Post-Cappuccino City

Industry is the key concept in understanding contemporary cities and their planning. Industrialization meant the growth and expansion of cities and the emergence or new cities around large factories.  It also meant land speculation, overcrowded housing and poor sanitary and environmental conditions. These are the illnesses that modern urban planning set out to cure; they became its fundamental ethos. The solution was to get the industry out of town, and even out of the country as it turned out. No thanks to planners and their functionalist principles only, but to the globalisation of the economy.  As industrial production (following urban farming that was cast out earlier) had left, only shopping, parties, culture and office work remained. Enter the post-industrial city, the cappuccino-city.

The city of Tampere in Finland is a prime example of this development. It grew around the Tammerkoski rapids in the 19th Century. The crown jewel was the cotton mill established by the Scottish industrialist James Finlayson in 1820. It used to be the largest cotton mill in the Nordic countries, and the industrial production in the middle of the city lasted until the 1990s. Back then, making of things was still part of urbanity. Not anymore: although the heritage buildings are still there, and the area employs some 3000 people (approximately the same number as in the industrial period), the businesses and functions are very different: shops, restaurants, coffee shops, offices, museums. The post-industrial city is an alienated city: there is no direct contact between the consumer and the producer. At the same time, there is a growing arrogance among the post-industrial urbanites: the cities are seen as the engines of national economies, the centres of high productivity. But productivity of what, if not food or things? One could turn the argument around: without the industries producing things and the farms producing food 'out there', there would be nothing to shop or nothing to eat in the restaurants.

This paradox can be explained by what Saskia Sassen called 'command centres'. The cities are not independent, they are totally dependent on their hinterlands (national and international). They have, however, taken control. There is not a single coffee bean produced in New York, London or Singapore, but these are the centres where futures of coffee are bought and sold. And, of course, these are the places where the self-confident brokers are drinking their cappuccino in a fancy coffee shop in former industrial premises.

But is this the 'end of history', and if not, what would be the next step? Interestingly, scholars have started discussing the possibility of 'urban re-industrialization' or getting industrial production back to cities. Krzysztof Nawratek, who originally coined the term 'cappuccino city' in 2012, has organised several conferences on the topic, and his recently edited book "Urban Re-Industrialization" (Punctum Books 2017) has emerged out of these. But what would urban re-industrialization be? Naturally it must be post-functionalist, as I have wanted to call it elsewhere (di Marino & Lapintie 2017), that is, not based on the functional division typical of early modernist planning. Making of things, not just digits, must be re-allowed in the urban environment. If this can be done, all the other positive features of urbanity will follow: co-existence, proximity and synergy.

What would make this possible? There are several trends that have been widely discussed but not so much in this overall context. One of them is 3D-printing, or in general the decentralisation and customisation of production. If production can be done closer to the customers, responding to their individual tastes, even inviting them so see how their items are produced, why then take the trouble of organising overseas mass production? Decentralised production does not need large factory spaces, to say nothing of 'cities within cities' that industry complexes like Finlayson represented. Customers, not just workers are welcome.

Secondly, the global environmental requirements have become more central than the earlier environmental health targets. If the solution of the early modernists was to re-locate polluting industries out of the city, now these industries have to become cleaner anyway. New technologies and production processes can make it possible to adapt production to the requirements of the urban environment by avoiding smells and unnecessary noise. Interestingly, one of the factories around the Tammerkoski rapids, the Tako board mill,  has succeeded in continuing its production in the city centre by changing its production processes.

Thirdly, since recycling of materials has become a necessity for all kinds of industrial production, it would make sense to take care of recycling closer to where consumption happens (and the corresponding waste is produced). An example of this is the Industri[us] project described by Christina Norton in the aforementioned book, in which temporarily vacant sites are taken to use by a collaborative of designers and users working with waste materials ("up-cycling").

Fourthly, the city is a possible site where re-emergence of arts and crafts can happen. Even if handicraft cannot compete with the lower prices of globalised industrial production, it can provide higher quality and longer life-time (even over generations). As we know, the urbanites are ready to pay higher prices for branded products, even if the quality would not correspond to the price. Handicraft can provide a more genuine promise, particularly if the producer is known and visible in the city.

Thus urban re-industrialization is not just a day-dream (nor a nationalist political ideology), but there are some real windows of opportunity that are open for progressive urbanism. However, the authors of "Urban Re-Industrization" are also worried if this is just another chapter of the neo-liberal city. For Nawratek, the "Industrial City 2.0" is much more, "the opposite of the contemporary city, based on the extremely individualistic philosophy of competition." It is " the city based on overcoming selfishness and on the construction of a new, inclusive community..." (p. 68). I would not quite share this optimism, but I find the concept very interesting and the emerging urban economies worth following. Importantly, it may open our eyes and invite us to re-think the feeble arguments of the Neo-urbanist agenda in urban planning.

Nawratek, Krzysztof (2017, ed.) Urban Re-Industrialization.  Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books.

di Marino, Mina & Kimmo Lapintie (2017) Emerging Workplaces in Post-Functionalist Cities. Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 24, Issue 3,

Three invisible things in Finnish planning I: ecology

One of the main problems of contemporary planning is that it is done in silos: the various experts and decision makers all have their specific interests and practices, which are confined within thematic and geographical areas. Even if integration is the buzz-word, it is not easy to make it real. There is a certain path-dependency in urban and regional expertise: each profession has its own history of combining knowledge with power, and it is also important to defend one's position in the planning commission. Who is needed, and what kind of knowledge is relevant? There is nothing self-evident in this. Different countries have used different experts; in Finland for instance, there is no actual planning profession, but planning is done by architects, landscape architects, civil engineers, planning  and urban geographers, among others. They all have different educational backgrounds and, correspondingly, different priorities.

On the other hand, urban and regional governance is also confined within specific geographical areas. The cities are drawing their detailed and structural or master plans - mainly blueprints - and the regional authorities consider regional policies and land-use. At the moment the current government of Finland is planning a major new reform in regional governance, in which independent regions (with elected councils) would take care of social and health-care services, as well as regional land-use plans. The existing independent municipalities (many of which are too small to take care of their ageing population) would be left with local municipal plans and educational and cultural services. Whatever will be the result of this reform, one problem seems to persist: the different authorities take good care not to step on each others' toes. Helsinki is careful not to suggest anything for the other cities of the metropolitan area (Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen), to say nothing of the larger urban region - and vice versa.

People - in contrast - are not confined. They may be living in one municipality and working in another - nay, they may be living and working in several municipalities and even city regions at the same time, changing their home and workplace as soon as it fits their purposes. They may have primary and secondary homes for both living and working, which is made possible by fast computer networks everywhere. In addition to the home and the office, they may occupy libraries and coffee shops for multi-local working. They would also like to use services according to their preferences and accessibility, but here they face a problem: urban and regional governance has no way of dealing with this fluidity and complexity. From the governance point of view, people are still conceived to be more or less fixed, with one place and neighbourhood of residence determining their local taxes, their public services, their local and national identity, and their political citizenship.   Thus the functional urban region is not corresponding to the institutional framework that is supposed to govern it. This incongruence is only partly remedied by the voluntary agreements between the national and the local states, the so-called MALPE-agreements, trying to integrate land-use, transportation, services and the economy.

With nature we have another wicked problem at hand. Before the concepts of sustainable development and ecology came so widespread in planning discourses, the main functions of green areas and networks were recreation and preservation of endangered species and cultural landscapes. They fitted nicely with the overall scheme of functionalistic land-use planning, allowing the confinement of a suitable amount of green around or within the more profitable functions of housing, industry or transportation. At the same time they could be dealt with as structural elements connecting housing with recreational functions. Surely they were understood as having ecological roles as well, as e.g. corridors for species or water retention areas, but not necessarily analysed as such.

How different is our understanding of the urban and regional green today, after decades of research on green infrastructures, ecosystem services, health effects, micro-climates, stormwater management etc. that urban ecology is dealing with. Not so different as one might expect. The two functions of recreation and preservation still dominate the field: we are debating on how much green can be sacrificed for urban development, which areas should be preserved, and what form the green network should take. The main points seem to be too difficult to handle: the avoiding of the juxtaposition of urban development and urban green, the understanding of urban ecology in systemic terms (and not as end-states that can be represented with two-dimensional maps), and addressing the different qualities of the urban green and the respective ecosystem services. An urban forest and a golf course are both green, but they provide very different services, both ecologically and socially.

The issue, thus, does not seem to be the existence or the amount of knowledge, but the way that urban reality is conceptualised through this knowledge, whether it is scientific or professional. And if so, dealing with the complex and dynamic urban reality at hand requires re-concpetualisation, and this is exactly what we are interested in.

Publications:

Libraries as transitory workspaces and spatial incubators

Di Marino, M. & Lapintie, K. 2015 In : LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE RESEARCH. 37, 2, p. 118-129

Emerging workplaces in the post-functionalist cities

Di Marino, M. & Lapintie, K. Forthcoming in JOURNAL OF URBAN TECHNOLOGY.

Exploring the concept of green infrastructure in urban landscape. Experiences from Italy, Canada and Finland

Di Marino, M. & Lapintie, K. Forthcoming in LANDSCAPE RESEARCH.