|
Finland Urbanization
The Great Migration was also a process of urbanization.
Mechanization of agriculture and forestry meant fewer jobs
in
these sectors that had traditionally taken the bulk of
Finland's
work force. Redundant workers found new employment in the
economically burgeoning south. Just before World War II,
three
out of four Finns lived in rural areas; it was not until
1969
that more than half the population had come to live in
urban
communities. The trend continued, and by the early 1980s
some 60
percent of Finns lived in urban areas. The largest urban
settlement in Finland was greater Helsinki, which, with a
population of about 950,000 in the 1980s, contained
one-fifth of
the country's total population. Two of Helsinki's suburbs,
Espoo
(established in 1963) and Vantaa (dating only from 1972),
were,
by a wide margin, the country's fourth and fifth largest
cities.
The greater urban areas of the cities of Tampere and Turku
each
contained about 250,000 inhabitants.
Data as of December 1988
|
