking scatology

I’ve been musing again on a life-long problem: why doesn’t everyone react with the same alarm to environmental change as I do? Why won’t everyone (and not just isolated if amazing heroes like the striking Swedish school girl) demand that those with power use it to stop the Eart from broiling?

As ever, I’ve looked for clues in literature.

I particularly enjoyed a volume on Economic Science Fictions edited by Goldsmiths-based William Davies (2018) and a short book cited therein, by Peter Frase called Four Futures from 2016. I also looked at David Pilling’s journalistic Growth Delusion, and finished going through a special issue of Ephemera Journal on Degrowth from 2017.

I’ve also been reflecting the readings against the freakishly hot summer.

I started to write this post, laptop on lap, from a small island in the Baltic. I sat not uncomfortably on the end of our jetty enjoying the best of a weirdly warm breeze.

Undoubtedly the most significant inspiration for my becoming an environmental anthropologist has been that place. Like many Helsinki kids, I was transported each year to be “close to nature” away from school and city distractions. A few weeks in a comfortable if simply equipped cabin with water to swim and fish in and rocks and woods to run around in.

Drinking-water still has to be carried there. Waste is composted or combusted or it gets carted back to the mainland. Here is a perfect spot for learning about environmental change: annual fluctuations in seaweed and algae express the state of the Baltic. Not good.

Over the years it’s been wonderful watching sunsets. Gradually I’ve learned to listen to birds and look out for fish, elk, deer, and lately, ticks. But the small changes have been incremental and often for the worse.

This year for the first time, I ended up doing what I could to keep the cabin cool. (See the photo above, top).

I also cut reeds for the first time. Although good for cleaning impurities from the water, they were also threatening to suffocate a lagoon. People have been enjoying warm swimming there since the late 1950s and no doubt before. A “first world” loss and not THAT unpleasant a job. But not an insignificant thing in terms of ecological health.

Nice to escape into books. What was a pleasure about my summer reading was that the texts spell out confident versions of environmentalism. They have no truck with so-called climate sceptics, and they are happy to muddle along in a broad-brush cognitive space in which events out there in the world demand radical responses.

Now, as fellow anthropologist Hannah Knox argues so lucidly, we can’t be sure the heatwaves were “caused” by carbon emissions. But we can be pretty sure that what we think of as normal and even desirable is paving the way to climate chaos. If economic growth continues as the default aspiration through which we try to maintain something like social cohesion, disasters small and large, of many kinds, are sure to come, and quite soon at that.

That all sounds a bit vague. So did the rather alarming heat maps that peppered the media this year. But then progress and economic growth are really extraordinarily vague co-ordianates by which to order social life too.

So, those books. They make vague but strong claims about how we, the primary beneficiaries of global capitalism, have produced this mess.

It was rewarding to read about what we know has happened and what kinds of responses are already being undertaken. These were more than could-be and should-be sustainability talk of the kind my friend Cindy Kohtala has warned students about. (Although there was inevitably a little of that too.)

Particularly Davies’ edited volume stridently turns on its head the economic thought I’ve always felt surrounded and suffocated by. The volume explores imagined worlds from literature, film and planning, whose notions of economics highly consequential and yet also fantasies. Embarrassing perhaps, but I had no idea so much science fiction, and “cli-fi”, was out there, dedicated to questioning progress, innovation, economic growth and other Europe-centred modern virtues!

There is still a problem though. For all that the zeitgeist encourages talk of the harms created by devotion to economic growth, to mention growth scepticism still courts ridicule or disapproval. Somehow it just isn’t polite to talk about climate change.

What is and isn’t polite is of course the stuff of anthropology. In all societies there are some things that are considered too dirty or shaming or dangerous to talk about. And usually the most powerful people are able to ignore them or pretend they don’t apply to them.

Which links climate and other environmental crises to the not-so-thorny problem of whether or not royalty goes to the toilet.

What a depressing thought, that link.

Making it does, I suppose, reinforce my belief in the importance of environmental anthropology. I see few signs of it getting much support or authority, but perhaps this is about to shift. The zeitgeist and those temperatures, after all. Of course they go to the toilet.

p.s. This poster by Finnish graphic designer Kyösti Varis riffed on a similar theme back in 1970. “The ball is in our hands” it says.