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Veikka, thank you for your great poster! It is so interesting. I am wondering if you could conceptualize early modern Helsinki as a community of experience, or even many communities of experience. Your example of children is excellent, and it makes me think about several simultaneous communities. Some of them were more shared than some others, I guess.
Thank you for your kind words! I find this idea very interesting, because recently I’ve been writing a lot about different communities and so called common spaces. One of the most interesting cases in Helsinki is the very large amount of soldiers and their families. They weren’t “legal” residents of Helsinki, yet they lived in Helsinki or in Viapori. This idea of communities of experience might really help, when I’m trying to understand how e.g. the soldiers wives experienced the new environment, learned to live in it and make an adequate living, while their husbands were away serving in Viapori.
Thanks for your very interesting presentation and topic; I especially like how you include children’s usage and perspectives on urban space. You mention that your archival sources consist mostly of public documents in the city archives. Are you also taking into consideration other, more ‘informal’ material like literature, diaries, gazettes or newspapers, if these existed in Helsinki at the time? Another question that came to my mind is on the importance of water and waterways for the economic, military and political development of Helsinki (eg. the defense structures at Suomenlinna) – does water also play a particular role in your research as a factor in experiencing urban expansion and transformation?
Thank you for your comment! Unfortunately, I haven’t found much useful material from newspapers etc., but I’ve found some interesting viewpoints and outsider’s perspective from travel diaries. For example, one travel diary tells about the busy traffic between Helsinki and Viapori fortress during the winter when the sea was frozen. From my main sources, I’ve found several court cases that take place in the town port and those mostly describe how the sailors experienced the town space. Yet those cases also show, that waterways were very important everyday travelling routes, and that the sea connected Helsinki to the sphere of Baltic Sea and increasingly even to the Mediterranean.
This was really interesting, thank you! It reminded me of in Glasgow during the 19th century there were slum clearances where a lot of families were moved from city tenement flats to the suburbs. Before they could play on the streets and the back courts and the space was shared. But when they got to the suburbs a lot of people were irritated because the children did not really understand (or perhaps respect!) the concept of a ‘private’ garden and would jump over fences to play.
This is very interesting viewpoint, thank you for your comment! Your example really shows how different boundaries are structured, understood and experienced.
Thanks for this presentation! I liked the way you talked about the different experience)s) of different groups of people and the possible conflicts between them. I wonder if you can see temporal changes in these differences either as the town grows more urban and more central in the political and economic sense – or in ”microtime”, situationally according to the time of day, week or year?
Thank you for your comment! I’m looking forward to soon analyse long-term changes (or permanence!) especially after the year 1808 or 1812, but I’m not quite there yet. I think one change will be seen in the relationship of Helsinki and Viapori, or between the “legal” residents and the huge amount of soldiers. In “microtime” it is possible to see many temporal changes e.g. in “sensory environments”. For example, most of the court cases related to disturbance of peace were recorded on Sundays and during the church service, and quite usually the troublemaker was a soldier, a sailor or a hired hand. I guess this isn’t very surprising result as such, but still it has been very interesting to analyse these cases and to understand better the variation of different soundscapes in the town space.
Thank you for this presentation, this is a fascinating study!
Are you constructing it based on selected public spaces and experiences in them, e.g. a church, a certain martketplace etc., and then examining them from an intersectional perspective (e.g. gender, age, different groups), and situational temporal (night/day, holyday, seasons etc.), and the more long-term temporal changes? Or which aspects will you focus on?
Also, your title has the word ‘pre-modern’, emphasizing the difference from later/modern urban spaces, but is modernization (or the modernization paradigm) an aspect in your study? I guess in the traditional periodization this time frame (1770-1820) would be considered a transition point between ‘early modern’ and ‘modern’.
Riikka Miettinen
15.3.2021 16:59