Urban networks between Tallinn and Helsinki – Talsinki or Hellinn?
JUSSI S. JAUHIAINEN
26.05.2004
Growth, competitiveness and knowledge concentrate in urban regions. This was reported in the European Union (EU) in the mid-1990s . In the current territorial development strategy, European Spatial Development Perspective, urban networking takes place across the national borders. Today it is almost taken-for-granted that broader economic and social success in Europe cannot be realised without urban networks, i.e. specialised urban regions that cooperate and compete between themselves. The task is to make the EU globally the most competitive area by 2010. Urban networks are a vehicle for promoting free markets as inter-urban networks have become enrolled into the neoliberalisation of spatial policies in Europe.
Urban policy has become important part of the regional policy of the European Commission and the EU member states . Finland is an illustrating example of that. Still in the 1960s the general mentality in the country was quite anti-urban. One third of the population worked in agriculture and regional development policy significantly supported rural and peripheral areas. Today, agriculture makes less than 4% of the GDP. Urban regions are seen vital for the success of the country and the programs for centres of excellence and regional centres are cornerstones of regional development. Specific EU funds are used to tackle social problems and pockets of deprivation within cities, including some declined suburban neighbourhoods in Helsinki. The traditional anti-urban hostility in politics has slowly converted into an urban renaissance. Furthermore, people are moving in the largest urban regions and their central parts are physically regenerated.
In this article I discuss about an urban region in the extended EU, namely the networking between Helsinki (Finland) and Tallinn (Estonia), and whether this will lead into something encouraging and positive (Talsinki) or worrying and negative (Hellinn). I present the current ideas of cities and urban networks related to the transformation of society. These ideas are brought to the context and future of the urban region between Tallinn and Helsinki.
Cities as networks and neoliberal society
Cities are dense concentrations of people, things, institutions and architectural forms. There is heterogeneous life that juxtaposes in close proximity. Various networks of communication exist within and beyond the particular city . Recently, in the book Cities: Reimagining the urban there was discussed how cities consist simultaneously of places of work, consumption, circulation, play, creativity, excitement, and boreness. Cities mix, separate, conceal, and display unimaginably diverse social practices. Furthermore, the omnipresence various networks make cities virtualities in which the trajectories are set of potentials. These contain unpredictable elements resulting from co-evolution of moments of problems and solutions.
In contemporary globalised world cities are often described as networks. The conditions of possibility and actions of network participants are defined by their relationship with other participants rather than by their own inherent characteristics . Economic, political, social and cultural transactions – spaces of flows – intertwine cities around the globe. Nevertheless, the inhabitants organise their life within everyday social and physical environment – space of places. Fundamental is how glocal urban community is attached to this space of places in an urban region that belongs at the same time to the spaces of flows.
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