Speakers
Description
In the 1960s and 1970s, the rapidly growing personal motorisation changed the urban environment in Helsinki, as elsewhere, to an unprecedented degree. Having been considered earlier as a neutral and/or desirably modern phenomenon, growing passenger car traffic was now turned into a topic of political debate and conflict, and also increasingly treated as an urban problem. Two groups that were often juxtaposed in the public discussion were children and cars. During the same period, taking children’s perspective into consideration began to be discussed more as part of urban planning and education. We argue that this growing interest in children’s uses of space played an important role in challenging the car city, creating controversies with long-lasting influence.
In our presentation, we approach the changing image of the city, urban transport and children through the rich visual material created by the photographer Eeva Rista. Her photographs have recently become well-known as documents and illustrations of everyday life in Helsinki but they also open up many yet unused possibilities for historical research. We analyse Rista’s photographs not only in the framework of what they represent, but also as a form of urban activism - as the photographer’s systematic effort to try and change the car city through photography as a practice. Drawing from a wide body of Rista’s photographic material from the 1960s until the early-1980s, we discuss the production of the relationship between children and traffic in urban space from two perspectives: children in traffic and children as traffic.
By the former, children in traffic, we mean the different photographic ways in which children were presented as objects of various traffic policies and as victims during the time when motorized vehicles displaced children’s play from streets. The latter category, children as traffic, is characterized by the depiction of children engaging in self-directed and voluntary play and movement, portraying them as active participants who shaped their own urban spaces. These descriptions mirror the recognition of the importance of play and the understanding of children as urban residents with their unique needs, characteristic of that era.
Biography
Veera Moll (MSSc) works as a doctoral researcher at Aalto University, Department of Built Environment in Espoo, Finland. Her forthcoming thesis focuses on children’s role in post-war urban planning in Helsinki, Finland. Veera has authored several articles on the urban history of children, exploring it from both a planning perspective and through the lens of children’s experiences. Alongside children’s urban history, her research interests encompass child-friendly urban planning, playgrounds, standardization of children’s play environments and the evolution of children’s mobility and play opportunities in motorized urban contexts.
Tiina Männistö-Funk is a historian of technology working at the University of Turku in Finland. She holds a PhD in Finnish history and has worked as a researcher for example at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and at the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. Currently she is an Academy Research Fellow financed by the Academy of Finland with a project that studies the history of non-motorised modes and the change in Finnish living environments. She is also the PI in a project focusing on the questions of equality and justice in cities, funded by the Kone Foundation.
Tanja Vahtikari is Senior Lecturer in History and the leader of the Lived Nation research team at the Research Council of Finland's Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University, Finland. She is the author of Valuing World Heritage Cities (Routledge, 2017) and the co-editor of Lived Nation as the History of Experiences and Emotions in Finland, 1800-2000 (Palgrave, 2021), as well as numerous articles on history of experiences, urban history, heritage, history of childhood and visual methods in historical research.
