“… and this is where the flying cars were supposed to land.” Spaces and events in the making and celebrating of a Garden City
Marjana Johansson, Stockholm School of Economics
”We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed” claims Foucault in his lecture Of Other Spaces. This is the condition of heterotopia. Whereas utopia has no real place, heterotopia is displacement, “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”. In this paper, the juxtaposition of spaces and the mobilisation of a past is addressed through an account of the organising of a celebration of an urban space called the Garden City.
Situated just outside Helsinki, it was founded in the post-war years as a countermove to the spreading urban hell of “barrack-like housing and miserable backyards”. Instead, the Garden City was to provide “a socially right environment for modern man and his family”. The town was built from scratch for this purpose, as a hybrid of English garden city ideals and modernist architecture in the fashion of Le Corbusier. The “Garden City” epithet itself expresses a juxtapositon of pastoral and urban space. Fifty years later, in 2003, the Garden City had become slightly worn and unsure of its identity. With the 50th anniversary coming up the opportunity was seized to hold a reinvigorating celebration: a moment for reflection and for looking back but also for drawing up a future.
The celebration opens up a space for narrating a future and reenacting a past. In so doing, elements of the past are reclaimed and repolished (both physically by undertaking a major renovation of the centre and symbolically by invoking past deeds and people). The celebration of times past is firmly embodied in architectural structure and space as the anniversary includes inaugurating renovated parklands, organising architectural walks and putting on an exhibition of future construction projects.
In the organising of the celebrations, the two familiar combattants Culture and Commerce emerge. Culture is the foundation on which the town rests, its heritage and ideological roots. Commerce paves the way for the future: if the commercial appeal of the Garden City is not strengthened the town will wither, juxtaposed in the space between two newer, neighbouring commercial centres. The anniversary is to bring the two together, phrased in the slogan “Everything good combined”.
The paper is an account of the organising of the anniversary in terms of the elements that are drawn upon as resources when staging the past and the future. Decisions and acts of inclusion and exclusion are carried out. Which is the past we want to celebrate, and what will our future look like? Who will be part of it?