Modernity, enterprise, crisis: a letter to the editor

Over the holidays my colleague, expert on social enterprise Eeva Houtbeckers and I both reacted to the same opinion piece in a Finnish newspaper.

From Kirkko & kaupunki 29.12.2020

The letter we reacted to had a provocative headline. It exhorted young people to “work for the environment, protest doesn’t help”. The letter by turn was a response to earlier editorial content on environmental fears and activism among young people. The paper has recently written rather sympathetically about activism, for instance about Extinction Rebellion. The movement gained new visibility in Finland in October, when its activists were peppersprayed by the police after they refused to stop blocking a busy street. The event provoked considerable debate about policing.

Below is our letter in my English translation, here a link to the original in Finnish.

My disagreement stems from a political conviction, but also from having studied social movements on and off for the last thirty years. They very much do change the world.

Here’s our response:

Markku Metsäranta (K&k 17.12.) encourages young people to solve our epoch’s terrifying threats by pursuing familiar modern paths. He mentions science, engineering, enterprise, parliamentarianism and progress. 

The letter’s concluding claim – decision makers are totally dependent on enterprise – is partly true. Economic growth has been made synonymous with progress and is said to guarantee social peace.

At the same time, we forget or ignore how many different ways there have been over the centuries to organize life on this human-friendly planet. But as progress became reduced to economic growth, our imagination was narrowed.

From such a perspective, enterprise does appears like the foundation of many things and it seems it is best served by engineers and scientists, marketing and financial professionals. Social enterprises is also on the rise, but it is more of an accommodation than a challenge.

In the lives of the young people, who protest by sitting on the streets or going on school strike, and whose lives are affected by affected by the slowdown in economic growth that predates the pandemic, this recipy for progress is outdated. It is not possible for them to continue as before, or to deny the ever more palpable ecological crisis.

For that reason, our message to youth would be quite different: we value your energy and activism, we hear your imagination-expanding activism, which brings comfort. After all, though we have been taught to worship enterprise, we know that at the end of the day that is not what we depend on.

Eeva Berglund

Eeva Houtbeckers

Helsinki

We also both discovered, somewhat to our surprise, that we actually read this “free” paper published by the Lutheran (State) Church in Finland. It is still delivered, on paper, to (tax-paying) members.

“So as not to fill space” (on two or three exhibitions)

Pretty much on a daily basis I consider writing a letter to the editor of a newspaper. On e-scooters. I am saddened frankly, at how quickly they have transformed the rules on sharing space.

Just as I was beginning to believe that the selfish car-based road usage typical for Helsinki might be on its way out, e-scooters put wheels back to work for #individuals-in-a-hurry.

Many years ago (2005), I wrote about the scarily large vehicles that were then beginning to clog up many streets around me, then known as 4-by-4s (‘citymaasturi’ in my mother tongue). Even back then I was inspired by George Monbiot (who wrote about them again last year). SUVs, or Sports Utility Vehicles, are now normal. Heavier, more dangerous to other road users, and gluttonous devourers of materials and fuel (as the IEA has told us), choosing one must seem natural to some, despite these anti-social impacts.

My complaint is that whether parked or on the go, these high and mighty successes of marketing block road space and mental space that could be open to more public spirited uses. SUVs don’t just take up large amounts of parking space. They are very BIG, and even seem to block out the light.

So I had to go and see the exhibition at Espoo’s EMMA by Elmgreen & Dragset titled 2020, which takes a new look at cars and storing them. I was not disappointed.

EMMA’s gallery space works brilliantly as a spoof car park. An essay on the website spells out more. It includes the important point that “[m]ore than most other design objects, cars can reveal a lot about the power structures in our society.”

The exhibition is open until 17.01.2021.

EMMA is in a repurposed printing press – beautiful concrete and permanently unwashed windows. It is perfect for visiting in the dark season, even in pandemic times.

Closing on the same day, 17.1.2021 at Helsinki’s HAM is another thought-provoking show. The visual artist Terike Haapoja and the writer and playwright Laura Gustafsson have put together an ensemble of three works under the umbrella, Museum of Becoming.

It’s composed of a video, Becoming, an installation of the imaginary Museum of Nonhumanity and a curated collection of works owned by the City of Helsinki, under the title Remnants.

I bought the publication called Bud Book: Manual for Earthly Living, which accompanies the video. It’s available in English and Finnish. I recommend it warmly.

“Footprints are weighty, gluttonous, profligate”, writes Radhika Subramaniam, commenting on walking in a piece that I am – obviously – going to have to revisit later.

As at EMMA, the HAM exhibition points to an atmosphere, perhaps a world, seeking lightness and open space. Both exhibitions come from awareness of things not wanted. With my preoccupation with space taken up by cars that seem to keep growing, the ‘Mini’ below, for instance, both struck me as also concerned with questions about how to make conceptual space. Room for the imagination in this cluttered situation we are in.

Another strand for me to follow up – with my #colleex preoccupations – is something put into words in the book by Satu Herrala, who, among other things, is doing a doctorate at Aalto. She asks, “What is the minimal structure necessary so as not to fill space with everything we already know, but where we could and would dare to trust and try things out”.

Had I not been so slow about writing this, I could have put in a good word for another exhibition still, the Post-fossil show that ended last month at HIAP in Suomenlinna.

The Post-Fossil Show

But there we have it. My life was quite cluttered enough, so I didn’t write about it. There is, however, a blog, maintained by HIAP, together with the Mustarinda artist network from Kainuu, here.

Besides, the take is quite different from the HAM and EMMA shows, so just as well to save it up for another day – or not.

Walking in the rain is good for learning about sustainability or lack of it

Below is the advertising text for the walk that I led in Otaniemi earlier this week as part of Designs for a Cooler Planet events for Helsinki Design Week 2020.

The weather was appalling.

The wind and rain, however, were excellent for demonstrating the importance of infrastructure design in climate changing times. Thanks to Henriette for the photos – I think they convey the atmosphere!

Our blurb: Physical infrastructures are crucial foundations of ordinary life, conditioning our shared futures and guiding individual choices. Infrastructures connect the far-away to the near-at-hand. They blend almost unnoticed into the landscape, yet they carry hidden costs, about which only experts are normally aware. These include energy or material flows whose negative effects are distant. Infrastructures also harbour hidden risks, such as water damage and ecological disturbances, dangers with both local and far away impacts.

Of course, the point of infrastructures is to make life run smoothly. Today, however, we know that combinations of old and new technical improvements also generate novel problems. As intensified land-use meets changing Earth systems, designing for sustainability and for usability will require new ways of thinking. Innovating for resilient futures demands that we identify and communicate better about both the technical and meaningful aspects of our surroundings, and anticipate problems before it is too late.

Walking is part of fieldwork, a way to learn to pay attention. The infrastructure walk is a convivial and educational practice, combining technical expertise with local knowledge. It is guided but open-ended, aiming at identifying qualities worth noticing.

On this walk we combine forces with the Environmental Hydraulics Lab of Aalto University to focus on stormwater management on campus. The intensification of construction, more active and varied use, and land use and planning in Espoo beyond Aalto, are exactly the kinds of incremental changes that easily go unnoticed.

Specialist understanding of the challenges of stormwater management will be combined with small-scale techniques for heightening our awareness of the landscape. The goal is to notice what is often hidden in plain sight and then to imagine better alternatives together.

Walking and talking together, experts and users alike learn from each other and from the surroundings. An ancient learning practice, walking projects in recent years have drawn attention to public discomforts with mainstream development.

Professional urban experts can learn from these. Embodied experience leads to understanding the practice, not just the theory, of life in urban space. Besides educational, we hope learning to see with others will also be a joy.

Sustainability requires understanding flows of matter and power. This walk joins the dots – it will help us connect large-scale and somewhat abstract goals related to climate (13), land-use (15), water (6) or sustainable cities (11) to the local environment.

The walk was hosted by me, Eeva Berglund and Idil Gaziulusoy, of NODUS, the sustainable design research group in the Department of Design. Our guides to nature-based stormwater management solutions – and lack thereof – were Chun Lin and Juha Järvelä (below) from the Water and Environmental Engineering, Department of Built Environment, Aalto University. To our delight, Professor Harri Koivusalo and Aalto University Campus & Real Estate’s new chief, Ville Jokela also walked with us, so the conversation as we walked and talked really was a conversation.

With different weather and perhaps with more success suppressing COVID thus making people happier to join large groups, our walk might have been huge. As it was, we were a small group who braved the elements. I hope some of us will come together again to discuss our surroundings. I’m particularly keen to continue walking with folks together. Watch this space…

The one thing that stuck in my mind from what was said during the walk, was something Juha said. He pointed at a bin shelter in one of Aalto’s ubiquitous car parks. It was originally built with a green roof. It was not just a standard flat one. Nobody, Juha explained, had been taking care of the shelter and eventually a rather large tree grew on top of it.

Then it was cut down and the roof replaced with something lower maintenance.

It put a new spin on the design world’s justified interest in care.

As for walking as a practice or method of research. I think it became apparent that walking helps us slow down enough to notice things we’d not otherwise care about. This has professional significance of those who do fieldwork, whether surveying for naturalist purposes (counting trees, say) or more humanist ones (the deep hanging out that ethnographers do, say). I will write more about that on this blog later.

I look forward to walks that do both. And that get me out of the head-only world of Zoom meetings to the full-body experience for which my physique was, I guess, designed.

Growth in WEIRD Helsinki

We, Guy Julier and I, wrote a text for a special issue of the Journal of Social Studies/ Sociální studia on “(Not) my green city? Green spaces in times of urbanization”, Vol 17, No 1 (2020). 

It’s open access so you can get it via this link.

Like many good things, writing it came out of a series of serendipitous face-to-face encounters among academics. It was at a pre-zoom-era meeting, the 2019 Sustainability Science Days conference. Attending the Degrowth panel, convened by Eeva Houtbeckers and Pasi Heikkurinen, was Katri-Liisa Pulkkinen, with her colleague from the nearby city of Tallinn, Helen Sooväli-Sepping. And she, with her colleague, Bianka Plüschke-Altof, was preparing a journal issue. Emails were exchanged, lunch squeezed in on an unrelated visit to Tallinn, etc.

Such geography, like geography and scale generally, matters to our paper. And economics matters. We may be unhappy with Helsinki’s urban policy, but don’t want to blame, as local discourse tends to, either globalization or (greedy) local decision makers. It’s more that Helsinki’s “entrepreneurial real estate policy [as] practised both by the state and cities [has] had harmful consequences and created conflicts in Finland” (in Mika Hyötyläinen and Anne Haila.  2018. Entrepreneurial public real estate policy: The case of Eiranranta, Helsinki. Geoforum, 89, 137-144.)

Our paper is titled ‘Growth in WEIRD Helsinki:  Countering Dominant Urban Politics and its “Green” Pretentions‘. In it, Guy and I draw on our own research in Helsinki, and on Harvey Molotch’s simple but powerful idea of ‘the city as growth machine’. (It’s horrific to think his paper, published in the American Journal of Sociology, dates from 1976. So much time lost to not learning.)

In our paper we play with the idea that Helsinki, like many apparently ordinary cities of the wealthy world, is weird. We believe that needs to be addressed.

We found the idea of WEIRD, in our title, Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic, in a 2017 paper by a team of social psychologists. It’s good for self critique. When that list is mistaken for “humanity”, as it often is, it points at a crisis of academic imagination that is devastating for efforts to deal with humanity’s multiple technogenic crises. (Consider, if necessary, your recent media intake or consult the Stockholm Resilience Centre). It really is shocking that even the science of human possibility (psychology) fails to appreciate how peculiar Western culture (in all the vagueness and hubris of that concept) actually is.

Our paper is more specifically about economic growth as a taken for granted aspiration. Helsinki is used as an illustration of how economic growth becomes elided with progress. What you get is a kind of politics that is not about creating social value or about the resilience of regenerative processes so much as about the perpetuation of a normality that suits the winners of capitalism.

We also note that there is considerable weirdness to Helsinki’s ambitions to be like New York City.

Here’s the abstract:

Despite persistent concerns over sustainability, cities continue to be developed that serve capital more than citizens. Where urban politics prioritizes growth, ‘green’ credentials easily turn out to be illusory. Helsinki, with its pro-environmental administration, is an example of combining ‘green’ agendas with a culture of growth and depoliticizing debate. This essay presents two cases of this broadly ecomodernist approach. In one case [Vartiosaari] it led to proposing the destruction of irreplaceable green space and in the other [Kalasatama], to drawing residents into international circuits of finance and data. This problem does not just emerge from corporations and elites, however. Drawing on Harvey Molotch’s idea of ‘the city as growth machine’, we suggest that growth ideology reflects a culture that, following psychologists, we might call WEIRD:  Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic. Its claims are founded on a historically particular but widespread conception of global progress that is increasingly questioned.

Kalasatama continues to fascinate me with its property porn, and its adverts proclaiming its buildings to be the biggest in Finland.

Vartiosaari remains in the news, though mercifully it’s not massively changed since the photo below from 5 years ago. But so long as growth continues to orient urban policy, this exceptional island within Helsinki will appear to decision makers and the construction sector as empty space waiting for them to fill it.

The small piece of good news is that a new boat connection is up and running, allowing for more visitors in the summer. As explained on the city’s website, the boat is solar powered and the project benefitted from Helsinki’s participatory budgeting.

The debate about what here is weird (or weird-like) is already here, I’m pleased to report. Critiques of growth like ours can be heard here and there, thanks in part possibly to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even in an afternoon paper, Ilta Sanomat (in the photo above, headlining of a potential future Helsinki-as-Manhattan), the debate has begun. For instance, a great column by Saara Kankaanrinta appeared just last week arguing that our world is topsy-turvy. More specifically, we destroy in bulk and care in miniature (to do a very loose translation).

I recommend it for gems like this

For instance bug hotels are important, but if meanwhile our land use disregards the needs of biodiversity, we will be re-arranging (screwing in) our bug hotels as the Titanic goes down.

And in the original (which I warmly recommend to readers of Finnish)

Esimerkiksi hyönteishotellit ovat tärkeitä, mutta jos niiden rinnalla maankäytöllämme ei ole monimuotoisuuden reunaehtoja, jäämme ruuvaamaan pörriäishotellejamme Titanicin kannelle.

The normal problems of ordinary people – my very little essay on Covid-19

Noticing the taken-for-granted in novel ways

I feel acutely that my own experience since the pandemic has been privileged. I have also reduced my intake of Covid-related online news, but I am routinely conscious of heightened levels of anxiety. Nobody, least of all the British government, needs explicitly to encourage me to “Stay Alert”!

But this novelty on planet Earth, the virus known as Sars-CoV-2, hasn’t merely created anxiety, it has got folks thinking.

In this post, I too shall muse on what could be learned from the unprecedented transformations to everyday habits that the pandemic has brought about. Like most people around the world, I hanker for a more normal life. More than that though, I want more people to rethink and rework what normal means.

https://www.mathsisfun.com/data/standard-normal-distribution.html

A good place to start would be to acknowledge that although normal in the sense of predictable and safe is no doubt worth cherishing, normal is not a synonym for universal or ordinary. As a way to categorise things in the world, the normal is a specifically modern concept. It rose in importance alongside the development of statistics for public policy (a fascinating story, beautifully told at least by Porter).

But normality in modern life also became a cultural thing. Thought of as the unremarkable and unmarked lifestyles of “modern people”, it’s also an aspiration, perhaps more than ever before in history even. Sometimes it is even a comfort, as in being categorised as normal as opposed to belonging to a risk group.

These days normality is also an existential issue for the planet. Stop to think about it, and habits that are utterly normal in modern times, people’s normal hopes and dreams, and of course, normal forms of consumption, are, or they at least create, problems for the future of human life on the planet. None are sustainable.

It’s also true that NOT consuming ‘normally’ is an economic problem. People have been told to protect themselves from Covid-19 and avoid ordinary activities like shopping and travel, but we are also incessantly being told that this avoidance is itself a huge problem.

We don’t actually need to be told. There are plenty of signs of this in our town and cities.

One of many to-let signs in retail properties spotted today in Turku, Finland.

Living a paradox so acutely makes you think. It’s strengthened a hunch of mine from years back. I think the normal, ordinary, taken-for-granted things that make up modern life are weird. I’ve been baffled that this weirdness, the pushing and supporting of unsustainable socio-economic structures that are known to be so damaging, isn’t recognised as a form of madness by everyone. My hunch is that it’s because the weird was long ago made normal.

That said, many have been shouting lucidly about how the pandemic indicates that thinghs were badly wrong were before Covid-19 already. They are now noting that perhaps the kind of normal that passed for “global” wasn’t much to celebrate. To quote Dan  Hill’s wonderful Slowdown Papers:

Crucially, then, the virus is intrinsic to the same patterns of activity that create the climate crisis, and its attendant crises of chronic health and inequalities. In essence, the virus is an articulation of … crisis

Some people even started asking could the pandemic actually usher in more progress.

Anyone interested in environmental issues therefore, is bound to be fascinated by the cultural, including economic, and the technical ruptures of 2020 as well as the ecological dimensions of the pandemic. The nasty future that green thinkers have long been concerned about has, in some significant way, now arrived. The links between disease in our bodies and diseased environments, links that environmental justice campaigners have had to work hard to establish, are now horribly real. The pandemic and the troubles around it amount to a kind of unveiling, as a friend put it, of all manner of self-deluding stories that all is normal and all is well. Stories of ordinary people in ordinary places who have for decades protested against ordinary threats to their quality of life, have a different hue now. Covid-19 is thus an environmental justice issue.

The havoc that the virus wreaks is worst for the most vulnerable. But even the most comfortable among us learned what it means to be scared and feel threatened.

Normal, natural, dysfunctional – making the choices

Anyone interested in changes to planetary systems has been expecting a pandemic and been at pains to point out that it is not a natural disaster.

That also means there are important choices to be made about how we respond. It’s too late to hide behind the neoliberal mantra of the last 40 or so years, that There Is No Alternative. Demanding the impossible is no longer just realistic, it’s imperative. Having followed some protest networks in recent years, I also know it’s happening. There is less talk about how complicated and impossible to fix things are and more action to make change.

You could say humanity has really taken action in recent months. You could also (though I’d hesitate to do it) argue that nature has returned with a vengeance.

I always recommend caution with big, capitalizable, words like Nature and Humanity. They erase devastating inequalities and make us ignore interesting histories. Yet Inger Andersen and Johan Rockström, writing in Time magazine, are quite quotable:

Humanity’s dysfunctional relationship with nature has caused this wider disease.  … [Covid-19] evolved into a pandemic due to the now well-established risk cocktail of the 21st century: ecosystem destruction, species loss, global warming, colliding with risky human behavior like illegal wildlife trade. All of this has played out in a globalized network of trade and travel.

That’s a scary list, but much worse are the direct and indirect human impacts of the disease: physical pain and incapacity, sometimes going on for weeks, fear of being an asymptomatic carrier, restrictions on movement and other everyday activities, losing loved ones, but also income, home, routine and social contacts. During lock-downs in particular, the toll on mental health, and in some cases life, has been off-the-scale scary. As social life shifted into physically isolated places, the scary translated into long-term devastating but also unnoticed.

As it harms, the virus is an amplifier of pre-existing inequalities and injustices.  The pandemic has also been used to great effect by the greedy or simply those for whom market competition is natural: purveyors of protective equipment, those who make money in healthcare, and all those for whom crisis equals opportunity, like tech-companies and all those who feel reliant on the ‘solutions’ they offer.

A crisis opens up all kinds of opportunities, including those lucid commentaries I hinted at, on how the pandemic could help prepare for worse disaster to come. I’d recommend at least Rebecca Solnit’s essay on hope in The Guardian (drawing similar insights as her excellently titled A Paradise Built in Hell) Dan Hill’s Slowdown papers (quoted above), several #NoBackToNormal videos from degrowth advocates, sustainability lobbying from Paul Chatterton, and, in a slightly oblique way, rethinking the power of science from Lorraine Daston.

There is quite simply a wealth of news about how, in the last weeks and months, what was considered impossible and utopian has happened or, more importantly, been made to happen.

Then there is this interesting initiative from Bruno Latour, ‘Where to land after the pandemic? A paper and … a platform’. This collective endeavour seeks ways forward that do NOT involve going back to what is, as the site notes, a catastrophic normal.

The only way to take advantage of the current situation is to learn the political lesson this virus provides us. It is capable of imposing its law everywhere in the world…

Latour starts from the observation that the pandemic has led to the halting of many activities once thought not just normal but absolutely necessary. The results – like quieter skies, cleaner air, recovering Parisian and other once-clogged up streets from motorised traffic – can take us from the concrete and actually existing to thinking more creatively about the possible and potentially desirable.

What should be stopped? What should be developed?

Values, futures and other tools for sustainable designers

In response to the virus, teaching went online of course. This included the course I co-taught with my wonderful colleague Idil Gaziulusoy, Values in Design Futures, as part of the Creative Sustainability masters programme. It brought together sustainable design, trans-disciplinary futures work and the anthropological study of value formation. We could obviously not avoid dealing with the Covid-19 outbreak. I know many of the students found it difficult emotionally as well as academically, we assigned an essay on the pandemic. I’m pleased to report that the results were excellent and, I hope, empowering more than distressing.

Using the texts and concepts we considered in class, particularly around how values become concrete in the design of environments and habits, students were able to reflect not only on problems and fears, but on society’s ability, despite deeply ingrained conceptions that There Is No Alternative, to respond creatively, swiftly and thoughtfully to threats.

Had I written an essay on the topic myself, I would probably have continued along the train of thought from my earlier musings in Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough, edited by Francisco Martinez and Patrick Laviolette by arguing that although most powerful decision makers are totally oblivious to the fact, modernity and its problems are fundamentally cultural. I know among anthropologists such claims raise eyebrows, but basically, unless anthropologists and others show evidence of modern normality being utterly peculiar and probably toxic for both planet and people, the multiple crises it has set in motion are unlikely to be addressed with seriousness.

I would have written, echoing Idil, about how I dream about a world without carbon emmissions. I’d have written about how futures research has already generated scenarios, forecasts and speculative visions of futures that don’t depend on fossil fuel. I’d also write about how one might imagine a world that had taken a different track from around the 1970s oil crisis. My understanding is that the neoliberal, competitive, extractive and mostly macho culture that actually came to dominate not just in business but in geopolitics, in municipal government and even individual decision making, can be traced to events and choices of the 1970s. I’d write about the advertising slogan for an internet provider, “speed makes the world small”, and its loud, clear and clueless proclamation of values that are likely to push human life into danger zones that few actually want.

I’d find a way to argue that now, with the pandemic making people long for things to be normal, in the sense of safe and predictable, designers, politicians and everyone who wants to make the world a better place, could get a lot out of simply questioning what passes for normal.

I mean, I don’t believe that the airports, motorways, industrial zones and polluted skies above them, were ever so easily accepted as the only route forward. I believe that the achievement must owe a lot to the skills and cunning of marketing and design. It was those institutions, after all, that made them normal. If anything is cultural, surely that is.

Why I would like to walk with the students

With all contact teaching at Aalto University suspended, only those with express permission can access the buildings on campus. Teaching happens online.

No chance then of incorporating walking into my courses this spring as I’d hoped. That means we won’t be able to approach environmental sustainability on foot, using all our senses. No chance to develop my idea of infrastructure walks with the students.

We are having to consider in more cerebral and discursive ways the nodes and lines that connect us here in Helsinki with far-away things, people and processes. Shame, since in one way or another, to support sustainability creatively (it’s in the name of the master’s programme), we need to understand those connections.

Still, a while ago, as part of Helsinki Design Week 2019 I did instigate a small walk on the Aalto campus. Walking seemed a natural fit for the theme, Designs for a Cooler Planet.

Walking is the speed for noticing, as Anna Tsing reminds us, so walking together offered a way of noticing more richly. In the pitch I’d made for the Otaniemi Walk, I boasted that like the Ancients, we would stroll together to learn. No great innovation there, I suppose, walking has swiftly become an approach-of-choice for many of us curious about the environment, and I will continue making notes on it on this blog.

Photo by Eeva Berglund

And so, with Anna Kholina (above), who has walked, talked, sketched, listened, photographed and videoed most of Otaniemi campus for her doctorate, we ventured into a sunny September (!) evening. We attended particularly to the infrastructures or foundations that our ways of life depend on.

I got to indulge my passion for pipes, handles and boxes. We all got to quiz each other about such things – as experts in ways of life (culture and history you might say, though I take an anthropological view on that stuff – pretty much everything is included!), others as technical experts, still others shared local stories. (The masculine bias of those stories, though, in this hub of Finnish engineering prowess, meant we didn’t dwell on those*.)

Photo by Guy Julier

We were a small but enthusiastic group. I was also glad to have Samir Bhowmik along to share his knowledge of the subterranean supports of our Finnish normal. We need archaeologists of contemporary (and recent) media infrastructures like him, to help us attend to things like underground cables that are ordinarily invisible.

Back in September I was nurturing the idea of attending to such technical networks with the students. We could perhaps work out some grounded and easy-to-point-at examples of how the nearby and far-away are linked in ways that affect their sustainability. We could maybe also develop a new awareness of what it might mean to speak of the environment, nature, infrastructure and so on. We might work out ways to analyze how seamlessly – or not – growing things, manufactured things and ideas are blended into the landscape and how they operate in our everyday worlds.

I thought that if we built up our conversations from the act of walking to notice, the courses would work differently. My hope was that walking might help us all consider the environment as irredeemably historical and surprisingly human without ever ceasing to be natural.

Over the months since then I have found afficionados of learning from the immediate and sensory – walking for example – keen to understand urban networks, whether (easily) sensed by us or not. There are so many papers, books and online references for one to get lost in… I want to indulge in infrastructural tourism.  I’ve even started daydreaming of being twenty-something again, starting university studies over again, since these days it is possible to seriously research such modern things as cables, toxic materials or city streets and still be an anthropologist. Despite its colonial baggage, i.e. an early interest in precisely the non-modern, anthropology can be a fabulous way to study things that are overtly modern, technological and industrial (like waste disposal) in character.

That folks with such sophisticated and up-to-date knowledge of technological innovation are also into walking has been a particularly welcome discovery.

It’s a change from the common tendency for emphasizing the body and the senses in quiet, out-of-the-way or relatively solitary contexts. As beautiful and empowering as such accounts can be, I still get the impression that walking methods  are overwhelmingly for researching worlds and experiences that are earth-bound in a pre-anthropocene way – without cables, wires, magnetic fields and monetizable digital data. Without those, though, it’s hard to acknowledge and analyze, let alone to start redesigning, the normality that industrialism has bequeathed. To turn away from current unsustainability towards real sustainability, it’s the damaging mainstream that needs analysis more – I think.

So it feels sad that I can’t do those infrastructure walks with the students right now.

That being said, student-led initiatives flourish at Aalto. They demonstrate that students already do appreciate the entanglements and connections I wanted to work through by walking. Better still, students are actually acting to change things.

Our September walk, for instance, ended up (see image below) at a student-led experiment in sustainability that is known as the Test Site (I might blog on the irony of that term at some point). Besides the garden, it has a host of initiatives that put into practice design with nature, low-tech systems and social innovation.

I know it’s stupidly late to thank our hosts from September, but it was a wonderful place and a great way to conclude our walk, with food, foot-bath and conviviality and much talk.

Thank you Andrea, Ada, Jinwook and everyone else. A mix of fast and slow, of tech and nature, of infrastructure and event, its a place where learning the here and now goes together with learning the far away. Making those connections, in my view, is precisely what sustainability expertise must be about.

So it’s a pleasure to note that there will be another walk at the Helsinki Design Week this year. Surely whatever Covid19 does, the collective – small – walk will survive through it.

 

Photo by Hwang Jinwook

* It’s coming up to vappu, valborg, Mayday eve, that crucial festival of light towards the end of a Nordic winter. It is a fascinating cultural phenomenon whichever way you look at it. Otaniemi campus has a particular role in the festival here in Finland. Otaniemi as Technical University has long been the fount of engineering skills and of a particular kind of masculine student humour and pranks. The students have always also made a publication distributed to the  public, which at least in my experience, has traded in  gendered jokes that are understandably not equally appreciated across the current student body. Anyway, all of the above is noticeable by its absence in this year of Covid19, but anthropologist of technology, Vincent Ialenti noted its salience among technical experts in a short article.

Social ecology and the right to the city

COVID changes everything

Before COVID19 became a pandemic, I proposed to the Finnish Journal of Urban Studies, the only professional publication in Finland dedicated to urban research and spatial planning, that I write a review for them (in Finnish) of this book.

I’m working on it. Here, some English-language thoughts.

The book reflects on the injustices of urban lives in the early 21st century, seeing today’s crises as socio-ecological in nature – the social and the ecological always deeply entwined. In pandemic-struck April 2020, it would be hard to deny the entanglement of the natural and the political. It would be impossible to deny that even urbanites are also animals, human animals, susceptible to mega-scale nuisance and avoidable human tragedy caused by very, very, very small things. The shock is the extent of the trouble even in societies with spectacular technological capacity.

In social ecology terms, this is no shock, though. As an interdisciplinary field with a history, social ecology has been exploring ways to promote social and ecological diversity for decades, and looking for ways to turn around the tendency to simplify landscapes everywhere. Social ecology, less technically understood, is also an approach to planning for the future that puts relationships of dependency at the centre.

So, if everything is now up for grabs, and even the end of capitalism is printable in polite company (e.g. in this post on The Slowdown Papers), a field like social ecology is a place to go and learn. This book speaks to those concerned specifically with cities, where the aggravations of ecological and social crises are particularly intense.

The longer legacy of social ecology makes it impossible, however, to approach “the urban” or “the city” without considering its complement, “the rural” or “the countryside”. I was particularly keen to see this book because I am so frustrated with the amnesia here in Finland about the ties that bind us Helsinkians and other urbanites to the forests and smaller towns beyond. Our province is currently under lockdown but that doesn’t make us an island. Animals that we are, the borders now closed to human travellers are still open to food and medical supplies. (A theme to pursue in another post.)

What is below, was written some weeks ago and temporarily forgotten about, but as the situation continues, social ecology will surely offer evidence of and ideas for new normals to build after this great pause is over.

Social Ecology and the Right to the City: Towards Ecological and Democratic Cities, edited by Federico Venturini, Emet Değirmenci and Inés Morales – a review

The key message is that ecology and urban democracy are part of the same story. All 14 diverse chapters by thinkers and activists share that starting point.

For full disclosure, let me note that I was particularly curious about the book because it includes a chapter by my friend and former colleague Brian Morris about a key inspiration for the volume, Murray Bookchin. According to Morris, Bookchin who died in 2006, has been overlooked by academics. Yet, Morris writes, he “offers the only real solution to the immense social and ecological problems that confront us” (p.12).

Indeed, I read Bookchin in the 1980s and 1990s. Recent democratic and local assembly experiments, for example in Kurdistan, have brought him back into at least some conversations. Bookchin explored how capitalism has tendency to simplify landscapes in the process of plundering it for resources, often to fuel comforts in cities.

Animals of a special kind

Concerned with the flourishing of human and other lifeforms, he oriented himself towards maintaining what he called the restorative powers of nature and humanity. He saw this task as social ecology – as in the book’s title. Bookchin’s understanding of the relationship between ecological and human exploitation was rooted in what Morris calls his philosophical naturalism. Part of this perspective was an insistence that humans are a product of organic evolution. We are animals, if of a very special kind. This way of framing nature and humans also underpins his argument that we can develop a politics (even a way of living) that involves neither “communing with the spirit world (mysticism), nor the technocratic solutions offered within the current capitalist system” (in Morris’ chapter, p. 12).

The rest of Social Ecology and the Right to the City travels through a variety of theoretical and empirical resources to return over and over again to the multiple crises of contemporary capitalism. The whole demonstrates a strong sensibility nicely captured in one of the endorsements by Sutapa Chattopadhay, who sees it as responding to the rise of “hostile and narcissistic policies”.

Some brief comments then on those contributions that most elaborate on how this is exacerbating the problematic disconnections between urban and environmental thought.

The aim of the work as a whole is to deepen discussions of “the right to the city, spatial justice and social ecology” to support “urban social movements aiming towards ecological and democratic cities” (P.86). So writes Federico Venturini – an activist-researcher with a PhD in philosophy and first editor.

Though informed by scholarship, the book is explicitly activist, arising largely out of the work of people involved in The Transnational Institute of Social Ecology, who discussed these issues at a conference in Thessaloniki in 2017. The authors clearly have an acute awareness of inequalities, as well as practical and theoretical knowledge about urban and political processes. The variation in style and content of the texts affirm the editors’ claim that the volume is an undisciplined production.

Societycide, not just ecocide

Its critique is certainly strident, and will appeal to some for that reason. Perhaps it will put off others. Those may include all who remain“under a spell”, as Olli Tammilehto puts it in his chapter, of taking what is [was?] around us as normal. The predominant tone of the book is closer to the Kurdish activist Abdullah Öcalan, who brought Bookchin into the struggles over Kurdish futures. According to Havin Guneser and Eleanor Finley’s chapter, Öcalan refers to what has been happening as societycide, not just ecocide.

Though diverse, all the chapters take a close-to-the-ground perspective on politics that, as an anthropologist, I appreciate. This becomes quite concrete in the final two chapters, whose authors aply demonstrate that the contemporary city is best understood on foot. Also, longstanding social ecologist, Daniel Chodorkoff makes explicit his debt to anthropology for understanding different types of leadership and ways of organising human existence. He returns at the end of his theoretical text to what this means for contemporary urban life, the politics unfolding where we live, in our neighbourhoods, in assemblies, town meetings and other democratic experiments. His chapter is one of many in the book, which makes positive reference to recent anarchist experiments, but Chodorkoff wants to push them further. For instance, he wants permanent autonomous zones, not just temporary autonomous zones.

The chapters also vary with respect to who they see as most active in claiming rights to the city. A number offer rather optimistic if not romantic visions of widespread potential for political mobilisation. Although it is hard to disagree with the depiction of contemporary (“successful”) cities as dead ends of a sort – aseptic, reduced to arenas of capitalist competition, perhaps no longer even cities – the forces reasserting these worrying trends are huge, and the resistance is probably not as widespread as the book makes out. Many urban activist initiatives, after all, fall far short of mentioning let alone denouncing capitalism as the source of their troubles. Still, as informed and critical commentary on what currently passes for urban development and attractive visions of the future, the book has some delightful contents.

In particular, in a chapter titled Is the Right to the City Are Right or a Revolution? Magauli Fricaudet offers a theoretically informed take on urban growth and its impacts, for example how they exploit nature, intensify the power of international elites and normalise financialisation.

The theoretical inspirations are mainly Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey in addition to Bookchin, with appearances by Eleanor Ostrom and, to a lesser extent, Saskia Sassen. Her book on Expulsions would offer a framework for putting together the types of extractivism, appropriation, rent seeking and other, often parasitic, urban activities that current mainstream debate confuses with wealth creation.

Sometimes the authors indulge in problematic generalisations and make over-stretched claims. Regardless, I do commend its ambition to go well beyond critiques of today’s [make that at least in part yesterday’s, from this April 2020 perspective] frenetic but resisted capitalism. Authors consider often overlooked types of state power, for instance as it has developed and is evolving in China (Metin Guven), and latent tendencies in society that perhaps do herald more optimistic times (Olli Tammilehto).

Towards really asking what’s important

Rewriting my final two paragraphs in April I return to my friend Brian Morris. He writes that Bookchin and, I believe, by extention social ecological narratives generally, have always understood that besides being animal, humans are intrinsically social beings, not autonomous possessive egos. We [sic] do not, by any criteria, “need” Wall Street or its everyday manifestation, shiny new shopping centres (Tripla, below, from a before-and-after-COVID19 story in Helsingin Sanomat).

Mutual dependencies between towns and hinterlands are then newly visible. So is the fact that humans need humans. No longer does one need to be a romantic to recognize and applaud mutual dependency and human contact at very local level. Nor does it any longer require quite as much imagination or radical thought to appreciate that ubiquitous capital-intensive technology does not prevent me or you from being human as well as natural/animal. Perhaps with COVID19 social ecology will flourish anew, strengthened further by attending to the urban and the Right to the City.

 

Walking – or, practical, collective, mundane exploration of the world surrounding us

Just a few notes about walking as I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot, and, as ever, also doing the practice.

Buoyed along by environmental worries, methodological inventiveness and scholarly respect for situated knowledge, walking has become a very popular method of enquiry. Scholars are drawn to walking as a multisensory methodology, it feels just right for working in the Anthropocene. While walking, the senses can be productively  treated as both objects of curiosity and as instruments of research. The Walking Artists’ Network maintain an excellent resource including a list of publications.

It’s also been interesting to notice how doctoral students at Aalto Arts, in the qualitative methods course I have taught for the last three years, find walking so productive. One thing they have to do is a walking interview, rather a simple assignment really. Yet each year students have reported learning all sorts of new things about, well, learning. One thing I have learned here, is that as they have walked and talked, the students have also had to relinquish some of the control that, as budding researchers, they might prefer to have in that situation.

This walking that the students do seems to serve as grounding for all kinds of debates and discussions we go on to have through the course, about speaking for, learning with, taking care of and yet being critical.

(On which note, those of you interested in methods for our uneasy times, Anand Pandian’s A Possible Anthropology is a wonderful book to think with).

It matters where one walks

I’d hazard a guess that people who are lucky enough to live in or near quality environments, generally enjoy walking. It also does not take the pleasure out of walking to consider it an intellectual, even academic pursuit. I imagine Ancient Greeks were quite aware of that, and wonder how chances of nice walks correlate with other life chances in 2020.

Here we were walking with Narratiimi in 2016 in a quality environment in Laajasalo, whose future is uncertain (thanks again to Cindy Kohtala for the photo).

Walking always takes place in place. The pace of walking, its physicality and its necessary attachment to place, and its intimate connection to materiality, support and enforce connections and perhaps even attachments of value. But walking need not be about nostalgia for the past or romanticizing the natural, the small scale and/or the rural. I have been keeping an eye out particularly for ways of walking in technologically dense contexts.

Already most of us Earth-beings do most of our walking in urban landscapes. Here, futures have already been laid out and materialized in ways that will be shaping the links between security, surveillance and inequality for a long time to come. With that reality-check, the idea that one could deploy one’s body and one’s subjective experience as key tools of  sociological (or any other) investigation into these futures, is inadequate. Unless, that is, one subscribes to the (mystical?) notion that reality and experience are the same. (On that note, the philosophy of place, by the way, is pretty complicated stuff, although Edward Casey’s work is certainly worth a read!)

Fortunately, there are many fantastic initiatives around the world combining walking with a whole range of abstract, quantitative or technical ways of knowing. Often they are specifically geared to questioning technological stories.

In particular I find following Shannon Mattern (author of many excellent texts, including A City Is Not a Computer) on Twitter, a great way to get inspiration and a sense of what is happening.

Then again, to transport the preoccupations and the research methods of the global city, whether New York or London, to a place like Helsinki, might be to miss out on something that walking research highlights: being grounded in local context.

The value of losing epistemological control

Typically, walking appears as a way of slowing down, paying closer attention and provoking novel types of questions.

Those skills are under threat and yet fundamental, as Isabelle Stengers has argued. The Finnish environmental thinker Yrjö Haila discusses her work and its importance here. I hope I don’t misrepresent when I note that he – like Stengers – is very worried that institutional research today exacerbates misunderstanding and ignorance and puts everything in peril. That is how I understand the context from which Stengers is extending her invitation, in Another Science is Possible, to engage in “practical, collective, mundane exploration of the world surrounding us” as Haila puts it.

That describes exactly what it is – and probably all it is – that walking offers to most researchers. It’s just a part of what one does. Without the practicality, collectivity, mundaneness, and attention to what’s around us of walking, how could research find orientation? In the messiness of the world and even of scientific practice, and the radical uncertainties facing everyone and everything, do we not learn to think more adequately precisely in exploring the world around us (our bodies) with others?

Being interested in landscapes (as per my post last August), I’ve long been aware that walking in order to notice things is something I do for pleasure as well as learning, I often do it with political aims too (as with Narratiimi or friends in those parts of Helsinki getting caught up in the financialisation of urban life). In fact, if I were less self-conscious about my lack of  academic credentials over my working life, I’d not hesitate so much to claim that walking for me is almost always potentially a kind of researching.

In a sense walking is foundational, but, even for those for whom walking itself is the key focus of investigation, it goes with all the other things: reading, counting, assessing, judging, even lab-work and studio-work. It’s even worth it to read writings about writings about walking (and Stengers and Thoreau), as in this blog post by an amateur long-distance hiker.

I hope it’s not too grandiose to say that walking together provides a model at least for the kind of relinquishing of epistemological control that – following Stengers, Haila, Pandian and others – I believe is needed to nourish thought and inspire hopeful imagination.

In praise of walking together

A week ago with friends I walked around the tip of Lauttasaari. It was an exceptional February evening, snowless but frosty and stunningly moonlit. I learned things about is the international space station, about art projects in hospitals, about my friends and their friends and many other things. I also learned something that I might have learnt a long time ago but never did: how to spot Venus.

Who knows, something from that practical, mundane and yet wonderfully convivial micro exploration may yet help solve some puzzle, open up some question or support some research project elsewhere one day.

 

 

Things we feel and know – exploring ethnography with #Colleex in Cieszyn, July 2019

I plan for this to be the first of a series of posts about how to find out non-trivial things about the world. Methods, if you like.

From Ofri Lapid’s open format: “On the Surface of Text: A Reading Session with Props”, photo Zoe Aiano

I’m inclined to consider that the world is not just complex but that many of the most disturbing aspects of it are deliberately opaque. This applies whether we enter the problem via the existential anxieties of climate politics, the sabotaging of democracy or the machinations of digitally performed cognitive capitalism. Not that everything can or should be rendered transparent. It is the case though, that never-before-seen computing power, ubiquitous surveillance infrastructures and incomprehensibly big data notwithstanding, the world and its workings strike me as increasingly resistant to being known.

All this complicates residual ideas of knowledge translating into power. It confuses or at least contextualises the very idea of intellectual effort. Those things aside, for many of us, working things out together brings many joys and other rewards.

This I rediscovered with force again, with the #Colleex Collaboratory for Experimental Ethnography. #Colleex, an EASA-network, engages with experimental modes of research in and around anthropology. Since 2016 #Colleex has been collectively imagining how to pursue enquiry at the same time as pursuing change. This gives it a somewhat design anthropological hue.

Under the title, The use·ful·less·ness of the experiment, the Second #Colleex Workshop in Cieszyn, Poland, last July energised around forty people to strengthen our capacity to imagine, to think and to feel our way around ethnography today.

The workshop also helped me not just to do but to appreciate and value slowing down. To invoke Isabelle Stengers as well as the call for proposals, the meeting encouraged lingering with questions and provoked us to ask ourselves: why are we doing this work? (Not, I believe, in order to dismiss or critique, but in order to be clearer).

On the banks of the Olza River, photo Guy Julier

On the border

The July sunshine is now but a memory. It was the publication, last week, of Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough, edited by Francisco Martinez and Patrick Laviolette, that pushed me to finally write about the event. (I have a text in the book, and won’t review it.) In the poetic introduction to the collection, Fran, who is also involved in #Colleex (seen standing on the right in the photo above), writes: “Brokenness feels like something, but one does not know what it looks like, and even less how to verbalise that something” (2019: 28 ebook). Other authors in the book revel in the trickiness of capturing important things in words, or even trying to do anything as definite as “capturing”.

As with #Colleex, the book’s focus seems to be on how to keep things open. Indeed, how can one cope with a world where so much is deliberately made to go unnoticed and to be beyond democratic control?

The Cieszyn workshop had this ethos too. An implicit impulse ran through the workshop, an activist or perhaps Actor Network-style principle, of prizing open the old and the new black boxes all around us, that are quietly anchoring and materialising binary logics – us versus them as much as one versus zero – into the everyday.

This ethos of opening was, for me, powerfully instantiated in the location. Cieszyn is a delightful town on the Polish-Czech border. On the other side of the Olza River is now Czech Cieszyn. There we found more good beers and yet another currency. All we had to do was simply walk over a bridge, past former border checkpoints.

From Poland to the Czech Republic, photo Guy Julier

For one born in the 1960s, and who frequently crossed the Iron Curtain as a child, this evoked memories and feelings that are particularly poignant in this 30^th-anniversary week of the literal dismantling of the Berlin Wall.

Our local hosts at the “Political Critique Dayroom in Cieszyn” have been doing projects with local youth since 2009. They have been drawing attention to the social and economic (I might say “designed”) barriers affecting life chances alongside more material ones, like walls or rivers. In a place like this keeping things open, resisting binaries, is subtle but consequential work.

Some examples

Openness was cleverly materialised by Natalia Romik and her nomadic architecture. Walking around small Polish communities, she has literally introduced residents to the histories of previous, Jewish, inhabitants of those places. Together with her extensive research into Jewish heritage in architecture and urban life, her portable archive encloses and discloses at the same time.

Photo by Zoe Aiano

I was delighted by a phrase Natalia use in passing: “compulsive urban management”. It stayed with me as I reflected on Guy Julier’s re-presentation of six, variously “useful” 60-minute performances in Kalasatama, Helsinki. But it’s above all the use·ful·less·ness of this supposedly sustainability-oriented, “smart city” urban experiment that is worth pondering. That Guy, better known for his critical take on things, expressed his surprise in finding a new empathy with Kalasatama through these performances, suggests another way the workshop encouraged openness.

It’s cliché perhaps that artistic work and material objects lend themselves to resisting closure. Not surprisingly then, a good portion of the programme involved either performing or reflecting on material things. Similarly, film and image featured strongly, perhaps most movingly (and amusingly) for me in Zoe Aiano’s work with the Wild Pear collective. Thanks also to Zoe for some of the photos here!

The workshop practiced the ethos of openness also in the so-called open format. We had already practiced this in Lisbon two years previously in efforts to shift away from academic conventions of meeting and learning from each other. Tomás Sanchez Criado with our Polish organisers, Eva Rossal (pictured below) and Tomasz Rakowski, guided us through a programme that sometimes required patience and trust in the situations, devices, performances, experimental installations and other mini-experiments on offer. That patience was, at least for me, amply rewarded.

Eva Rossal in Ofri’s Reading Session with Props, photo Zoe Aiano

There were also formats that somehow put me in mind of the cyborg. In what I think of as a Harawayesque way, all formats drew us to connect with whatever parts, from whatever angles we could, using whatever hinges we could, resulting in temporary yet potentially fruitful [sic] monsters.

Some formats involved text and words materialised in different ways (Elisa Taber, Ofri Lapid), not simply to play around, but to examine the powers of the written word. We also practiced becoming tricksters, manipulating plastic, paper, coins, polystyrene and smartphone screens, to lure other animals and anticipate the unknowable with Hermione Spriggs. As creatures with many senses, we also trained our ears with Piotr Cichocki’s DJ set and our taste buds with Christy Spackman’s hyper-designed chocolate.

Martin Büdel and Francisco Martinez, photo Zoe Aiano

Luckily for me, there was also scope for presenting more conventionally (with PowerPoint as support), so I was able to simply to relate some of my experiences of doing activist walking research.

Reflecting

Before the workshop, Tomás and I talked about the importance of confusion in fieldwork situations, something we both have experienced but also written about. It has a role in research and teaching, but it can be hard to persist in academia with the things that we feel and perhaps even see but can’t put into words. Contemporary academic conditions of work only aggravate this situation.

Gathering together as #Colleex, inviting social scientists as well as designers, artists and architects to share in papers and open formats, we put our creativity to work on the spot and in variously fleeting ways. As Tomás and Adolfo Estalella have also discussed in print, anthropology needs to open up to more interventive methods of engaging – discovering but also designing the world.

Reflecting on the last day with Tomasz Rakowski, Hermione Spriggs, Natalia Romik, Maica Gugolati, Marcelo Rossal, photo Zoe Aiano

It is and was tempting to endorse everything we did as creative, and to be optimistic about what the open format could do and how it might become valued. But I think what I took away from the event was something different. It was a sense – a feeling – of researchers with others struggling to make sense, and succeeding in doing so with a fresh (to me at least) courage to actually be intellectual. Maybe this is in addition to being playful or creative, but do I want to emphasise the critical intellect.

To make an academic reference is surely thus warranted. Isabelle Stengers writes about experimenting:

“What is at stake here is ‘giving to the situation the power to make us think’, knowing that this power is always a virtual one, that it has to be actualised. The relevant tools, tools for thinking, are then the ones that address and actualise this power of the situation, that make it a matter of particular concern, in other words, make us think and not recognise” (p.185)

– Stengers, I. (2005). Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review, 11(1), 183–196.

Maybe open formats have many functions. Following Stengers they can be tools for thinking. The most provocative ones for me, were those that were open not just to fresh thought, but to the world, which the best of them managed to offer to us in that small situation at the border.

I started this post with a complaint that the world seems ever harder to know. I’ll conclude by noting that though it may be confusing to develop ethnographic experimentation as a tool to redress this problem, it can be powerful.

Looking across the border towards Cieszyn, photo Eeva Berglund

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.