COMMENTARY: Should the new metropolis be blowing its trumpet quite so loudly?

CITY LIGHTS

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By Antti Manninen
     
      The "metropolis baby" celebrated by civic leaders in the Greater Helsinki area on Wednesday of last week is blissfully unaware of the explosion of discussion that her birth and the metropolitan area's rise to million-resident status caused on the Internet discussion forums.
      Is the Helsinki region a real metropolis at all, the posters ask, and is it really worth making such a huge song and dance about it even if it is?
     
Many are irritated by the word "metropolis" in and of itself. It is a pompous term to describe the capital of small, peripheral Finland, a city that should not be going around puffing itself unnecessarily, they say.
      Helsinki is an insignificant one-horse town by comparison with the real European or world metropoles, starting with neighbouring Stockholm or St. Petersburg, not to mention places of genuine mega-magnitude like Mumbai or Calcutta.
     
The online discussions rapidly and predictably hurtled into the nether regions of Finnish self-deprecation and self-pity. The free-content online encyclopaedia Wikipedia was wheeled into action.
      What precisely is meant by the M-word and what is the significance of administrative boundaries in the make-up of the urban agglomeration variously known as "Greater Helsinki" or the "Helsinki Metropolitan Area" or the "Helsinki Region"?
      Will Helsinki now finally be shown as a red square on international maps, and does it really make a blind bit of difference when nobody knows anything about Finland anyway?
     
At some point one writer observed that Helsinki was Finland's only city (in spite of the fact that there are 113 "cities" on the nation's books). This approach was roundly condemned by another poster who described it brusquely as "tired and confidence-challenged 1950s Helsinki-centredness".
      Another writer says that all the fancy talk about metropoles means nothing without actions befitting such a title. He recommends putting the accent on the first half of the word and improving the rail transport systems of the capital region before starting to talk about a metropolis.
     
One poster believes that a metropolis should contain beautiful old buildings erected over the centuries and not acres of concrete suburbs filled with "bulk housing barracks". Another leaps in to shoot this claim down: on the outskirts of all European metropoles one finds these same concrete dormitory suburbs, he retorts. Helsinki is no exception.
     
The M-word is clearly an emotive and entertaining topic for debate, in which it is easy to poke fun at self-important city managers, snotty parochial Helsinki-ites, or hayseeds who have just arrived in the area from the Finnish boondocks. It all depends on your perspective.
      Exaggeration makes for good sport. In Finland, quixotically, it usually involves exaggerated understatement. We have nothing, or next to nothing, and if we do have something, then it really doesn't have any value anyway. A metropolis in Finland? Geddoutahere! You must be mad!
     
For us forest-Finns, it is so nice to trot off every now and then to Central Europe to get our eyes opened.
      When in Berlin, there is no earthly need to ponder with furrowed brows whether the place is a metropolis or not. The city has its own patina of history that a metropolis needs.
      Then when we come home it is fun to watch as the plane makes its final approach into Helsinki-Vantaa International, over the 45 square kilometres of uninhabited wilds that are the Nuuksio National Park.
      It doesn't look much like a metropolis - is that such a problem?
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 20.4.2007


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Baby girl declared millionth resident of Helsinki region (19.4.2007)

ANTTI MANNINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
antti.manninen@hs.fi