POPULAR RESISTANCE: …The catalyst for the most recent wave of collaborative innovations in Helsinki wasRestaurant Day. Now an international event, Restaurant Day launched in 2011 as a quarterly “food carnival.” The model is simple: would-be restaurateurs dream up a concept for a pop-up cafe, establish a location and menu, issue a public invitation through the Restaurant Day website, and, for one day, transform a private home or city park into a bonafide eating establishment. The popularity of Restaurant Day and other projects, including Cleaning Day, a resident-driven swap meet inaugurated in 2012, has in turn inspired other grassroots sharing initiatives. “Restaurant Day has implemented the idea that, ‘Yes we can—everything is possible as long as we do it together,’” said Timo Santala, an event producer, DJ, journalist, and photographer who serves on the Restaurant Day board and is Head of Food Culture Strategy for the City of Helsinki. “It’s a positive cycle. Once you have the first ones that pave the way, you’re bound to have more.”
But the seeds of Helsinki’s contemporary sharing economy were planted long before 2011. “The humorous way of saying it is that we came down from the trees later than others,” said Matti Aistrich, Senior Lead in Business Development at Sitra. “We were an agricultural nation until not that long ago. The agrarian society was always very sharing and circular economy focused.” The Finnish concept of talkoot (literally, “bee”), which prizes voluntary communal work, survived the transition from the fields to the central city. “Centuries ago, when crops needed to be harvested, it was a tradition that the men of the village would do it all together, because it’s more effective that way,” said Santala. “We still have that. If you have an apartment building, every fall they gather together to do yard work or maintenance around the building.”
(Contrast this with examples abroad including Seoul, South Korea, where a failure to transfer rural values to the new urban landscape has likely contributed to high suicide rates and a round-the-clock work culture. The city’s recent attempts to initiate sharing practices from the top down have so far met with limited success.)… (more)
