location: turku, finland
time: 1970s, 1980s

i was traveling all the afternoon. infinite curves and spirals in this mediocre port city. then i’ve seen these houses finally, and got off from the bus. varissuo was built on a meadow. the finnish people call it a problematic district. 32 percent of the inhabitants are immigrants. i am walking in a dreamlike ghetto in new york. finally something with meaning. the moomins definitely don’t live here, maybe the groke at best. pine trees and high rises merge into the dusk, people switch on the lights in their windows, all of them is a reminder, home is where the heart is far away.

location: turku, finland
time: 1960s, 1970s

if the múmins had lived on a housing estate, that would have looked like this one: maybe just the illusory weather, but lauste looked like a tiny cartoon empire, where nothing remains on its place for long time, and building bricks are placed on the ground in the playful oblivion. because, eventually, nobody was there, only a girl with an umbrella, and an apparently disadvantaged couple who were pulling a shopping trolley and having a very unpleasant quarrel (some things never change anywhere?)

but come on, it’s october, the fictive inhabitants probably started their winter sleep already.

location: turku, finland
time: 1970s

the largest suburb of turku, with 20 percent of immigrant population. i get off the bus n18 a bit frightened, no idea why here, after all east europe. but nothing happens, really nothing, a few people walking on the streets, one group of kids, pensioners, grownups walking dogs, hardly any sign of life, because these places are not built for that, however impressive the vegetation is around them. finland is good in that: all housing estates look like elite healthcare institutions in the middle of a park full of primal trees, and sometimes it’s really hard to imagine the “serious problems” that are written in the articles on them, but in the end, segregation knows no borders.

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1977

it is wonderful again: since the estate is built by the housing cooperative gocław airport, the four subdistricts of gocław are named of different polis aircraft pieces:

iskra (spark)
jantar (amber)
orlik (eagle)
wilga (oriole) 

a secret sentence about socialism written into the urban landscape.

and in the middle of the estate there is a lake called BALATON!

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1977

it’s easy to say ursynów, although it is an unforeseeble area of different housing estates, where innumerable buses carry the passengers to unknown places. ursynów never ends, or the buses have round lines.

ghetto and garden city in one.

i have a hunch that it was the greyest place i’ve ever been, or i just don’t remember to romania anymore.

and this place consists of the most melodic streetnames, that generates nice synesthetic experiences in our mind. and there is a bartók béla street, which composes an interesting contrast with the budapest one.

warsaw is the city of trees and concrete. a city of may and rain, doesn’t matter when are we going there. but we can’t really miss it, light conditions around the central station are frighteningly similar in may and december. these pictures were taken in july. it’s kind of a solidity.

when the housing estates in warsaw were built in the years of oppression, one of the chief architects’ wife committed suicide in the bathtub. since then bathrooms in warsaw housing blocks are smelling like a fairy’s forgotten bathwater. conduits are not fogetting.

besides the magic forests, yellow and green houses are also very usual here. and the shades change in every block.

the next part of ursynów is blue for a change, and quotes greek villages. it doesn’t worth to give up dreaming at all.

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1970s

we don’t know anything about this place except that piasków means sand, which shows the less creative sort of naming, and that it is located next to chomiczówka, separated by a nice tram track.

at some point i could even experience that kind of sacralized space which sometimes appears in a random corner of conrete blocks, always next to the trees.

inside the block follow less interesting pastel houses with a summer garden feeling.

location: warsaw, poland
time: 1975-80 

chomiczówką, chomiczówką, pierwsze wino, pierwsza wódka, mean that anything, (obviously something with vodka)

that song shows that there should be some character in this neighbourhood, but i didn’t experience so much of that. it was just a new example of colorful toy cities arisen from rehabilitation programs or the planner’s fantasy. but nothing significantly original. anyway, it looks pretty amazing on this photo, so maybe i was in too much of hurry (i just stepped of from an urban activist workshop, where i had the task to make beetroot paint), and didn’t discover the exciting parts.

but there are some nice picture, where concrete blocs become pastel scenes of fairy tales,

where the essence of warsaw housing feeling, the light green walls and rich vegetation are in present,

and some harder contours.

location: hamburg, germany
time: ca. 1970

surprisingly ghetto-like landscape when we get off the s-bahn, that becomes different step by step.

slowly transforming into a decent post 70s garden estate…

stalin style blocks…

little streams and good pedestrian connections…

moderately exciting facades.

yeah, that’s pretty hard. le corbusier in the sky with diamonds! 

location: hamburg, germany
time: 1969-73

good to know that western europe is also keeping secrets for us. the keyword is diversity: more form, more material, more colour. and the condition of the buildings of course. but it’s still far away from the gloss of helsinki suburbs. and we can’t forget about the water, as in any point of this city. grand waters and frightening distances, this is hamburg.

contours.

corps.

spaces.

facades.

streetscapes.

contrasts.

they’re moving towards you with their colors all the same

time: 04.12.2010.
location: from purvciems to mežciems, riga, latvia

there is a 19th century worker district near the centre of riga, called grizinkalns. it’s brown and rusty and noble, details maybe later. in this neighbourhood the buildings are tied to each other by overcrossing trolley wires, and time to time, light blue trolleys appear on brown streets. they have numbers: if we miss 23, we still can catch the 18, and it takes us farther, even to mežciems.

first, we reach purvciems, which means ‘marsh village’, and it was built in the 1980s and 90s, so it is sometimes referred as postsoviet rather than soviet.

as journey continues, landscape becomes blurred, contours become soft.

than the trolley slowly arrives to the egde of the town, where fairy creatures are living in lakes called juglas ezers. it is already mežciems, which means ‘forest village’ and was built in the 1970s. it is hiding from the visitor, at first sight everything seems so distant, as if real life of the neighbourhood would happen somewhere inside, where outsiders can’t see it. it is just a bus stop in the end of the world, driving to the forests, and some houses in the distance, which could be built anytime, even in the nineties.