Excuse me, could you direct me to the absolute centre of Helsinki?

The city's hub is the place that is easiest of access, but it is gradually moving west

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By Panu Lehtovuori
     
      The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Lasipalatsi film & media complex, Tennispalatsi with its multiplex cinema, and Library 10 (specialising in IT and music) represent Helsinki's new cool cultural hub, nestled around the junction of Mannerheimintie, Postikatu, and Salomonkatu.
      The opening of the adjacent Kamppi Center shopping mall also gave an appreciable nudge to the city's centre of gravity in terms of shopping and nightlife.
      This concentration of culture, commerce, and travel (Kamppi Center also houses the new bus terminal and a Metro station) is laying down a challenge to the old idea of the capital's bullseye of movement and interaction being situated at or near the Stockmann department store, which occupies the site on the corner of Mannerheimintie and the main Helsinki shopping thoroughfare, Aleksanterinkatu.
     
In the not too distant future, both the Töölönlahti Bay area and the commercial harbours that fringe the downtown area of Helsinki will undergo a very dramatic facelift.
      Where will "the centre" drift to when this happens?
     
The centre of Helsinki has in fact moved throughout the city's history. The drift has for the most part been slow and measured, but there have been one or two quantum leaps along the way.
      In 1550 King Gustavus Vasa of Sweden founded Helsinki at the mouth of the Vantaa River, in what is now a northern suburb, known suitably as Vanhakaupunki (Old City), a good few kilometres north of what we think of as the centre today.
      With the benefit of hindsight, Gustavus's great plan turned out to be less than brilliant. The river-mouth silted up and the whole idea of the city - envisioned as an economic powerhouse to compete with the Hanseatic League's Tallinn - rather fell apart when ships could no longer navigate into port.
      Nevertheless, it took 90 years of suffering and neglect before the decision was made to give the little town a fresh start on a more favourable site.
     
The headland of Vironniemi was chosen for the relocation. As a name, Vironniemi has rather lapsed, but effectively the plan placed the centre of the new community in what we now call Kruununhaka (named in turn because it was former Crown pasture land), and the hub was around the site of the modern-day Senate Square. This was then the point where the old highway to and from Häme Province reached the city's wooden church and the new harbour. The date was 1640.
      In the 18th century, changes in European superpower politics obliged the Swedish Crown to engage in some serious military spending and defence: on the offshore islands just south from the new Helsinki they built an imposing naval fortress, Sveaborg or Suomenlinna. Very quickly the tail began to wag the dog, and Suomenlinna became an urban area considerably larger - and more advanced in every respect - than Helsinki itself.
     
When push came to shove in April 1809, Suomenlinna, the "Gibraltar of the North", surrendered in short order (in part because it was designed to prevent a naval invasion, and the Russians "arrived from the wrong direction"), and in 1812 the victorious Russian Empire under Czar Alexander I decided to make Helsinki the capital of its new acquisition.
      Turku, hitherto the capital of Sweden-Finland, was too close to Stockholm for comfort. In the middle of the rather less than spectacular town was built a monumental centre around the Senate Square, and this nailed down the "centre" of Helsinki for many years to come.
     
However, by the end of the 19th century, the geographical balance of power in the city began to shift once more.
      Helsinki was becoming industrialised and quite prosperous, and the city fathers filled in what was formerly a marine inlet to form what we know now as Kluuvi, and builders erected a string of imposing commercial edifices on the drained land alongside the Esplanade Park.
      This westward drift was given a final shove in 1922, when the Stockmann department store opened its handsome new building on the triangular site between Mannerheimintie, Aleksanterinkatu, and the Esplanade. The perceived centre had irreversibly moved away from its Senate Square/Market Square origins.
     
So we know the centre moves, but what is it that drives the movement?
      The architectural theories behind what is known as "urban space syntax" begin from the concepts of accessibility, connectivity, and "wayfinding". The city is seen as a spatial network, with the component parts being individual street sections and squares.
      Distance in metres or yards is not as significant as an attractive or easy route between one place and another. Often the city centre will gravitate to the crossing-points of long thoroughfares that combine whole large areas of a conurbation.
      In the case of Helsinki, these pivotal streets are Mannerheimintie, Aleksanterinkatu or "Aleksi", and also the old high street of Unioninkatu, running north-south, down into the Senate Square and up into the formerly working-class district of Hakaniemi.
      These key spaces collect major traffic flows, which in turn attract shops and other services that require a heavy throughput of customers.
     
What emerges is a self-perpetuating spiral that anchors itself loosely on the busy and often expensive main streets of the downtown area.
      As the city grows, the hub can move with the pull of new development. The new blocks that went up in Kluuvi in the late 19th century, and the development of the Kaisaniemi area to the east of the present-day railway station, helped to drag the centre of town away from the monumental centre and towards the western end of Aleksi.
      The mass of people swarming around the statue of The Three Blacksmiths (by Felix Nylund, 1932) and the abundance of shops and other services in the immediate vicinity of this meeting of streets are precisely the result of this kind of self-perpetuating development: the place that people experience as the most central has been built most easily on the site that is most easy of access.
      In London, Tokyo, and New York, alongside the services and the stunning rental prices for property, the main paths that the human flows have gravitated to are signalled by the density of neon signs and advertisements. The more people there are to look at it, the more it is worth having your product's name up there in lights.
     
The urban spatial network is a pretty robust construct. This means that even manifest changes in the urban structure may not actually shift the city centre off its axis.
      To take the example of London, the historic Oxford Street remains the most accessible and "central" street, even though the metropolis has swollen to accommodate millions upon millions of people.
      But even if such viscosity and inertia exists to hinder movement, other reasons may cause people to rethink what they regard as the most central location. The centre can shift one way or another in small steps on a short time-frame.
     
For all that it was Helsinki's largest-ever building site, the completion of the Kamppi Center complex will not of itself have any great impact on the overall urban spatial whole. It moves the centre purely by virtue of tempting people in and shifting the direction of human flows.
      It is now a good deal easier to reach Kamppi both by Metro and by bus. The new restaurants on the site are attracting customers in the evenings after working hours, and the skateboarders have already discovered the maze of steps and ramps along Salomonkatu.
      The centre for "Design Helsinki" may be further south and west in the gallery quarter of Punavuori, and the young clubbing & nightlife focus has perhaps gravitated towards Kallio. In the summer, the Esplanade Park might feel more like the heart of the capital than the shopping streets. Similarly, the barfly will recognise a different centre from the person with a yen for culture.
      Another thing that makes a difference today is the existence of WiFi. Wireless networks play a part, fusing media and geography in new ways. For many, access to the Net is now a more important measure of "accessibility" than an attractive walking route or a convenient ride on the Metro.
     
The City of Helsinki's own actions in the Senate Square district of town have had the effect of driving the perceived centre of Helsinki away from its origins. The old patricians' houses, shops, and the opulent Hotel Seurahuone were converted into office premises in the early 20th century. The hotel is now City Hall.
      After the makeover, the local citizens had far less reason to navigate to these previously important streets, and they began to be forgotten and to gather moss.
      Now there are moves afoot to redirect the human flows and to liven up the old monumental centre with new stores and cultural fare.
     
From the perspective of the shifting of the centre of town, the idea of a downtown pedestrian precinct contains an intriguing conflict. Although the space system as such does not change, cutting off motor vehicle traffic necessarily reduces accessibility. On the other hand, helping people on foot might improve access on the local level.
      In a few Finnish provincial cities the main street has been turned into a pedestrians-only zone, with Kauppakatu in Jyväskylä being one well-known example.
      If there is a real desire to create a good pedestrian centre in Helsinki, then the south end of Mannerheimintie and the northern side of the Esplanade Park [Pohjois-Esplanadi], would have to become off-limits to cars. Only then would the choicest places be at the disposal of the pedestrians.
      For the traffic planning engineers, this presents a stiff challenge.
     
The city planners who came after Carl Ludvig Engel (1778-1840, the "father" of the monumental neo-classical centre and the man responsible for the Lutheran Cathedral, the University, and the other buildings around the Senate Square) have put forward at least two new centres for the capital: Pasila and the Töölönlahti Bay area.
      However, the self-perpetuating "dynamic duo" of easy access and attractive functions has so far torpedoed any attempts to move the hub of the city away from the Aleksi-Mannerheimintie axis.
     
But what of the immediate future? The uprooting of the cargo harbour facilities in the city proper and the opening of a new custom-built port in Vuosaari will generate as much as three square kilometres of urban development space in Jätkäsaari (the present West Harbour), Sörnäinen (Sörnäinen Harbour), and Pasila (where the main rail marshalling yards are now). This is likely to shake things up somewhat. The probability is that the 200-year slide westwards of the city centre will take another step.
      The redevelopment of the West Harbour site will produce a new urban zone roughly the size of the old districts in the southern part of the city. In decades to come, it is by no means impossible that the centre of town would stretch itself out in a south-westerly direction towards Hietalahti, which is the rough-edged interface between the "old" and the "new" Helsinki.
     
There are plenty of historical examples of how an district on the edge of town can become the centre.
      In the case of Barcelona, the famous main street Las Ramblas  was in medieval times the outer edge of the built-up area, a rather shabby river that became a dry ditch in the summer months.
      As the city expanded, it crossed the watercourse and gradually the gulch was built up into a stylish street and the new centre. Might the Hietalahti landscape undergo the same kind of metamorphosis?
     
Another possible scenario is that the "centre" will fragment into increasingly specialised cores in different city districts. The Teollisuuskatu "valley", which links together Kallio and Vallila, is one potential site for a future hub, as are the still undeveloped areas of Kalasatama (the zone around the old fishing port at the north end of Sörnäinen Harbour) and Central Pasila (mooted as a large new high-rise suburb joining West and East Pasila when the railyards become less relevant with the opening of the new Vuosaari Harbour).
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.4.2006
     
The author is an architect and holds a doctorate from the Graduate School for Urban and Planning Studies. A link to his homepage is given below.

More on this subject:
 Vox-Pop: Railway Station and Stockmann gather most hits
 FACTFILE: Space Syntax, Wayfinding, and Mental Maps

Links:
  Panu Lehtovuori
  A searchable Helsinki Map

Helsingin Sanomat