Oulun Yliopiston sekä Arkkitehtiosaston säilyttävä keskustassa

I am an American Architect who was a Fulbright Scholar to Finland in 1969-70. I researched the Finnish housing and urban design policies around the suburban growth of Helsinki. I have always been concerned about how suburbs can drain life from the centers of our cities and I wanted to see if the Finns had found a better way to deal with their suburban growth. While Finish policies were superior to what the US was experiencing at the time, and still is, even in Finalnd, the spread of suburban development was subtracting from the life of the older central city.

As much as Otaniemi was a lovely campus, I always regretted that it was located outside of Helsinki's center. As a native New Yorker, I chose to live in the heart of downtown Helsinki on Eerikinkatu, and visited the Otaniemi campus maybe 3 times in the entire year I was there. Not knowing all the issues around the Oulu case, I suspect that moving the school of architecture to the outer edge is a mistake, and will be one more example of important cultural life being drained from the heart of a city, and more people using more energy to move themselves about the region to work, learn and recreate.

I think it is a mistake everytime an important cultural instituion leaves an inner city for suburban locations. These types of moves are regretted for generations afterwards, and in the future people will look back in wonder-- how could such a foolish decision have been made in the first place?

I have been returning to Finland every five years since I did my research there more than 40 years ago. I have good friends there all of whom lived in the city when I was there and I have very fond memories of my year immersed in the Finnish culture. Some of my friends are now pernmanently living in their summer homes outside the city as retirees. I always thought that the fact that so many Finns had city lives and then cabins outside the city for escape, was a good alternative to the suburbs, which were neither cities nor escapes, but always pretended to be both. I thought Finland did not need suburbs as long as city dwellers could have some tiny place of escape waiting for them in the forest.

I wish all those involved in the descision about Oulu's school of architecture will do so rationally.