Espoon Keskus

I am not very proud to admit that I had quite a few preconceptions of Espoon Keskus, or rather about Espoo in general, before visiting Espoon Keskus. They had mainly to do with:

• Weird, ugly, brutalist architecture
• Westend & Swedish-speaking Finns vs. poor suburbs with a big population of immigrants
• No identity or an image; tasteless, odourless, colourless, spiceless, dull and boring, middle-class, middle-aged, uninspiring
• NIMBY: not in my back yard
• The guest harbour case
• The café case
• Reserved, prejudiced, selfish, ignorant, corrupted, apprehensive: people being worried that something or somebody will come and take away what they own or that something is threatening their lifestyle and what they represent.

From our first visit to Espoon Keskus we learned that from their perspective Espoo is the little brother of Helsinki that has not been developed as quickly because of Helsinki. The centre of Espoon Keskus is situated between the old church and the Entresse shopping centre and divided by the railway. The Centre was built as a result of a competition in 1972 that was won by a group of Polish architects. The result is big bulgy blocks,a lot of parking spaces, lifted up walkways – a centre built for cars not for people not for interaction or a community. The brutalist architecture to me seems super clumsy, masculine, pompous and the whole feel of Espoon Keskus is quite unwelcoming.


In our visit to the city hall we heard that Espoo is one of the fastest growing cities in Finland, it is – and has been – very dependent on the railway development and that the demographics consist mainly of young families where around 40% of the people living in Espoon Keskus are between the ages 35-64. The future vision or a brand for Espoon keskus is a "cultural landscape & young urban milieu that promotes healthy & sustainable lifestyle that’s based on public transport. It’s a crosspoint & a living room for people living in Espoo that is run by an open & agile government”. The areas the city development will focus on in the near future are:

• new practices for a versatile city centre
• the station area
• Building apartments near services and public transport
• a quality pedestrian and cycling environment
• More green, trees etc.

I couldn’t agree more on the areas they need to be developing but they sure have their work cut out for them if they are to realise their humble future vision. What I personally would have liked to hear, though, was a more human centred approach on how it will actually be done, something that would have involved the citizens of Espoon Keskus in the decision making and development of the area. Now the city representative only mentioned that “We should ask the residents, but the people are always the same and have the same ideas” referring to a project where people got to choose equipment for the playgrounds. From this statement it is quite obvious that they still have a lot to learn about citizen participation.

First impressions

To me the word that would best describe Espoon keskus is sekasikiö, which in english translates into a mongrel. It is a crazy combination of old and new/modern, urban-agrarian, rich-poor. It’s characterised by concrete, brutalism, shopping centres, a sense of a suburb not a city, weird architecture that seems to have created a vicious circle when building new, a centre that was designed for cars, not for people/ interaction/ community/ a natural infrastructure or a flow of people. There is no sense of community nor nothing that would support a sense of community, nothing that would make people naturally get to know each other, no triggers, nothing that would facilitate interaction.

Overall as a whole Espoo to me seems very scattered, a set of several small city centres without much connection that seem to rather be competing against each other than working together for the greater good of Espoo. There seems to be no character, no identity or an image – There are a lot of blemishes but no edge. The overall feel is dismal, gloomy and cheerless, there’s no sense of identity, nothing people would be proud of nor something that would be characteristic of residents of Espoon Keskus.

What I started wondering was how could this weird mongrel be turned into a curiosity, how could the crazy mismatch become an interesting character and even an asset. What I think Espoon Keskus would need is a community. It is small, it’s not a city so maybe it should stop pretending to be one and become more like a village by bringing more life to the streets, taking better care of the pedestrians, building something else besides shopping centres – even by becoming an anti shopping centres community. By turning their focus on the pedestrians and the liveliness on the streets they would improve the feeling of livability and safety in Espoon Keskus. Espoon Keskus also has unutilised richness that comes from the variety of people, ethnicities, cultures, backgrounds, stories etc. that they should cherish and see as an asset that could help in creating something completely unique out of Espoon Keskus.

After getting to know more about Espoon Keskus I maybe didn’t get rid of all my preconceptions but my image of it has evolved, at least a bit. Now I see that it's like any other place in Finland, very much as I had thought but much more human once seen and experienced. People there are living their lives as people anywhere else, not thinking too much about the surroundings but rather adjusting to what ever they need to adjust to, exactly as we human beings do. The old church is very beautiful, as is the river and the scenery when ever it’s not interrupted by crazy layers of architecture and ideas from the past decades.