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There's Paul Auster's New York, Woody Allen's Manhattan, Hemingway's Paris - and Aki Kaurismäki's Paris. When he was making La Vie bohème (1992), the Finnish film director Aki Kaurismäki found sufficiently 'authentic' and shabby surroundings in the Malakoff district of Paris. He filmed The Man without a Past (2002) on Helsinki's unkempt shoreline. It will soon perhaps be history. The city's decision-makers have ambitious construction plans. Signe Brander's century-old photographs of Helsinki (see pages 131-139), now collected together in a book, show a city that has not completely disappeared, but the profundity of change is pondered by both the Helsinki journalist Hannu Marttila and the urban sociologist Pasi Mäenpää. The city is many cities historically, architecturally and socially, but above all a place for living and a seat of experience. I myself am a native of Helsinki; over the decades, the city of my childhood has changed radically. I dare not even think about buildings that have been demolished and on whose site new ones have been built. As I child, I lived in southern Helsinki, by the sea. In one city block there used to be four dairies, a bakery, two groceries, a chemist's, a stationer and cobbler's, and round the corner three butchers. They no longer exist. They have been replaced by interior design stores, advertising agencies, antique shops and a beauty salon. My aged parents, who still live in my childhood home, have to walk a long way to buy bread and milk. The desirability of the area and the rise in prices of flats have changed the nature of the district. No workers live even in the side streets any more; they have been replaced by wealthy, youngish white-collar people. I do not know where they buy their food. Social change can been traced through both property prices and the services on offer. When the old-fashioned 'bar' - in Finland this means a place that sells not alcohol but stale coffee, withered Danish pastries and perhaps mild beer - disappears, it is replaced by a café specialising in different coffee varieties, and fashion is making the area ready for take-off. Pitkäsilta - the Long Bridge - which leads from south to north, once divided the patrician areas, the city's monumental and commercial centre, from the workers' homes and work-places. The length of the bridge was symbolic; now it has shortened. Workers' flats and fine old residential buildings interest young, academic small families. I have 'proletarianised' myself there, far from my childhood home, but even my current neighbourhood is changing rapidly. When the scrap dealer was evicted from downstairs, the space was renovated for a design office. In new residential areas, attempts are made to cultivate social diversity by building municipal rental apartments, homes for old people, flats for students and properties for sale. In old areas, the market dictates. It is saddening. Iris's stationer's has disappeared from my block. The old cobbler and the ancient clock- and goldsmith are struggling. Many students live in my building, but there are still old people, too. The block has a life of its own, conversation and mutual aid, but for how long? The city is a nest of cities, because one thinks of one's immediate surroundings as home. In Paris an old woman was interviewed who had never left her own district. Why should she? She had around her her shops, her post office, her bank, her friends and her acquaintances.
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