The Use of Tne Notion Culture in Transforming Industrial Spaces

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01178.x
Dont Plan! The Use of the Notion of Culture in Transforming Obsolete Industrial Space
MARO KRIV
Abstract
How is the notion of culture understood and used in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space? This article analyses the evidence from a current planning project in Suvilahti, Helsinki. It shows that culture is imagined and employed as an instrument capable of producing difference in urban space. The transformation of the Cable Factory in Helsinki and the subsequent consensus on the importance of culture are shown to have inuenced the planning of Suvilahti. On the one hand, planning is being carried out with a deliberate minimization of planning interventions and the promotion of the spontaneous, non-planned practices of cultural producers: the future Suvilahti is imagined as a cultural enclave and its community is characterized as a living organism. On the other, culture is planned in terms of its supposedly positive effects on urban space. Planners do not want to interfere with the non-planned character of cultural production, yet at the same time they express certainty about cultural productions positive spatial and socioeconomic effects. The transformation of Suvilahti is playing an important part in the large-scale planning project to redevelop the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama, Helsinki. The changes in the nature of planning are analysed under the concept of cultural governmentality. The object of the following article is to analyse the way in which the notion of culture is understood in local decision-making institutions and used in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial spaces. It will be shown that culture is valued as a planning instrument capable of producing difference in urban space. This assumed instrumental capacity of culture constitutes what I call a regime of cultural governmentality, in which the paradoxical role of urban planning is to promote spontaneous, non-planned practices. However, this does not mean that planning disappears. On the contrary, what is planned is the projected identity of something that might be described as a culture factory a former industrial building, in which so-called cultural activities are concentrated. Hence, my aim in the study is to analyse how the instrumental idea of culture (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002) has been developed and used in the specic context of regenerating an obsolete industrial built environment. My case study will focus on the transformation of Suvilahti, industrial premises in Helsinki, Finland, to a cultural use. Suvilahti was used for electricity and gas production until it was abandoned in the 1990s. It is situated on the eastern limits of the Helsinki city centre and adjoins a former industrial harbour in the so-called Kalasatama area (see Figure 1).
I would like to thank Anne Haila for her guidance in writing the paper. I would like to express my thanks also to Chiara Rabbiosi, Tahl Kaminer, Agata Marzecova and two IJURR referees for their helpful comments given at different stages of the article.
2012 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by Blackwell Publishing. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA
Maro Kriv
Figure 1 Location of the projects discussed in the article within Helsinki (source: map OpenStreetMap contributors, CC BY-SA)
My research is based on an analysis of planning documents and strategies, and on interviews with the city planners and managers. In my study, I will rst compare the Suvilahti project with the case of the Cable Factory another culture factory in Helsinki and discuss the possible inuence of the latter on the former. I will then analyse the way the planning of Suvilahti has been shaped by the fact that it is a part of a waterfront redevelopment of the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama, the largest Helsinki planning project in years. In this context, I will ask what it means to envision the future Suvilahti as a living organism and a cultural enclave. Finally, I will discuss the concept of cultural governmentality in the light of the Suvilahti case and analyse the specic form of planning and managing culture embodied in Suvilahtis transformation.
Background
In recent years, culture, creativity and the transformation of obsolete industrial spaces have been intertwined in the minds, practices and projects of urban planners and decision makers. Bilbao, Shefeld and Pittsburgh may serve as examples: the notions cultural quarter and creative city were formulated in industrial cities that had large amounts of obsolete space and whose local economies were in a bleak state. As Hesmondhalgh and Pratt (2005: 4) put it, an almost missionary zeal seems to have attached itself to these strategies for the remaking of cities in the name of culture and creativity. While the implementation of policies that support culture and creativity is fuelled by a desire to resolve local economic and social crises, the urbanistic focus of such activities lies in the abandoned industrial environment itself. For example, the Tallinn Cultural Capital 2011 project has a special focus on the industrial and working-class districts of Kalamaja and Kopli and the post-industrial wasteland waterfront. The main ofce of the project organization is located in an abandoned factory nicknamed the Kultuurikatel (Cultural Boiler), which identies itself as an incubator for creative economy (Lassur et al., 2010: 69). Obsolete factories, warehouses, and industrial wastelands are often identied as spaces where the commodication of cities can be resisted (Doron, 2000; Wilson, 2000; Armstrong, 2006). A critic explains as follows:
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2012 Urban Research Publications Limited
The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland
Cities are being turned into products, something that can be easily bought, sold and exchanged. Wastelands remain beyond this logic for the time being. Wasteland is something that you can experience, something with which you can gradually build a relationship, something which you can hug, a place where you can dance (Lehtovuori, 2010: 220).
However, the critique misses the point that building a relationship, hugging and dancing cannot be taken as acts of resistance as such. On the contrary, planning of such spontaneous and resisting activities is constitutive of what I call the regime of cultural governmentality. For example, one of the objectives on the cultural agenda of the city of Lille is to encourage people to dance and sing together . . . by setting up initiatives . . . and awareness-raising workshops (Cullen, 2009: 44). In this context, dancing (taken here as a wider metaphor for spontaneous, non-planned activities) loses its transgressive function. Instead, it simply becomes an instance of culture that can be employed as a policy instrument.
Two concepts of culture

This article studies culture in the context of planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space. However, let me rst situate the discussion of culture within the broader framework in which this notion has been historically developed. A particularly important role is played here by two concepts of culture that have been variously contrasted as axiological/anthropological (Soukup, 2000), humanistic/anthropological (Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952; Jaeger and Selznick, 1964), normative/descriptive (Jaeger and Selznick, 1964; Geertz, 2000), or as a dichotomy of Bildung and customs (Jurist, 2000) or Culture and cultures (Gupta and Ferguson, 2001). In these concepts, the distinction has been made between culture as an ideal to be pursued and culture as a description of existing differences. The notion of culture analysed in this study has to be distinguished from these two understandings, but it can also be characterized as their synthesis. Within the context of planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space, the notion of culture juxtaposes the two meanings: culture as an ideal and culture as difference. What is specic in the concept of culture that I analyse is that difference itself becomes an ideal to be pursued. The employment of culture in regenerating obsolete industrial space is grounded in an emphasis on culture-as-difference and in the belief that culture is capable of generating social, economic and spatial difference. The two conceptualizations of culture are underpinned by a wealth and depth of arguments. Some critiques question the validity of this conceptual dichotomy (e.g. Yengoyan, 1986). My interest regarding the two notions is purely heuristic: they enable me to characterize more aptly the notion of culture that is central in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial spaces and in my case study. Hence, in the axiological or normative conceptualization, culture is understood as an ideal to be pursued. The notion of culture stands for an ideal realization of a socio-historical process. The origins of the concept can be traced back to Cicero (2007) and his denition of culture as a cultivation of social mind. Regarding the development of the notion in the nineteenth century, philosophers as opposed as Hegel and Nietzsche agreed on its basic premise (see Jurist, 2000, on this agreement). Hegel says that culture is:
. . . construed in terms of universal properties. A cultured man is one who knows how to impress the stamp of universality upon all his actions, who has renounced his particularity, and who acts in accordance with universal principles (Hegel, 1975: 567).
Culture forms itself in a dialectical process of overcoming customs and realization of the Ideal. Nietzsche describes the product of culture in a similar fashion:
Maro Kriv
If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit, where society and the morality of customs at last reveal what they have simply been the means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual . . . liberated again from morality of customs (Nietzsche, quoted in Deleuze, 2002: 1367).
Both Hegel and Nietzsche theorize culture in relation to its status as an ideal to be pursued. Like Nietzsche, Georg Simmel has compared the notion of culture to a fruit tree. In the hands of a gardener, a tree with sour and inedible fruit is transformed into a rich resource of sweet fruit that graces our tables. In the words of Simmel (1982: 446) the values of life . . . appear as developments of a basis that we call nature and whose power and intellectual content they surpass in so far as they become culture. Within the anthropological conceptualization, contrariwise, the notion of culture describes a way of life of a specically delimited social group. E.B. Tylor denes culture as a complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society (Tylor, 1903: 1). Despite his pronounced evolutionism, Tylor conceptualizes culture not as a future ideal, but as a presently existing complex whole. One can talk about the normativity of cultural values only from the perspective of ones own particular culture. And since every group has its own culture, the concept of culture necessarily recognizes the plurality of different cultures. In the words of Franz Boas (1938: 159): Culture may be dened as the totality of the mental and physical reactions and activities that characterize the behavior of individuals composing a social group . . . in relation . . . to other groups. Clifford Geertzs theory of thick description aims to understand the web of subjective meanings underlying every instance of culture. It is clear, nonetheless, that such an approach itself presupposes the existence of a plurality of particular cultures: Understanding a peoples culture exposes their normalness without reducing their particularity (Geertz, 2000: 14). The key role of difference in the anthropological concept of culture is described by Fredric Jameson as follows:
No group has a culture all by itself: culture is the nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one (Jameson, 1993: 33).
In relation to the present inquiry, I am then interested in the notion of culture that juxtaposes the two previously mentioned concepts. In such a notion, which emerges in the practice of transforming obsolete space and which can be traced in planning documents and planners rhetoric, the ideal and the descriptive element of the two notions of culture are combined. Cultural difference per se is now recognized as an ideal to be pursued, instead of merely being described. As Terry Eagleton puts it (2000: 14): Simply being a culture of some kind [is] a value in itself.
Culture, planning and urban space

In recent years, there has been intensive discussion of the role of culture in the development of urban economies (Judd and Fainstein, 1999; Scott, 2000; 2006; Pratt, 2008). However, my objective is to study how culture becomes such an instrument and how it is used in the transformation of obsolete spaces. My aim is to analyse culture as a differing notion. In other words, I will ask how the role of culture is dened in relation to urban regeneration and what the concrete manifestation of cultural difference and diversity is in relation to obsolete urban space? How do planning authorities design the future identity of a culture factory and why do they understand the culture factory as a different space? Emphasizing cultural diversity as an ideal to be pursued has developed into a specic argumentational trope. This trope can be traced across a wide range of strategy and policy documents. For example, in the Agenda 21 for Culture (adopted in 2004 by United Cities and Local Governments, a global umbrella organization for local municipalities), we read the following:
Cultural diversity is the main heritage of humanity. It is the product of thousands of years of history, the fruit of the collective contribution of all peoples through their languages, imaginations, technologies, practices and creations. Culture takes on different forms . . . Cultural diversity . . . is one of the essential elements in the transformation of urban and social reality (Agenda 21 for Culture, 2004).
UNESCO makes a similar statement on cultural diversity, which is, in its words, perceived as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral, and spiritual existence (UNESCO, 2001: article 3). The same trope is referenced also in strategic policy documents of the city of Helsinki:
Interculturalism goes beyond equal opportunities and respect for existing differences. Cities need to develop policies which prioritise funding for projects where different cultures intersect, contaminate each other and hybridise. City governments should promote cross-fertilisation across all boundaries, between majority and minorities, dominant and sub cultures, localities, classes, faiths, disciplines and genres (Comedia, 2010: 28).
In such statements, the ideal of the proliferation of differences between cultures is pursued. Here, culture is understood neither in the axiological sense, as an ideal to be pursued, nor in the anthropological sense, as a description of existing differences. Rather, cultural difference and cultural diversity are themselves posited as ideals to be pursued. If we now employed Simmels fruit tree metaphor, it would imply a tautology: a particular form of life is to be cultivated by another particular form of life.
Culture as an instrument
Today, culture is often justied in instrumental terms. As a typical example states, we claim that culture is important for society, economics, education, urban development (Heinrich, 2009: 88). Let me distinguish this form of justifying culture from the previous two. Within the axiological vocabulary, the claim that culture is important for something cannot arise. Culture is not differentiated from a society as its specic subsystem. Rather, it represents an ideal realization of this society. We can say that cherries are important for cherry trees, but this means only that a plentiful cherry crop is the ideal realization of a cherry tree. The concept of a cherry is inherent in the concept of a cherry tree. It is something different to claim that cherries are important for the economic viability of a local farm, for example. Here, two different entities are compared and the claim about the importance of the former for the latter is made. The situation is similar within anthropological vocabulary. The statement that culture (in a general sense) is important would be problematic. As an anthropological notion, culture is a description of existing differences. The anthropological notion of culture contains by denition the idea of different cultures. Without doubt, individual cultures can claim the normativity and superiority of their own values and enter into conict with each other. However, to make a claim about the importance of culture from the perspective of anthropology would mean to claim the importance of cultural differences as such and this would be in contradiction with the understanding of culture as a description of existing differences. The instrumentalization of culture is, then, parallel with the shift of emphasis from description of differences to positing culture-as-difference as an ideal to be pursued. Culture becomes an instrument when it is itself understood as a difference (specic subsystem, specic type of social activity) and from this position it is capable of producing difference (having a variety of social, economic or spatial effects). As Horkheimer and Adorno (2002: 104) put it:
Maro Kriv
The general designation culture already contains, virtually, the process of identifying, cataloging, and classifying which imports culture into the realm of administration. The motivation behind claims about the importance of culture, such as the one presented at the beginning of this section, is to be found in administrative practices employing culture as a tool in realizing specic administrative objectives. Richard Florida has formulated some archetypal statements on cultural diversity, for example that:
Diversity plays a central and crucial role in attracting . . . human capital . . . diversity is important to regional economic performance . . . diversity plays a key role in the attraction and retention of the kinds of talent required to support high-technology industry and generate regional growth (Florida, 2005: 91).
Today, Floridas writings (2005; 2008) are probably the best-known celebrations of the notion of cultural diversity as a strategic instrument. Typically, culture is justied as important for something (urban development, regional growth) and plays a key role in something (economic performance, attracting human capital). Whence comes the importance of identifying, measuring and assessing the performance of culture:
A citys or regions cultural performance can thus be classed as outstanding if it depends on the utilization of its cultural potential as part of its overall development strategy and makes culture central to all areas of life and policy (Schneider, 2010: 23).
In studying how culture is operationalized as an instrument, two further notions play a key role: creativity and art. Both are important to understanding how culture assumes a connotation of diversity and difference and how this differing notion of culture is then imported into the realm of transforming obsolete space.
Creativity and culture

It is again Florida who is the main strategic proponent of the discourse on creativity and of its specic elaboration in the context of urban development. He tells us that the . . . single most important . . . element of my theory is the idea that every human being is creative (Florida, 2005: 34, emphasis added). However, such a theory is unable to understand the concrete and historic function of creativity. Instead, it becomes a strategic discourse that imports creativity into the realm of administration. Historically, creativity as a notion has its origins in Kants concept of genius, which is dened as the innate mental aptitude . . . through which nature gives the rule to art . . . genius is a talent for producing that for which no denite rule can be given (Kant, 2000, section 46: 307). For Kant, genius is a medium for an indirect manifestation of nature. Kants notion was developed by the Romantic movement, in which the image of a lonely artist struggling against and outside established institutions was attached to genius. For Romantics, creative artistic work was regarded as a promise of free, non-alienated life and harboured an implicit social critique (Groys, 2005; Peters, 2009). A democratized version of creativity was formulated in the 1968 movements critique of the sterile, monotonous and dull forms of labour under capitalism. Here too, creativity harboured a hope of self-realization and authentic life, thwarted otherwise under oppressive and alienated labour conditions (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). In such instances, appeals to creativity were formulated as attempts to create a different kind of society or at least difference within a society. Arguing for difference meant to question the existing organization of a society. However, as Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) argue, during the 1990s the use of creativity and the meaning of difference changed. Creativity becomes instrumental in mobilizing a population towards production of economic values:
The creativity thesis . . . argues that the role of culture is . . . expansive, that human beings have limitless potential, and that the key to economic growth is to enable and unleash that potential. This unleashing requires an open culture one that does not discriminate, does not force people into boxes, allows us to be ourselves, and validates various forms of . . . human identity . . . [C]ulture operates not by constraining the range of human creative possibilities but by facilitating and mobilizing them (Florida, 2005: 56).
When creativity becomes a strategic tool in economic growth, its role as a social critique is rendered powerless. Provided that the difference that it is called upon to generate is simply a difference in economic value, the role of creativity corresponds to the instrumental role of culture.
Art and culture

The relation between art and culture is paradoxical culture seems to contain art and, at one and the same time, to be equal with art. There is a parallel between, on one hand, the two previously characterized notions of culture and, on the other, two ways in which art and culture relate to each other (Williams, referenced in Habermas, 1991: 258, 21n). Hence, we can distinguish a relation of non-differentiation, in which there is no separation between art and culture, from the relation, in which art is differentiated from culture as a specic social activity. As Raymond Williams writes:
After the very earliest period of relative non-differentiation of functions, in which the . . . artistic had not or not fully separated out from the more generally cultural, there had been this phase of specically instituted artists, . . . [when] the social position of this kind of cultural producer was instituted as such (Williams, 1981: 38, emphasis in original).
Following the situation Williams describes, there are two possible roles that art can play and these roles are crucial for my comparison of the Suvilahti and Cable Factory cases. On one side, arts relative separation from culture opens up its potentially emancipatory role. In Jacques Rancires words, this moment of dismantl[ing] correlation between subject matter and mode of representation is described as an aesthetic regime (Rancire, 2006: 32). The emancipatory role of art lies in its potentiality of dis-identication (Rancire, 1992: 61). In other words, art can challenge a culturally established identity between a represented object and a form of this representation. Only from a position that is relatively separate from culture and society can art reect back upon cultural and social forms. On the other side, this relative separation of art and culture can be dismantled through practices that put an equality sign between the two. This, however, does not mean that we return to the original non-differentiated function of art described by Williams. Rather, the emancipatory act of dis-identication is hereby subsumed under a cultural identity. In this case, art is called for simply to produce difference in the form of diversity and diversion. Art and artists are called upon to create an enjoyable difference and at the urban level to rejuvenate and beautify city space. The following is a typical example of how art is called upon to create difference and project identity in spaces which are perceived as being without identity. The exhibition of student paintings is staged at the airport in order to enhance its atmosphere:
Finavia and the Aalto University School of Art and Design are co-hosting an exhibition of student paintings at Helsinki Airport . . . The motifs for the ARTPORT pieces are drawn from the airport. There will be approximately 70 paintings done by 20 different students. Airport Director Juha-Pekka Pystynen of Finavia believes that the exhibition will pique the interest of passengers. The exhibitions are part of Helsinki Airports passenger services and our desire to enhance the airports atmosphere. It also allows us to showcase up and coming Finnish artists. After all, nearly 40,000 passengers pass through the airport every day (Finavia, 2010).
Maro Kriv
Once identied with culture as such, the emancipatory, non-identitarian potential of art evaporates. Such absolute identication of art and culture also plays an important role in the instrumentalization of culture. I will now analyse a specic form of using culture as an instrument of urban planning.
Cultural governmentality
In my analysis of Suvilahti, I suggest using the concept of cultural governmentality to describe a specic form of planning and managing that employs culture and creativity to shape the transformation of obsolete industrial space. The paradoxical nature of such planning and managing, in which the notions of culture and creativity play an instrumental role, is a self-imposed limitation that public authorities place on their own exercise of power. Culture and creativity, as supposedly voluntary forms of self-conduct, are themselves employed as instruments in planning by non-planning and managing by non-managing. Foucault characterizes governmentality as the way in which one conducts the conduct of men (Foucault, 2008: 186). In governmentality, one does not directly conduct the practice of men, but rather what precedes their practice i.e. their conduct. In the words of Margo Huxley, the method of governmentality is to establish taken-for-granted conceptions of what is appropriate, which subjects should engage in what sort of activities, where and when (Huxley, 2002: 145). Importantly, governmentality proceeds by producing certain ideas of self, of what is good and what is valuable: Governmentality is a coalescence of various tactics and strategies for the conduct of conduct practices that dene, shape or have effects in creating particular behaviours and identities within a given space or territory (ibid.: 142). At a political level, Foucault describes governmentality as a paradox of politics dened by an objective to abolish politics (see Foucault, 2008: 185238). It is the method of governing in which individual freedoms are pitched against state bureaucracy, but it is from this bureaucracy itself that initiatives promoting individual freedoms originate. Since the 1990s, the concept of governance has been commonly used in urban studies to describe new entrepreneurial, processual, project-based, multi-actor, multi-level and multi-scalar forms of city governing (Harvey, 1989; Goodwin and Painter, 1996; Le Gals, 1998; Pierre, 1999; Brenner, 2004). However, the concept of governmentality emphasizes that this informal, inclusive, decentralized and participatory model of governing is not simply based on having more responsibilities and more freedom the connotation that governance has increasingly acquired as it has passed into strategies of corporate governance and EU policy documents but rather describes a new form through which power is channelled in society. In the regime of governmentality, the notion of planning refers to renewed role of state and public administration:
planning . . . is the practice of shaping human conduct and acts by material and discursive means. . . . Planning . . . is not only about developing control and steering of processes, but also of shaping the public discourse, its schemes of signication, ways of communication, and on what to communicate about. It is also a matter of dispersing discursive and political power and making interests powerless through tactics, strategies, situations or unchangeable political end-goals (Plger, 2004: 80).
The concept of governmentality enables us to see the projected, functional and instrumental role of the very dispersal of power (see Law-Yone, 2007: 31920) i.e. something that I suggest should be characterized as planning by non-planning. Thus, the critique of too much planning, which was originally put forward by actors from outside of ofcial planning institutions, stems today from these institutions themselves. The concept of governmentality has been employed in diverse contexts: both as a heuristic tool in analysing transformation of specic social spheres, such as housing
(Murdoch, 2004; Cheshire et al., 2009), education (Simons, 2002) or security (De Lint and Virta, 2004), and as an overarching concept of transnational governmentality characterizing rescaling of forms of governing and power organization at a global level (Ferguson and Gupta, 2002). I use the concept cultural governmentality to describe a regime of governmentality in which the notions of culture and creativity are instrumental in planning and projecting social reality. Under cultural governmentality, these notions are not simply used to describe social reality, they are endowed with a performative power and a structure of a self-fullling prophecy (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 2001). Used as instruments for transforming obsolete urban space, the concepts of culture and creativity are above all . . . project[s] that endeavor to create a social reality that [these projects themselves] suggest already exists (Lemke, 2002: 13). Thus, on the one hand, it is said that we live in times of culture and creativity, while, on the other, there is an administrative and planning agenda for culture and creativity. In other words, something that is being promoted is at the same time described as already existing. The problem can be illustrated by the following statement, which attempts to characterize the Agenda 21 for culture:
We live in the age of creativity. Creativity is the core of capability in culture. Traditional models are not feasible any more. Creativity in any sense is an important part of the Agenda 21 for culture in the current post-industrial world which is virtually impacted by the changes in the global culture where top positions are given to the creative industry innovators and representatives. Agenda 21 for culture has to inform a broad range of activities for the strategic development of a city and consolidate a stronger worldwide network of partners (Mickov, 2009: 135).
The unquestioned fact that culture and creativity dene our age is at the same time a result of active discourse that presents this fact as unquestioned. The concept of cultural governmentality describes the form of governing that operates by conating what is and what should be. The discourse that grounds cultural governmentality is not merely a discourse. It is through urban planning that mere words are materialized in specic historical situations and specic places. Through planning, specic concepts such as culture and creativity are put into practice in order to attract a wide range of independent, autonomous and voluntary actors into the process of governing; at the same time, however, a taken-for-granted and unquestioned framework for this governing is reinforced. As Murdoch says:
The governmentality approach indicates that there is more to governmental discourse than only discursive elements: discourses must be materialized in time and space and this process of materialization inevitably requires the assembling of heterogeneous resources in ways that facilitate the dissemination of specic governmentalities (Murdoch, 2004: 52).
Before proceeding further, I should like to clarify my position vis--vis two scholars whose investigations lie on the intersection of culture and governmentality. Tony Bennett writes specically about culture and governmentality in a book chapter of the same name (Bennett, 2002). He is worried that, as the concept of governmentality extends the analysis of governing towards the socially normalized forms of seeing, thinking and being, it may simply overlap with culture. Nonetheless, in his text the notion of culture is limited to its anthropological meaning; the question of how culture becomes an instrument is left untouched. Sharon Zukin, for her part, offers precisely this kind of analysis of culture. Her work (Zukin, 1982; 1995) focuses on various strategies through which culture is understood and utilized as an effective tool of urban development. Although she does not use the term governmentality, her famous notion of culture as a framing process is inspired by Foucaults turning around of the relation between vision and power:
The common element in . . . [cultural] strategies [of economic development] is that they reduce the multiple dimensions and conicts of culture to a coherent visual representation . . .
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Historically, power over a space . . . determines the ability to impose a vision of that space. Many of Michel Foucaults historical speculations reverse that relation and it is that standpoint that I have adopted . . . Often the power to impose a coherent vision of a space enables a group to claim that space. This is a framing process (Zukin, 1995: 271, 279).
However, in contrast to Zukins notion of culture, which is always constituted as a conict between different cultural visions, I understand culture in urban development as being itself a policy instrument that is supposed to produce difference. In the present context, I see Zukins reading of Foucault as inaccurate in two points. First, the vision that frames is not aimed at producing a coherent culture. Rather, it operates through encouraging an ethos of creativity that ultimately results in the production of difference and diversity, not of coherence or sameness. Second, Zukins conict between different visions of space seems to be nonexistent in the face of general acceptance of statements such as we live in the age of creativity. Moreover, there is no questioning of the fact that an obsolete industrial environment should be transformed into cultural use at least not in the case of Suvilahti, which I am now going to analyse.
Suvilahti
The industrial premises of Suvilahti consist of 11 two- to three-storey buildings with an overall oor area of 12,500 m2 (see Figures 2 and 3). Most of the buildings were planned by the architect Selim A. Lindqvist and the engineer Jalmar Castrn and were erected during the years 190911. The two most distinctive buildings in Suvilahti the electric power plant and the gas tower were built at that time. Over the course of the twentieth century continuous transformations, adjustments and additions took place. From the late 1960s, as a consequence of the construction of a new and more powerful power plant at nearby Hanasaari Island (196774), the Suvilahti power plant slowly decreased its operations. It eventually ceased production in 1974. Subsequently, the power plant was partly restored and used for other functions (e.g. as a furniture store). Gas production continued well into the 1990s. As late as 1971 two new gas holders were constructed. The end of industrial production in the Suvilahti area then dates to 1994, when the two gas
Figure 2 Layout of Suvilahti (source: http//:www.suvilahti./info/, adapted by the author)

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Figure 3 Aerial view of Suvilahti (source: photograph by Timo Noko)
holders were torn down only 20 years or so after their construction (see Schulman et al., 2009). Around the same time, in 1993, the Finnish National Board of Antiquities declared the premises at Suvilahti to be nationally signicant cultural built environment (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 6, my translation). Mikael Sundman, the head planner of the Kalasatama project points to 1996 as the year when the City of Helsinki started to look for a new function for the former industrial area of Suvilahti. In 2001 the City Planning Department, with the cooperation of architectural ofce Schulman Oy, drew up a proposal in which the following three uses were suggested for the premises: physical culture halls for football, gymnastics and tness, swimming pool located in the gas tower; cultural production park studios for lm production and toy manufacturing; cultural park space for small creative industries and regular festivals (interview with Mikael Sundman, 15 September 2009; see also Schulman et al., 1999: 22). In the Helsinki Master Plan published in 2002, the premises of Suvilahti were zoned for public services, higher education, environment-friendly activities, housing, and recreation (City of Helsinki Planning Department, 2003a). However, such use was limited by two factors. First, in terms of its architecture and urbanscape, Suvilahti was marked as a culturally and historically signicant area. Accordingly, the development had to protect the value and distinctive features of the area (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 7, my translation). Second, the Master Plan took note of the polluted soil of Suvilahti and its limiting effect on future land use there (City of Helsinki Planning Department, 2003b). In the mid-2000s, after the city refused to grant Helsinki Energy permission to construct a new power plant at the Hanasaari location, several individual members of the Helsinki City Planning Board proposed that the existing Hanasaari power plant should be used for cultural purposes. In 2005 and 2006, Sundman opposed the idea and argued that Suvilahti was more suitable for cultural use. Soon, the new mayor Pajunen (elected in 2005) came to support Sundman as he took an active role in promoting the project of a culture factory in Suvilahti. The two agreed that locating the culture in the Hanasaari power plant would mean having an empty building 50 metres tall solely for cultural purposes and, they asked, whats the point of that? (interview with Sundman, 2009). They argued that the reuse of Hanasaari would be complicated and lead to economic
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catastrophe. According to Sundman, Pajunen repeatedly stated in the Helsinki City Council that using the Hanasaari plant for culture would be idiotic because, in his opinion, culture would be much better placed in Suvilahti (ibid.). Very soon after the Suvilahti project was pushed through the City Council (decision of 21 March 2007), the mayor founded the Suvilahti working group (Suvilahti Tyryhm), whose task was to prepare a study of how the transformation of the Suvilahti area might be organized, nanced and managed. The working group also commissioned the architectural ofce Schulman Oy to prepare a report on the architectural history and current status of the buildings in Suvilahti. An extremely detailed and well-informed, but purely technical document was published in 2009 (Schulman et al., 2009). The working groups nal report, published on 31 October 2007, recommended cultural use as the most desirable strategy for Suvilahtis transformation (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007). Cultural use was also supported by the Helsinki City Board. Moreover, according to the Suvilahti working groups nal report, it is in line with the Helsinki Economic Development Strategy of 2007 (Yritysmynteiseksi, 2007) and its identication of creativity as one of the three poles of economic growth (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 8). At the same time, the heritage value of Suvilahti is emphasized in the Partial Master Plan of 2007 (Helsinki City Planning Department, 2007: 44, 56). There was no major conict in the transformation of Suvilahti to cultural use. Marjatta Raunila, a member of the Suvilahti working group, stated that the process of transition went very smoothly (interview, 15 October 2009). Given the history of the transformation of the Cable Factory, the lack of conict and absence of competing claims for the space of Suvilahti are surprising.
Inuence of the Cable Factory
What is the Cable Factory and did it inuence the planning of Suvilahti? Let me rst briey describe it and the process of its transformation (a detailed analysis can be found in Krivy, 2010). The factory is a single building located in the western part of the Helsinki inner city in the Ruoholahti city district (see Figure 1). It was built in four stages between 1941 and 1954 by the Finnish Cable Factory, which later merged with Nokia. During the 1980s, the city of Helsinki made a decision to shift industrial production away from the city centre. As a consequence, the Cable Factory became obsolete. In the original contract between the city and Nokia, the Cable Factory was to be transferred to the citys ownership and the company was to be compensated. The immense building the Cable Factorys oor area of 49,300 m2 made it one of the largest buildings in Finland at the time was to be divided into smaller units to house public services for the inhabitants of Ruoholahti. In 1989, partly in order to cover costs during the transitional period, Nokia started to rent its spaces to artists and architects. In 1990 tenants organized themselves into the Pro Kaapeli (For the Cable Factory) movement and later resisted city administration plans for the dissection and redevelopment of the factory space. At the centre of the dispute was the factorys largest open space, the 110-metre-long and three-storey-high Sea Cable Hall. While the movement wanted to keep this place undivided, the city argued that there was no practical use for such a large space. There was a lengthy dispute about the future of the factory with Pro Kaapeli and its supporters on one side and the city administration on the other, which led to city leaders eventual acceptance of Pro Kaapelis proposal to keep the building undivided and functioning as a venue for artistic production. In 1992, the real estate organization Kaapelikiinteist was created and put in charge of the Cable Factory management. Soon, the Cable Factory gained a reputation as a success story (Pennanen, 2002: 124; Eurocult21, 2004: 1920; interview with Raunila, 2009). Suvilahti policy documents and interviews I conducted made frequent references to the Cable Factory as an inspiration and powerful model (e.g. interviews with Simo Freese, architect responsible for the renovation of the Suvilahti buildings, 24 November 2009 and with
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Birgitta Rickman, head of the Economic Planning Division, the Economic and Planning Centre, City of Helsinki, and member of the Suvilahti working group, 30 September 2009). The mayor of Helsinki described Suvilahti as a Cable Factory of the East (interview with Pekka Timonen, cultural director of the City of Helsinki and member of the Suvilahti working group, 3 December 2009), and the Suvilahti working group report states: the Cable Factory brand is widely known (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 13, my translation). The Partial Master Plan of 2007 species that Suvilahti is particularly suitable for cultural activities in the style of the Cable Factory (City of Helsinki Planning Department, 2007: 41, my translation). Since 2008 Suvilahtis management has been included under the umbrella of Kaapelikiinteist, the same managing organization that runs the Cable Factory. Hence, the planning of Suvilahti appears to be an attempt to imitate the Cable Factory model. When I asked the planner Mikael Sundman to compare the Cable Factory and the Suvilahti, he told me thats the same story (interview, 2009). But the nature of the inuence of the former on the latter is more complex. When I further asked Mikael Sundman to specify the form of the inuence of the Cable Factory on the Suvilahti project, he replied no, no, no, no, [there was] no impact at all. I thought there might have been some misunderstanding, so I asked him again, and he again replied that we didnt need any inspiration from the Cable Factory, I didnt mention the Cable Factory during the process and that he didnt think it should have been similar (interview, 2009). How can we explain this apparent confusion? I suggest that the Suvilahti project was structured not simply by the direct inuence of the Cable Factory as a success story, but by its indirect inuence on the understanding of culture within the city administration. In particular, the unintended consequence of Pro Kaapelis struggle to preserve the Cable Factory was an objectivation of culture as a viable instrument for the regeneration of obsolete urban spaces. If the interpretation of the Cable Factory case as a success story contributed to the establishment of a pro-culture climate, the planning of Suvilahti as a culture factory was strongly positioned within this climate. Apropos the idea of culturalizing Suvilahti, Pekka Timonen, the head of the Cultural Department of the city of Helsinki, stated that he arrived independently at this idea, but talked openly to people and realized that other people had been thinking along the same lines (interview, 2009). Among them were people from the Department of Urban Planning (including Mikael Sundman) and the mayor Pajunen: These discussions were coming to his ears too . . . and he liked the idea as well (ibid.). The case of the Cable Factory might be only one amongst many factors through which culture has been instrumentalized in the context of Helsinki urban planning. We could also mention the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, the Helsinki Cultural Capital Year in 2000, the citys status as the World Capital of Design in 2012, not to mention the global boom in creative-city consultants who have repeatedly visited and lectured in Helsinki during recent decades. But the specicity of the Cable Factory that I want to stress in the present analysis is twofold. On one hand, in the context of Helsinki, it was the rst signicant case of transforming obsolete built environment by means of something that was later interpreted as a cultural use. On the other, the transformation did not start as a planning project or an urban development strategy, but as a gradual, piecemeal and bottom-up process whose objectives and outcomes were uncertain at that time. In the case of the Cable Factory, the emancipation of obsolete space from its culturally accepted mode of representation dened the political role of the Pro Kaapeli artists movement in the factorys transformation. I have argued elsewhere (Krivy, 2010) that this transformation did not proceed by reclaiming an identity for the place. Rather, the movement worked with the idea of empty obsolete space. Whereas there was unanimous agreement on the need to redevelop the Cable Factory towards a new post-industrial use, Pro Kaapeli dismantled this form of representation by saying that the empty space did not have to be redeveloped. Rather than redevelopment and the establishment of a projected new identity as a culture factory, the collective work of the Pro Kaapeli could
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be characterized as alteration preserving the non-identity of the empty, obsolete space of the factory. In the practice of alteration, empty, obsolete space undergoes piecemeal, gradual, and continuous change, but no denite identity is projected for the place. Alteration is never nished and there is a great deal of uncertainty about its outcomes (Scott, 2008). Whereas uncertainty characterized the practice of the Pro Kaapeli movement during the years 198991, the Suvilahti project is grounded in the certainty of its cultural effects, i.e. in its projected identity: Suvilahti will become a well-known and respected cultural community and a pleasant place to visit (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 10, my translation). There is a signicant difference between the uncertain interventions of the Pro Kaapeli movement in the Cable Factory and the Suvilahti project, where culture has been employed as a planning instrument and the certainty of its positive effects is proudly announced. The conict between the Pro Kaapeli movement and the city authorities would not happen nowadays the alternative proposals formulated by the Pro Kaapeli are now praised and recognized as culture by the city authorities themselves. Signicantly, whereas the Cable Factory was listed as a heritage monument only after or, as a consequence of (interview with Simo Freese, 2009) the involvement of the Pro Kaapeli movement and the transfer of the ownership of the Cable Factory to Kaapelikiinteist, the National Board of Antiquities had already declared the premises of Suvilahti to be a nationally signicant cultural built environment (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 6, my translation) in 1993, that is, before the project for Suvilahtis transformation. Hence, in terms of the built environment, the project is largely restorative as Simo Freese, the head architect in charge of the transformation of Suvilahti, put it: functions have to t the buildings, not the other way around, because the buildings are protected (interview, 2009). This is the tone of the arguments behind the cultural transformation of Suvilahti: Cultural use is justied from the point of view of the conservation of buildings, because the basic standards can be achieved without drastic modications (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 9, my translation). The emergence of a regime in which culture is recognized as an instrument of urban planning was an unintended consequence of the Pro Kaapeli movements ght for the preservation of the Cable Factory and of its eventual success. The inuence of the Cable Factory is not manifested simply as case-to-case inuence, but as inuence through the production of a consensus of people thinking along the same lines that culture is good, important and useful. The instrumental role of the culturalization of obsolete industrial spaces lies in the planned nature of the effects that culture is expected to mobilize. Later in the article, I shall analyse this culturalization using the notion of cultural governmentality. However, prior to doing so, I would like to show how the planning of culture in Suvilahti is related to the planning of the surrounding areas. On one side, the role of culture is . . . to keep [the original] architecture (interview with Freese, 2009), that is, cultural use is embraced because it can be easily accommodated with requirements to restore Suvilahti into its original condition. On the other side, cultural use valorizes Suvilahti premises by giving them a specic sociospatial function within the wider urban context and, in particular, in the context of the planning project for the transformation of Kalasatama.
Suvilahti as a part of Kalasatama redevelopment and as an enclave
The cultural function, which was envisaged as being provided by Suvilahti, was conceived by the City Planning Department as an integral part of the Kalasatama redevelopment, covering a former industrial harbour and adjoining areas. The planning competition began in 2011 and the project is timetabled to last until 2035. The area of land to be redeveloped is 177 ha, bordering 5 km of the shoreline. The overall planned oor area is 1,350,000 m2 and the new district is expected to attract 18,000 new inhabitants and 10,000 new workplaces.
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Kalasatama is one of the largest urban planning projects in Helsinki in recent decades, and it has started with the transformation of Suvilahti: When we build new areas, we . . . come there with culture (interview with Birgitta Rickman, 2009). The working group report compares the future effects of Suvilahti on the district of Kalasatama to the inuence of Cable Factory on the district of Ruoholahti (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 4). However little sense the reference to the Cable Factory makes it is precisely the lack of any alleged effect of the Cable Factory on Ruoholahti that is often mentioned (e.g. in interviews with Marjatta Raunila, 30 September 2009 and with Pia Ilonen, head architect and founding member of the Pro Kaapeli movement, 11 July 2007) the valuation of culture in Suvilahti is dened in terms of its external effects on Kalasatama, which it is supposed to affect in a positive way. Strong cultural forces are supposed to radiate from Suvilahti to Kalasatama, having a variety of inuences ranging from environmental art to construction development (interview with Sundman, 2009). At the same time, documents and interviews present Suvilahti as a differential enclave. What is being staged here is a contrast between an ordinary city and cultural space that is different. Pekka Timonen says of Suvilahti: Its a very nice area. When the city gets built around it, it will be like a village inside the city. Its got a nice texture (interview, 2009). Similarly, Simo Freese states: There is a big road through Srnainen and over the bridge to Kulosaari [see Figure 3]. It is not so nice, it is windy and there are lots of cars. Suvilahti is in the middle of this boring road and when you pass through it, it is like going through a village (interview, 2009). Celebration of the beauty of Suvilahti is a signicant rhetorical strategy in the project for its transformation. Simo Freese stresses the restorative dimension of the project by repeatedly pointing out the uniqueness and specicity of the original architecture of Selim A. Lindqvist and Jalmar Castrn. The very good architecture, beautiful Jugendstil, and very beautiful vaulted ceilings are emphasized (interview with Freese, 2009). The interviewees also stress that the gasholders make this one of only two remaining locations with gasholders in Finland, and that the buildings represent the rst example in Finland of the Hennebique system of reinforced-concrete construction (interviews with Sundman, 2009, Timonen, 2009, Freese, 2009). The uniqueness and value of the factory buildings is further asserted by claiming that they contribute to the international prestige of Helsinki (you could easily nd those buildings in Vienna; it is a very similar style to Otto Wagner or Josef Olbrich, interview with Freese, 2009) or even their international primacy (you wont nd any industrial buildings in Europe of the same quality from that particular time, interview with Sundman, 2009). Such statements about the beauty and architectural uniqueness of Suvilahti elevate it into a different space, a nice texture in the middle of a boring road. This is one dimension of the metaphor of Suvilahti as a village or an enclave. Its other aspect is the idea of the future community of Suvilahti as a living organism, an autonomous, creative, diverse and self-managed community of cultural producers: Suvilahti will be a living organism, it has to be that kind of structure, it is not governed by the city. . . . Big architects often forget the idea of a living organism . . . [that] people can really create and inuence themselves (interview with Timonen, 2009). It is said that the city should not interfere with a living organism the notion contrasts rigid, bureaucratic, top-down planning with the idea of a spontaneous and bottom-up-organized community of users dened simply by their unencumbered individual creativity: The goal is to create an inspiring, creative community in the area whose membership neither obligates nor binds, but instead offers the opportunity of working together with others at Suvilahti (quoted in ENCATC, 2011: 7). And this concept [of the living organism] is important for all spaces linked to the arts, culture and creativity (interview with Timonen, 2009). Hence, on one side, Suvilahti is portrayed as an enclave of beautiful and unique architecture housing a unique cultural and creative community a village and a living organism. On the other, Suvilahti is as an integral part of the massive planning project for Kalasatama redevelopment. How do these two aspects of Suvilahti match up?
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Pekka Timonen (interview, 2009) states: The area needs character, it needs culture, it needs this kind of buzz. New developed areas need to have character and depth. This kind of function for [Suvilahti] also brings and creates value for the whole area around. Hence, Suvilahti is conceived as an enclave of difference, yet the function of this enclave is to radiate difference around itself and inuence the surrounding ordinary, or even boring, city:
[Suvilahti] is an asset . . . it must be a bonus, something that creates a bonus for the whole area. When it is developed and functioning, I think people will nd it an oasis, an island, which is a bit different from the things around it, which is always good. The cultural resources for the area are provided by Suvilahti a cultural dynamo (interview with Timonen, 2009). For the city, it is very good; for people, the citizens, it is much better. It will be a really nice place and a phenomenon for Helsinki. It is already now . . . but it will be much more in the future . . . I hope it will serve people from Kalasatama, I hope it will be very popular. Without Suvilahti, Kalasatama would be a quite boring place (interview with Freese, 2009).
This tells us lot about the relation between planning and non-planning. With regard to Suvilahti, paradoxically, planners present themselves as not really planning and city managers as not really managing. At the same time, the traditional role of planning does not disappear the planning of Kalasatama can be compared to the non-planning of Suvilahti, the trafc around Suvilahti is well-planned (the good accessibility of the site is repeatedly praised, see e.g. Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 9), even the heritage protection of Suvilahti can be taken as a form of planning. How should we then understand the non-planning of Suvilahti? My thesis is that the non-planning is a specic form of planning for the cultural transformation of obsolete industrial spaces. Planners and managers value the non-planned character of culture for its potential to generate difference that is, difference in heritage value (the regeneration and conservation of the original Suvilahti architecture), economic value (the valorization of land in connection to the Kalasatama project), and societal wellbeing (diversion and enjoyment for visitors and for future inhabitants of Kalasatama). In the next subsection I analyse this process as cultural governmentality.
Cultural governmentality
During the interview with Mikael Sundman (15 September 2009), after I inadvertently revealed that I was not professionally trained in architecture, he explained in a patronizing way that I must (sic!) understand that things do not go from A to B to C as planned, that urban planning is extremely complex and that everything constantly changes. He further stated that there was no real logic or real planning in transforming Suvilahti for cultural purposes; it was only that one thing happened and another thing happened and then, suddenly and without real planning, it was converted into cultural purpose. However, the two things should not be confused. The fact that things do not proceed as planned, means neither that they are not planned, nor that there is no logic behind them. In spite of everything, what is planned, or at least expected, is the effects of culture. In Sundmans words:
We do not really have any clear idea what the inuence of that area [Suvilahti] will be in the end. But, at the same time, we are condent that it will have a huge impact because we are starting a new area with 18,000 inhabitants, starting with a metro station and cultural centre, we know the impact will be huge we dont want to give any answer, we know there are strong forces in Suvilahti that should radiate and inuence, but we dont know how . . . In Suvilahti, there would certainly, certainly, certainly be an impact on Kalasatama (interview, 2009).
In what sense will culture be employed in the Suvilahti transformation? For example, Sundman says that they think about how to give a building process provisional streets, shelters, cranes and how they should have artistic quality, how to give that artistic quality
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to the whole building process of the area, which should be a part of the mental map of Helsinki inhabitants (interview, 2009). Hence, there is planning qua planning of this impact, that is, planning for cultural diversity and diversion, as well as for the artistic quality of the cranes. In other words, the planners say that there is no real logic behind planning and the managers say they do not really manage and rather let things happen. The imperative is dont plan too much (interview with Timonen, 2009). The role of the city is enabling, it only enables things to happen . . . it does not interfere as a structure too much (ibid.). Hence, the task of an urban manager is to keep interventions at a minimum: I dont call the City Hall and they dont call me and that keeps everyone happy (ibid.). The role of the citys bureaucratic structure is to govern in a non-bureaucratic way, delegating management to organizations such as the Kaapelikiinteist, which is not bureaucratic, it is not an extension of a bureaucratic system, it is an independent body that works very closely with people and its customers. And the city has to enable it (ibid.). The position and role of the Kaapelikiinteist as the managing organization of Suvilahti is crucial in understanding the planning of the transformation of this obsolete space. The organization is a city-owned, non-prot, real estate company, in which the board of directors consists mostly of established and well-regarded artists. The companys operating prot uctuates around zero. Kaapelikiinteists revenues come from rents on long-term and short-term leases to artists, independent cultural organizations, event organizers and private companies. There are specic rates of rent for specic types of tenants individual artists and startup companies pay the lowest rents (interview with Rickman, 2009; interview with Timo Hrml, head of the Real Estate Department, City of Helsinki, member of the Suvilahti working group, 29 September 2009). As a major operational strategy, the revenues from rents are more or less fully reinvested in renovations to the buildings the investment outlook for the following years is around 1 million annually (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 13). There is no external funding from the city. The involvement of public money is limited to the initial soil cleaning and HVAC renovation nanced by the Helsinki City Real Estate Department. Kaapelikiinteist and its specic model of managing a culture factory was born in 1991 out of the struggle between the Pro Kaapeli movement and city institutions over the Cable Factory. In the present case, it was the advice of the working group to transfer the ownership and management of Suvilahti to Kaapelikiinteist. The working group chose this course of action after considering at least two other options to sell the buildings to an independent private body or to keep them in the ownership of the city. The working group based its recommendation on Kaapelikiinteists 16 years of know-how in renovation and self-operating cultural management, its capacity for an immediate investment and comparative cost-efciency of this solution (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 1213). The recommendation of the working group came into effect on 1 January 2008, with an increase of Kaapelikiinteists turnover from 3.5 million in 2007 to 4.3 million in 2008. The absence of direct cultural programming in Suvilahti is a key aspect in its planning by non-planning. Instead, programming is done by way of careful consideration and selection of long-term tenants and short-term events. Necessarily, their contribution to the spirit of the place thus plays a key role in the process of selection: It is important to enhance the spirit of neighbourhood so that the tenants might nd ways to co-operate and also look at their activity from the viewpoint of a customer coming to . . . Suvilahti (Creative Metropoles, 2011: 106) and also: Finding the right users and the ability to reconcile the wishes of a larger whole are essential factors for success. Diversity of user proles enables active use in all seasons and throughout the whole week (Suvilahti Tyryhm, 2007: 10, my translation). As the demand for space in Suvilahti is three times higher than the amount available (interview with Stuba Nikula, managing director of the Kaapelikiinteist Oy, 11 September 2009), there is no need to attract new actors they come by themselves. Although the role of the Helsinki City Cultural Department is important due to the fact that many of the Suvilahti tenants are
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supported by its grants, it has no direct inuence on the cultural programming of Suvilahti this is fully dependent on the expected creativity of Suvilahtis tenants and an indeniteness . . . that needs to be maintained (Creative Metropoles, 2011: 106).
Cultural governmentality and the planning instrument of temporary use
The institutional arrangement that underlies the planning of Suvilahtis transformation strategic self-limitation on the part of planning authorities, the outsourcing of development, uncertainty and indeniteness of use shares many similarities with the recently popularized planning arrangement for interim or temporary use (Hentil and Lindborg, 2003; Blumner, 2006; Overmeyer, 2007). Similarities exist also insofar as culture is the predominant type of use involved where use is interim or temporary (Hentil and Lindborg, 2003). Interim use is dened as the temporary activation of vacant land or buildings with no foreseeable development demand . . . use of a site is, by agreement with the owner, time-limited . . . interim use is permitted until an investor emerges. Interim use does not change the long-term zoning or land use for a site (Blumner, 2006). The instrument of temporary use is similarly dened by the fact that the use is limited in time (Hentil and Lindborg, 2003: 3). Interim and temporary uses have been understood as harbouring social, cultural and political alternatives (Doron, 2000; Wilson, 2000; Lehtovuori, 2010) to speculative urban developments. More recent claims, however, undermine such a view. The advocates of temporary and interim uses themselves claim that city ofcials perceive interim use as a means to attract residents and businesses to the city by enhancing its image as a creative center (Blumner, 2006, my emphasis) and that the additional value connected with temporary uses is the potential of forming innovative milieus . . ., creating synergy . . . and therefore improving the competition capacity of a city (Hentil and Lindborg, 2003: x, my emphasis). By this means non-planned, temporary use as an end in itself as exemplied in the case of the Pro Kaapeli movement and the Cable Factory is transformed into a strategy (means) to obtain a specic objective (additional value). But the deep contradiction at the heart of the temporary uses do they stand for an alternative to speculative boosterism or for a new form of speculative boosterism? (see e.g. Shaw, 2005) points still to an uncertainty (potential) regarding the immediate translation of temporary uses into economic growth. In fact, the perceived additional value of temporary uses does not lie in their temporariness per se but in the diversity, spontaneity and indeterminacy of the cultural activities that tend to be generated by their temporariness something that Walter Benjamin characterized as a diversion in the tedium of urban life (Benjamin, 1983: 11n). The solution that is attempted in the planning of Suvilahti, then, is to make the activities generated by temporary uses permanent the change of the local land use plan is expected in the near future (Freese, 2009). The planning objective is to stimulate Suvilahti into a place of creative uncertainty, but without any uncertainty about its socio-urban function there is a certainty about the added value and positive effects of Suvilahti. Once again, the crucial difference to the Cable Factory should be stressed. The transformation of the Cable Factory started as a temporary use and only a conict led to the change of the local land use plan of the site and a making permanent of the interim use. In Suvilahti, the transformation mimics the content generated by interim/ temporary uses, but the use is made permanent and changes in local land use plan are anticipated from the start.
Cultural governmentality and cultivation
The lack of conict, and thus also the possibility of employing non-planned cultural practices as a planning instrument, can be explained by the performative power of the notion of culture. The situation is merely described, but, at the same time, the importance
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accorded to the fact that things should be as they are provides the ground for its actual planning: The rise of the creative industries and culture in Helsinki is now clear for everybody people see from the economic point of view, from the cultural point of view, from the city development point of view, that it is very important now for the city of Helsinki, and the wellbeing and the success of Helsinki, so we want to encourage this movement (interview with Timonen, 2009). Besides the tautological statement that culture is important from the cultural point of view, it is further claimed that culture is accepted [sic!] by the people to a very large extent, people see culture as a vital element in the city. This is very culture-oriented city . . . Helsinkis lifestyle, wellbeing and economic development are all related to cultural creativity (ibid.). If there is general agreement about the positive effects of culture, culture can be immediately translated into a planning instrument without planning the culture itself. Employing culture as an instrument in generating wellbeing and economic development can go hand in hand with the spontaneity and autonomy of cultural actors. Pekka Timonen characterizes Suvilahtis managing organization Kaapelikiinteist as only a gardener who makes sure that the sun is shining [sic!], that grass is growing and that weeds are taken out (interview, 2009). At the risk of overinterpreting, I think this slip of the tongue is quite revealing. Extending the parallel, while the Simmels axiological gardener cultivated the tree of culture and the anthropological gardeners might have developed a variety of different understandings of a cultivated tree, the present gardener actually harbours hopes of cultivating the sun itself. This gardener does not want to plan his garden he only enables everything to grow by itself, ensuring that every single plant has enough space for its personal development and that there is a rich diversity of plants but he does aim to plan the wider ecosystem. As far as culture is concerned, the planner and administrator do not want to dene what it is, they only want to enable the creativity of individual cultural producers. Yet this retreat from a denition of culture goes hand in hand with a conception of culture as an instrument capable of inuencing the external environment at the social and urban levels. Thus, the cultivating role of culture in Suvilahti can be understood as follows. On the one hand, the autonomy of cultural producers is granted through the delegation of Suvilahtis management to non-prot, city-owned real estate organization (Kaapelikiinteist), in which artists dominate the board of directors. The organization cultivates the built environment of Suvilahti it carries out renovations in line with the heritage protection required by the National Board of Antiquities. The cultural output of Suvilahti is regulated only by careful selection of tenants, governed by an ideal of a diverse community. On the other hand, the decision to hand cultural planning over to Kaapelikiinteist is based on a rm belief that the diversity of cultural output generated by Suvilahti tenants will cultivate the surrounding space of the planned district of Kalasatama. The autonomy given to Suvilahtis artists and cultural producers is perceived as a non-plan solution that will secure thriving cultural spontaneity and diversity. This is what planning authorities understand as culture and it is within this notion of culture that we can understand the strategy of planning Suvilahti as a cultivating agent for Kalasatama.
Conclusion
Throughout the Suvilahti-related documents, plans, decisions, and decision-makers rhetoric, culture is shaped as a powerful instrument capable of moulding its social and spatial environment. In urban planning, the instrumental role of culture lies in its capacity to produce a difference in urban space. What does this mean? On one side, the projected identity of Suvilahti, that of a culture factory, is itself imagined as constituting an enclave of difference. The selection of tenants by the Kaapelikiinteist real estate organization, the owner and the manager of Suvilahtis
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transformation, is governed by the idea of diversity and mixture: they think about these mixtures of different kind of users (interview with Freese, 2009). The future community of Suvilahti is characterized as a living organism a spontaneous community of independent artists and cultural producers creating buzz. Suvilahti is also perceived as different from the surrounding city. Suvilahti, which is in the middle of [a] boring road (ibid.) is praised for its beautiful industrial architecture. Suvilahti has received a heritage protection since 1993 and culture is understood as the best instrument of regenerating and conserving the perceived uniqueness of Suvilahti. On the other side, Suvilahti, as a cultural enclave, is expected to radiate positive difference to the surrounding areas. Suvilahti plays a key role in planning and transformation of the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama into a modern waterfront. It is expected that Suvilahtis culture will generate difference in the form of a socioeconomic value for the surrounding areas: without Suvilahti, Kalasatama could be quite a boring place (ibid.). In this sense, culture as an urban planning instrument can be characterized by a specic combination of the axiological and anthropological notions of culture. With regard to the former, culture is grasped as an ideal to be pursued; with regard to the latter, it is understood as a description of existing differences. The instrumentalization of culture, as analysed in the case of Suvilahti, can be then dened as a process in which culture-as-difference becomes an ideal to be pursued and employed in planning for social, economic and spatial difference. A shaping inuence on Suvilahti has been traced back to the transformation of the Cable Factory and its subsequent presentation as a success story, which created a consensus that culture is good and that it is the best instrument for transforming obsolete industrial space. The Pro Kaapeli movement never proposed any cultural identity for the factory, but operated by gradual and uncertain alterations without a denite plan. However, the growing subsequent fame of the building as a culture factory led to urban planners and managers recognition of culture as an instrument of urban planning and managing. This instrument is now being employed in the planning of Suvilahtis transformation. In the concept of cultural governmentality I have described a specic form of governing the transformation of Suvilahti, in which urban planners and managers present themselves as deliberately minimizing their measures and interventions. I have shown that, in spite of this rhetoric, planning does not disappear; it only changes its objective: the promotion of non-planned practices becomes itself a new form of planning. What are planned in the case of Suvilahti are the instrumental effects of voluntary and non-planned cultural practices on obsolete urban space.
Maro Kriv (maros.krivy@helsinki.), Department of Social Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Snellmaninkatu 10, Helsinki 00014, Finland.
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The Use of Tne Notion Culture in Transforming Industrial Spaces

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International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01178.x

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

Two concepts of culture

Culture, planning and urban space

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

Creativity and culture

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

Art and culture

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

Figure 2 Layout of Suvilahti (source: http//:www.suvilahti./info/, adapted by the author)

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

Figure 3 Aerial view of Suvilahti (source: photograph by Timo Noko)

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

The use of culture in transforming industrial space in Finland

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