lewism

An interesting postcard came through our door a few weeks ago. It has a link to a website on it explaining the details (in Finnish only I’m afraid). It comes from a number of villages in Finland, and is an appeal to ex-members of those villages to relocate back there, and it seems to be part of a campaign to get families to move back to those villages, in short a counter-urbanisation strategy. My wife comes from Hartola which explains why we got one, and it seems they are backing up their PR with heavily discounted land prices to encourage people to buy and build there. It is interesting that Finland urbanised later than most European countries but very quickly after WWII and that now the paper industry (production at least) seems to be on the wain here that these villages want or need to try and keep their populations, and fight the general trend of urbanisation. Finnish people, you can’t help but notice also have a love affair with nature, or at least the Kesämoki or summer cottage, where the Finnish family can escape from the city for the summer and get back in touch with their country roots. This paper is really interesting insight into the issues for Finland for their urbanisation, ‘the great move’ in the fifties and sixties where the baby boom generation was born in the country but now mostly lives in the cities. The postcard is an interesting strategy to challenge the slow decline of the countryside outside of the Kesämoki lifestyle.
Also see Stats in Finland.