Urban networks between Tallinn and Helsinki – Talsinki or Hellinn?
JUSSI S. JAUHIAINEN
26.05.2004
Architecture and planning are significant in meaningful connecting of flows and places . Important is the network of interactions among actors (individual and collective, public and private, local and supra-local) within, for example, functional urban regions. These interactions are self-contained local everyday territory where local means the geographical scale of proximity.
In the EU a transformation towards late industrial urban society is taking place (table 1). Inhabitants commute daily within urban regions and on annual basis also between urban regions across national borders. Enterprises move flexibly from one country to another looking for temporarily competitive advantage in urban regions. Production and consumption chains of goods and services are becoming increasingly multi- and transnational. In the last decade many European countries experienced reurbanisation resulting population growth in urban regions both in the centre and the fringe. The urban sprawl is transforming into a more coherent territorial structure consisted of functionally specialised clusters.
The enormously rapid advancement in telematics and globalisation facilitate the birth of a networked post-industrial society (table 1). This splintering urbanism of an extended urban network emerges first in more advanced areas . “Urban” is penetrating in all aspects of life and the inhabitant is connected 24 hours per day to the spaces of flows. However, the postmodern condition offers possibilities to enjoy – or consume – seemingly differentiated space of places within and between urban regions. These urban regions grow into a globally interconnected virtual network consisted of regional and local production and consumption systems. The physical structure of such network is still unclear. It may lead into a spatially extended and physically connected diffused city – “the glopolis”. Another and possibly simultaneous process is periurbanisation when the peripheral settlements of countries are intensively connected to urban networks with the help of telematics.
Globalised neoliberal economy can be seen as cause and outcome of current urban network policies – either progressive or regressive. The differences between network discources and really existing networks have helped make interurban networks into channels of neoliberalisation . Neoliberalism is a mixture of neoclassical economic fundamentalism, market regulation instead of state guidance, economic redistribution of capital in favour of capital, moral authoritarianism with an idealised consumption-oriented family (DINK, i.e. double income no kids) at its centre, international free trade principles, and thorough intolerance of trade unionism. Actually, the state plays fundamental role in the process of neoliberalisation. This means an intensification of coercive, disciplinary forms of state intervention in order to impose market rule upon all aspects of
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