Growth and green in the age of Web 2.0

In our Urban Laboratory this autumn, we decided to study Urban Growth and Ecosystem services in the age of Web 2.0. Three topics, seemingly different, but intimately connected. You can hardly find a planning project that does not destroy some of the urban green. People, however, tend to like their parks, forests and fields, and so the conflict is ready. How do planners cope with it? The easy solution - too often heard - is that they couldn't care less, since the residents are simply a bunch of NIMBYs, opposing everything that sounds like planning, with no respect for the hard realities of urban development, namely growth.

Could there be an alternative? This is not an easy question, but we may approach it from two perspectives. First, we need to get rid of the assumption that urban growth is a natural phenomenon, something that simply happens like weather or flooding, and which we should only be prepared for. It is also made by us: we invite people into our cities by providing housing, services, jobs, and a good living environment - including the urban green. If people like it, it must be something valuable (in fact its value to us as human animals can even be proved scientifically, but let us not go into that, at least not yet).

My point here is that we are in fact actively designing the qualities of our cities, we are not forced to react to some natural force. Politics of emergency ("there is no alternative") is not the right answer here. We could even decide not to grow, but this would come at a price: housing and property prices would probably go skyrocketing. I am not suggesting this, but rather a different mindset. Cities are made for hundreds, even thousands of years. They may grow, thrive and decline innumerable times during their history, and we should try to avoid shortsightedness in their planning.

But the urban green is not only liked by people, it also has a logic of its own. This may be a second problem in our traditional mindset: we tend to see construction as if a drawing on top of a green background; it is what is left over after planning. Thus it is no wonder that our cities often consist of small, unconnected patches of green, in addition to some larger recreational areas. It is interesting to compare this relationship with other urban functions. We don't think that streets are what is left over after the buildings are erected. And we don't think that ideal sites for housing are those that remain between industrial plants. But why do we think in this way when the urban green is considered? Like streets, they do - or should - form networks. Like housing areas, they are homes for several species. Like industrial plants, they produce food and materials for us. And like schools and shops, they do provide us services - the ecosystem services. And believe or not, these services are, for us, a matter of life and death.

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Some additional food for thought:

Hansen, R., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Rall, E, Kabisch, N., Kaczorowska, A., Kain, J-H., Artmann, M. and Pauleit, S., 2015. The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses Ecosystem Services, vol.12, pp. 228-246.

Maes, J., et al., 2014. More green infrastructure is required to maintain ecosystem services under current trends in land-use change in Europe. Landscape Ecology. 1-18. doi: 10.1007/s10980-014-0083-2

Niemelä J., Saarela ,S.R., Söderman T., Kopperoinen L., Yli-Pelkonen V. Väre S., and Kotze, D.J., 2010.Using the ecosystem services approach for better planning and conservation of urban greenspaces. A Finland case study. Biodiversity Conservation 19:3225-3243

From Ivory Tower to Neoliberalism

In the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) congress last week, there was an interesting roundtable organised by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). You might have expected it to be a local debate about planning in the UK, but it turned out to be a more general discussion on the role of research in the context of planning practice and politics.

The event had its motivation in the observation that planning has been under attack by the neoliberal government in the UK, according to which planning represents needless and even harmful restrictions to the market economy and economic growth. In their attempt to defend planning against this accusation, the representatives of RTPI had designed a research agenda that would help them to demonstrate that planning can in fact promote economic growth. Unfortunately they had not found much help to from academic research, which has mainly concentrated on criticising neoliberalism. This is why they have started to promote and organise research that would give them suitable weapons in their 'war' against neoliberalism - the market itself cannot be beaten.

The invited members of the academic community were not so enthusiastic. In her memorable comment Simin Davoudi told the story of Alan Turing and his seemingly useless ideas, which however ended up in deciphering the German code Enigma (and thus shortening the 2nd World War) and - as if by chance - the design of the first electronic computer. The ways of science and researchers are mysterious: you never know what you get - but you need to give them leeway.

At first sight this seems like the age-old dichotomy between the Ivory Tower of academics and the down-to-earth attitude of the practitioners. However, the issue of the role and responsibility of research is worth readdressing in these turbulent times, when the university is no longer the self-evident fortress of disinterested research that it used to be. Well, perhaps it never was, if we believe Foucault, according to whom 'truth is a thing in this world'. But it is fair to say that societies are more than ever in the process of redefining the role of the university: we should form more partnerships with industry, and we should prepare our students to meet the requirements of working life rather than - though this is never explicitly said - making them critics of the established order.

Considering this context, the need for practitioners to defend their professional role is understandable, but a research agenda that is in effect positioned inside the neoliberal political framework would not only squeeze research into instrumentalism, but it would also give weapons to the opponents of professionalism. Even if we would no longer believe in the Durkheimian view of professions as moral fortresses, they are professions exactly because of their relative freedom to define their own commission. The day when doctors of medicine are no longer allowed to define health - but only politicians - we are in trouble. And the same is true of planners and the good environment.

Again referring to Davoudi, the original motivation of planning and the measure of its success was not GDP but the health and happiness of people, their access to good and affordable housing, etc. The fact these early aspirations now seem outdated or idealistic tells something of our contemporary society and politics.  And this is exactly what research should address.

Architecture of thought: Urban Design from a can of beer

This is the English version of my existing blog in Finnish called Mahdolliset kaupungit, which means pretty much the same as possible cities. The two do not correspond to each other, however, although they look alike. I will not directly translate any of the texts, but I will address some of the issues in both blogs, such as the ontology of cities, the burden of functionalism, smart cities, homelessness, and urban ecology. The reason for writing also in English is, of course, to reach a wider audience, but also because many of my friends and colleagues do not speak this strange language of five millions or so - and I don't expect them to learn it, as it is one of the most difficult languages of the world.

As you may have guessed, this blog is about cities, about what they are, about their planning and design, and about the people and cultures that they accommodate. This is both a professional and an academic blog, which tells something about what I do, being a professor of urban and regional planning in Aalto University, Finland. However, these posts are not academic essays in the traditional sense; I am also taking liberties in telling you stories from my personal experience, and I will also comment on things that I have read and what is happening in the field. Whenever I am directly using others' work (or my own published work), I will give references, but not all the time.

In this first post, I will try to describe my basic understanding of what cities are all about: that they are not big things, or big things on the move, but possibilities. Before doing this, however, I need to tell you something about myself, since my perspective to cities may sound rather strange to you. I started my academic career in the University of Turku in South-West Finland, studying subjects like theoretical and practical philosophy, economics, and theory and history of art. This may seem like a crazy combination, and it was. During the time of academic freedom of the late 1970s you could, however, freely choose. Actually I thought that economics would give me a job that philosophy or art never would, but it turned out that I was wrong. So I moved over to architecture that is a much more practical profession.

Studying architecture in Tampere University of Technology was, however, somewhat of a cultural shock to me. Having accustomed to reflection, analysis and argumentation, I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who couldn't care less of reflection, analysis or argumentation. They just did. The astonishing feature of Finnish architects, in contrast to many of their European colleagues, is to jump to conclusions, that is, design, without even analysing the problem. This is also their main strength, since they have no fear. One of my colleagues won a major competition in Copenhagen together with his friends without having much education in urban design, or much knowledge of the city for that matter. So they had to learn how to design cities pretty fast, in addition to the equally strange language of the Danes.

But it quickly became clear to me that this was not my cup of tea. There was, however, one professor, Jorma Mänty, who was interested in theory, in addition to being a professor of urban planning. Planning seemed to be less straightforward, since you don't have ready-made projects, and you need to consider the people, the economy, and the social realm that you are dealing with. Getting things built is not always the best option. So I turned to architectural theory and planning, and I spent some years as a practicing consultant after my graduation, until I returned to university in 1993, to lead a research project on ecological cities. From 1999 I have worked as professor of urban and regional planning, first in Helsinki University of Technology and, after its merger with two other universities, in Aalto University.

This short description of my background might help you to see the way that I am approaching cities and their planning. The triad of philosophy, architecture and planning has made me what I am, which means that I am particularly interested in what an earth are we thinking as we are planning and designing our cities. The architecture of thought, you might say.

But I also need to explain the meaning of the name of my blog. Let me do it with a story. In Finland, we have this odd tradition of socialising by inviting people to have a sauna bath (together, naked), and then discussing and drinking beer after it. Once we were wrapping up one of our courses in a sauna owned by the student union of our university.  In addition to our course of urban planning, I knew that the students had already taken a course on urban design (called Urban Space), so I asked them what they understood by urban space. Nobody even tried to define it.

I don't blame them. Students of architecture usually take space to be something that has a form, which can then be designed to have a different form. It is not material, since it seems to be between the material things like buildings. It may have some meanings, such as being intimate or pompous, in addition to its form. It is where people go, but the people are not needed to define the space in the first place. So the students naturally suspected that I was playing a trick on them. Which I was.

As they did not respond, I tried to explain my own understanding of urban space. Since there was no blackboard in the sauna, I used what I had, an empty can of beer in front of me. I changed its position on the table and said that they were hardly surprised to see that it could also take this different place on the table. Which meant, I suppose, that they already knew, before I moved it, that it could have taken this new position, although they had no idea that it would be moved, or where I was going to move it. So, in perceiving the can of beer, they had not only perceived a physical object in the place where it happened to be, but also the many possible places that it could take.

I don't know whether any of the students understood what I was talking about. My assistant lecturer certainly did not, since he suggested that I should make a video clip where the can would  be moving back and forth, like commuting cars between housing and workplaces. This was, of course, a total misunderstanding of the idea. It was not the actual movement that mattered, but the possibility of movement. And if you have a power to move, you also have a power to not move. Even cans can have that sort of power.

This may sound self-evident, but it is not. Philosophers know that I am talking about the difference between actuality and possibility that goes back to Aristotle and through the scholastics to modern philosophy of possible worlds. I am not going to discuss that, however, at least not yet. What I am trying to do is to show the way from the can of beer to urban design.

The city could be thought of as a big material object. Architects could think of it like a big building, with streets resembling corridors, central parks the atrium, and squares the rooms. No big difference, just the scale. But in both cases, we need to take into account the movement of people. The things are not fixed, they are changing all the time in space, so we are speaking of a spatio-temporal reality. Like the flowing water, people move through corridors or streets and take places in rooms and squares. This is still easy, since we may observe what they are doing, at a certain moment, or during a certain period of time. Being and moving is real, because it can be observed. Esse est percipi, as Berkeley would say.

But what if we include in our world the realm of the possible? This is something that you cannot observe. You could see the can in its original position, and then again in its new position. But you cannot see the many possible positions on the table that it has. Does it mean that you can only see the fixed can and its movement, and you have to imagine the other possible positions? Hardly, since you can always imagine the can floating in the air, but this is not one of its physical possibilities. No help from psychology here.

But what if we think of cities as realities that include not only things (the buildings, the trees, the pavement, the cars) and their recorded movement, but also their possibilities? Instead of the cars commuting back and forth, we would have the drivers considering whether to take the car or the bus, or where they should be heading and which road to take. The driver would have a set of different options to choose from. If we make it very unpleasant or expensive to take the car, he will not take it. He is not stupid. Unless of course if you forget the driver and see the flow of traffic as a natural force, like rivers. Then you will end up building more roads and lanes, in order to avoid congestion. But as we know, they will again be filled with cars. Why? Because more drivers will consider it a good idea to take the car.

Again, this may sound like a simple thing, but it is not. Urban researchers want to study the empirical reality (because at least that is real, not speculation), by observing the mobility of people and cars, and asking about their preferences through surveys. But there is no way of observing what they could have done, or what they should have done. In time the scholars will develop theories of how cities develop, what kind of patterns they exemplify, and how the housing market leads some districts to prosper and others to decline, for instance.

For planners and architects, the reality consisting of possibilities instead of actualities seems much more natural. The basic assumption behind every act of planning and design is that the future is not determined; why else should we plan for it, and not just expect for it to happen? So there must be a belief in other possibilities than only the ones that we see before our eyes, and where things seem to be going.

The thing is, however, that not everything that is possible is easily seen. My students could easily figure out where on the table the beer could be. But those developing our cities cannot so easily see what the cities could be. The realm of possibilities is infinite, even if we respect the physical (or economic, or ecological, or political, or social) context. The future of cities, the possible cities, cannot be seen. They have to be made visible. They have to be designed.


Kimmo Lapintie (2007) Modalities of Urban Space. Planning Theory, Vol. 6, ss. 36-51.

(This is a scholarly article I once wrote about space as possibilities. Unfortunately it is not freely available unless your institution has subscribed to the journal)