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Steering clear of politics: local virtues in Helsinki's design activism Eeva Be

Steering clear of politics: local virtues in Helsinki's design activism Eeva Berglund1 Independent scholar, Helsinki, Finland Abstract Practical projects around the world are exploring and prefiguring ecologically feasible futures. The ideas informing these initiatives are familiar from degrowth discourses. But particularly where activists hail from the professional middle-classes of wealthy cities - architects, designers and other 'creatives' in Helsinki for example - they risk being dismissed by the media as well as by academics as vacuous life-style experimenters. Looking at Finland, the sense that this activity is not truly political or transformative can be further enhanced by activists' own reluctance to enter into explicitly political debate and their preference for discussing futures in the neutral language of science. Connecting today's situation to precursors in the 1960s, however, we can see how these local projects are embedded in local political culture, including a Finnish tendency to play up scientific rationality as a tool for managing collective affairs. This contrast with many other degrowth discourses shows the significance of local histories in influencing the space available for people to work out alternatives to the status quo. Keywords: social movements; Finland; urban/DIY activism; design Résumé Dans le monde entier, des projets pratiques essayent d'explorer et de préfigurer un avenir écologiquement viable. Les idées informant ces initiatives sont familières aux discours de décroissance. Mais en particulier lorsque les activistes viennent de classes moyennes professionnelles des villes riches – des architectes, des designers et d'autres créateurs à Helsinki, par exemple - ils risquent d'être rejetées par les médias, ainsi que par les académiques, jugées comme venant des expérimentateurs de style de vie vide. En prenant la Finlande comme exemple, le sens que cette activité n'est ni politique ni transformative peut être renforcée par la réticence des activistes à d'entrer dans le débat politique ainsi que par leur préférence de discuter d'un avenir dans le langage neutre de la science. En connectant l'actuelle situation à celle des précurseurs des années 1960, nous pouvons, cependant, voir comment ces projets locaux sont intégraux à la culture politique locale, y compris la tendance finlandaise à exagérer la rationalité scientifique comme un outil de la gestion des affaires collectives. Ce contraste avec d'autres discours de décroissance montre l'importance des histoires locales pour influencer l'espace disponible qui permettent aux gens d'inventer d'autres possibles statu quo. Mot clés: mouvements sociaux, Finlande, activisme / bricolage urbain, conception Resumen Diversos proyectos prácticos en el mundo están explorando y prefigurando futuros ecológicamente viables. Las ideas informando estas iniciativas son reconocidas en los discursos acerca del decrecimiento. Pero cuando los activistas proceden de una clase media profesional y, en particular, de las ciudades ricas – por ejemplo los arquitectos, diseñadores y otros ″creativos" en Helsinki—ellos corren el riesgo de ser rechazados por los medios de comunicación y por los académicos como experimentadores superficiales, jugando con estilos de vida. En cuanto a Finlandia, la sensación de que esta actividad no es transformativa ni verdaderamente política puede ser fortalecida por la resistencia de los activistas a entablar un debate político y por su preferencia de usar el idioma neutral de la ciencia para discutir acerca de los futuros. Sin embargo, al conectar esta situación a sus precursoras en los sesentas, podemos ver como estos proyectos locales están 1 Dr. Eeva Berglund, Independent scholar, Helsinki, Finland. Email: eeva.berglund "at" helsinki.fi. Web: https://eevabee.wordpress.com. Thanks to all the people in Helsinki who have lived with my questioning over the years, including the Suomenlinna 1968 interviewees and Jukka Noponen, and to Elina Alatalo, Susan Paulson and Lisa Gezon. This is the eight article in Lisa L. Gezon and Susan Paulson (eds.) 2017. "Degrowth, culture and power", Special Section of the Journal of Political Ecology, 24: 425-466. Berglund Steering clear of politics Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 24, 2017 567 incrustados en la cultura política local, esto incluye una tendencia finlandesa a reproducir la racionalidad científica como una herramienta para gestionar asuntos colectivos. El contraste con otros discursos de decrecimiento presenta la importancia de las historias locales para influir en los espacios disponibles para elaborar alternativas al estatus quo. Palabras clave: movimientos sociales, Finlandia; activismo / DIY urbana, diseño 1. Designing better futures in 'tiny social movements' My window onto degrowth is the mostly unspectacular practical work of small groups of people who are prefiguring ecologically feasible futures and popularizing alternative, if vague, visions of a future normality outside the growth paradigm. All around the world people are seeking to make change through decentralized activities that go by many names: DIY-urbanism, urban experimentation, tactical urbanism, prototyping, urban commoning, design activism and so on. More and more municipalities encourage such citizen-directed and world-improving projects, but to assume that this activity is about seeking alternatives to the politics of economic growth would be misleading. Its role in wider socio-economic structures is always context-specific and often contradictory. The media and even academics have dismissed it as utopian. From the point of view of many of those involved, however, what is utopian (or at least outdated) is the mainstream habit of seeing economic growth and so-called consumer confidence as indications of progress. The future, they feel, cannot possibly recapitulate the resource-destructive present and recent past. The focus here is on Helsinki, where degrowth is one strand within a family of ideas gaining traction as capitalist normality persistently falls prey to multiple crises and manifold critiques. Working at small scales, more focused on socio-technical change than on political ideology or economic critique - let alone violent revolution – Helsinki's diffuse and sometimes tentative projects do not quite add up to a social movement as conventionally defined, but they are, to borrow the words of activist and writer Pauliina Seppälä to whom I return below, recognizable as "tiny social movements" (Seppälä 2012). She characterizes these as born of "random" ideas often built up with the help of social media but picking up on current social issues "already out there." Articulating "emotions and positions" around these, participation offers a "medium with which to promote social and cultural change" (Seppälä 2012: 71). I see this voluntary effort less as resistance than as survival-oriented, understood in the broadest terms. It is an insistent yet sometimes complicated imperative to "do something," what Gwynn Williams has dubbed the "imperative of action" (Williams 2008: 72, quoted in Demmer and Hummel 2016) so familiar to ethnographers of socio-ecological movements. Political tensions of middle-classness Helsinki's tiny social movements develop alongside ordinary urban life, often among people who are not the most vulnerable or marginalized. They can be seen as the political descendants of Green critics who, for decades, have protested against exhausting environmental goods, but more than their precursors, current actors are also frustrated with the exhaustion and injustices of work life (Koivulaakso et al. 2010, see also Brennan 2000). The result is a critique of economic growth that is recognizably of the wealthy North and sometimes explicitly informed by degrowth thinking (Demaria et al. 2013) but is often vague about political purposes. A local peculiarity that I shall highlight is Finnish activists' enthusiasm for science. I have even heard the claim, made with no sense of irony, that we Finns are better placed than most to access truth through science. Meanwhile a style of critique does flourish that ridicules this discourse of scientific hubris, as well its frequent corollary, the notion that Finland is somehow less vulnerable to technological risks than other places. The critique is often made through art2 and popular music, but also in writing (in English see Kalliala et al. 2011). Of course, activism in Helsinki is far from homogenous. Many groups present themselves as radical, some clearly subscribe to techno-fixes that are compatible with green growth while 2 Return of the atom, the documentary film by Mika Taanila and Jussi Eerola released in 2015, is an excellent example, training a very ethnographic and nuanced lens on the nuclear community of Eurajoki, site of the first nuclear power plant to be commissioned in the west since Chernobyl. Berglund Steering clear of politics Journal of Political Ecology Vol. 24, 2017 568 others vehemently oppose these. In any case people are often articulate about the shortcomings of other groups' or, indeed, their own, politics. However, as in some recent waves of protest around the world that have been criticized for pragmatism and rejecting explicit ideological programs (Taylor 2013), Helsinki's activists are sometimes dismissed (or worse) as vacuous life-style experimenters. Disproportionate numbers of those involved have design and architectural backgrounds, and they easily conform to the image of the post-industrial economy's labor force, the "creatives." And although activists in Helsinki are often celebrated for their initiative, both in the media and in academia, there have been suggestions that their progressive-sounding rhetoric masks what are actually the regressive politics of people who can afford to down-shift, to embrace post-material values or toy with lower-class tastes, and so on. In the pejorative populist speech that has increased in Finland in recent years, activism becomes associated with naïve world-improving efforts and a putatively unnatural tolerance for (cultural) difference. Such uploads/Geographie/ steering-clear-of-politics-local-virtues-in-helsinki-x27-s-design-activism.pdf