Paljassaare – A Void in Tallinn
The Paljassaare peninsula has for most of its history existed as an enclave within the rest of the city's texture – uninhabited, wild, dangerous, lucrative... Paljassaare is an anti-city of its own, a void in space, from whose shores another forest can clearly be seen – the 21st century cluster of skyscrapers built in Tallinn city centre during the construction boom.
Once there were two islands instead of a peninsula, and they have been inhabited by the army since the 18th century. When the construction of the Peter the Great sea fortress began in 1912, the soil excavated in the deepening of the port was used to join the two islands into a peninsula, leaving an element of nature designed by man. The military nostalgia is today strengthened by the surviving ruins of the battery of the sea fortress, the railway dyke and the Katariina pier. As a military zone Paljassaare has always been devoid of people; in the 1930s a few hundred people lived here, away from civilisation, travelling to the town by sea as the road was so bad.
To get a full picture of Paljassaare, it should also be remembered that the peninsula lies in Kopli, the industrial backyard of modern Tallinn, in a district with beautiful hundred-year-old factory buildings and dry-rotting wooden houses, where from each lot the sea is visible, but where no-one sees it. The virginal untouched body of Paljassaare is flanked on both sides by commercial and military ports, transiting vehicles, factories, a water treatment plant, an illegal Soviet-era area of garages, a similarly illegal landfill and a whole row of incomprehensible “tough” structures. Tallinn is not a very logical and evenly developed city, it has its own voids, unexpected strata that have not been wiped out by the cleansing force of history, and that sneer at you in the face from around every corner.
Today's Paljassaare is not quite a town of people. Scientists say it has incredibly rich flora, and ornithologists are fascinated by the variety of species on the peninsula, which lies on the route for migratory birds, and have created an officially protected area for birds here. Untamed nature in the centre of the city, a potential theme park, whose beauty and value have started to be discovered by the property boom flowing out of the city centre. The ports move out, the factories close down, and ecologically balanced activities even allow the construction of residential houses next to the water treatment plant. Tallinn colonises its voids.
Today's Paljassaare is a strange example of self-organising urbanism, a public space born wildly with a plurality of temporary opportunities for use. The old Katariina pier with its beach was a secret superbeach for many years that could not be reached by any kind of public transport, and the road was disgraced by abandoned houses. A place for fishermen, hikers, metal collectors, fortune hunters and artistic souls looking for a void. Only since the year before last have the signs of civilisation denoting the “officialness” of the beach arrived here: lifeguards, toilets and a cheap hamburger kiosk. The rest is pretty much the same, even the view of the Tallinn panorama striving powerfully upwards from the shrubbery has the same distant and detached effect it had before.
Triin Ojari
Translation Robin Hazlehurst