Finland transformed its commercial and industrial structure with unusual speed, for this modernisation was conducted systematically, quickly and effectively. Finland may be considered a laboratory of American efficiency and cultural influence. Instead of the material aid received by the other countries of western Europe under the Marshall Plan, the Finns received US support in the form of study, research, knowhow and management scholarships under the Asla-Fulbright programme; in relative terms more Finns received vocational training in the United States during the 1950s than any other nation. American influence was represented not only by increasing car ownership and consumerism, but also computerism. With the use of computers it was possible to calculate and plan the development of small and culturally and linguistically well-defined national economies such as that of Finland. Computers also had a decisive influence on how traffic planners and their forecasts took the lead in urban and social planning.
     The adoption of new patterns of production, marketing and consumption took place simultaneously with the change of commercial and industrial structure. The mass movement from country to town itself marked a thoroughgoing change in lifestyle. Innovations were promised in all areas, and it was believed that the new was always better than the old in quality as well as quantity. By the 1960s the destruction of the old urban structure and the functionalist separation of functions were accelerating.
     From 1964 onward, housing developments were built under agreements between banks, construction companies and local politicians. This practice was against the code of building legislation, but was not challenged by central government, as the consensus on regional building agreements was that construction companies used their profits to fund the activities of political parties, from right to left. The practice became a custom, and accusations of corruption among civil servants, political parties and construction companies that were raised in the 1980s were generally subsequently dropped. More than half a million housing units were built in the decade between 1965 and 1975, most of them in the capital area.
     In creating the planning system, the principle that competition in business activity should not be easily criminalised had been adopted in order to maximise economic growth. Thus Finns found themselves moving into housing developments whose cost included significant 'system costs'. On the other hand, the system was also based on strong inflation, so that mortages rapidly shrank. Practical comparisons with other ways of producing housing became impossible when funding for rival systems was withdrawn by the banks.
     Architects were forced to become part of the technological structure of the housing industry. Cheap standard solutions were applied repeatedly in housing design down to the smallest detail in the name of modernisation. Instead of aesthetic quality, the new residents themselves often stressed the rise of their standard of living, delighting in the fact that 'water comes and goes, there are no draughts from the corners and the windows are easy to wash', as one of them put it. Residents did not even have any say in the fixtures and fittings of their own flats, for the macro-economic planning system ensured assured markets and long production runs for the furniture and white goods industries.
     Modern urbanism in Finland was, in a sense, created from nothing, without experience, in a state of innocence, with the optimistic settlement of large numbers of people in housing developments without any traditional codes of behaviour concerning living together, and in particular living together in apartment blocks. Although many of the new residents had moved from the cramped conditions of city apartment blocks, they too were generally originally from the countryside. The housing developments meant, for them, a modern, healthy way of life that was close to nature, in distinction to the stuffy, impractical and cramped living conditions in the older part of the city. The traditional communities fragmented in the first great move from countryside to the city and its suburbs.
     The building of the suburbs was also based to a large extent on the save-as-you-earn system, and house ownership brought satisfaction to many savers. A house of one's own felt great - new and light. Modern fittings and spaces such as a dressing room and balcony were things which were simply not on offer in city-centre apartments. Children might even be able to have a room of their own. The housing development was also an economically viable channel for social betterment through exchanges of apartments.

In recent years, a new interest in city-dwellers' own experiences has resulted in some interesting publications which open up new perspectives on Finnish urbanism.
     Kotikaduilla - elämää Helsingissä 1970-luvulla ('Home streets - life in Helsinki in the 1970s') is based on contemporary interviews. A couple of dozen scholars have produced interesting analyses of the inhabitants of the city centre and suburbs and of their living conditions. The interviews show no trace of any significant youth problem, because the areas under study were old corner communities with heterogeneous age-structures. Some of the interviewees are, however, on the move from the old city to the suburbs. The life of city-centre residents is, according to the interviews, characterised by a sense either of serene permanence or of optimism for the future.
     Elämä lähiössä ('Life in the suburbs'), on the other hand, is a picture-book dealing with the settlement of the new housing developments: Finland's biggest daily newspaper published a series of articles on the suburbs in 1995 and 1996, and offered column space to residents' own texts and photographs, publishing a total of about 200 letters. The project reminds suburbanites that it is never to invent a 'happy childhood', whatever other people think. Sometimes, it is true, writer also wish to record their negative experiences. But in this handsome picture-book, the housing developments receive a human face.
     The political scholar Kyösti Pekonen, for his part, examines today's situation in his book Politiikka urbaanissa betonilähiössä ('Politics in concrete urban housing developments'). This study is based on anonymous interviews with residents and workers in concrete suburbs in Helsinki. Pekonen explores the peaceful apathy that appears superficially to hold sway, and compares the Finnish situation with those of central and southern Europe.
     The optimism of the early years of Finnish concrete suburbs has changed to pessimism; politics has abandoned the housing estates, but they have not been left to mature at their own pace: instead, they are continually inundated with new building and new residents, who are now immigrants. Even the traditional source of strength of Finnish housing developments, the forest, is being built up. 'Proprietorship' is already felt to be in danger, although the extreme right-wing agitation that has been seen elsewhere in Europe has not yet made its appearance.
     Nowhere in the above-mentioned works is the grand narrative of the city or suburb to be found; instead, there is a mosaic of many different stories reflecting the contradiction of life in the suburbs and its interpretation. Do politicians in general have sufficient interest in the situation in the suburbs? The interest of the residents of the housing developments and their belief in the capacity of politics to solve social problems, particularly long-term unemployment, has already slumped to a record low.

Working-class living conditions have been an important concern of urban planning since the 19th century. In Finland it was typical, in the absence of organised dwellings or when they were fully inhabited, for new, 'wild' communities to spring up outside the city limits. The old Helsinki district of Pasila with its wooden houses was such a spontaneous phenomenon. The workers' communities were characterised by a strong feeling of solidarity, but to outsiders they were notorious. On account of their economic, social and hygienic conditions these areas were soon incorporated into the city.
     At the other end of the scale from Pasila was Töölö, whose Museokatu street represents the apotheosis of bourgeois urbanism. Töölö's housing stock was seen as a symbol of modernism in cinema and literature in the 1930s and 1940s. For the novelist Mika Waltari Töölö, with its novelties represented the 'socialisation and utilitarianisation of life', for his fellow writer Helvi Hämäläinen freedom for women, the independence of a woman who earned her own living. But by the end of the 1940s it had been branded a symbol of unsuccessful inner-city building by Heikki von Hertzen, director of the Finnish Population and Family Welfare Federation, who felt it was better suited to mummies than people. In a polemic pamphlet of 1946, Koti vaiko kasarmi lapsillemme ('A home or a barracks for our children'), von Hertzen laid the ideological groundwork for the Tapiola Garden City project in Espoo.
     After the war, families with children were the object of special attention. The birth-rate reached its peak during the final years of the 1940s, and government propaganda favoured families of at least four children. Families were also supported economically in many ways. The world-famous Tapiola Garden City became a pilot development for family policies, with the direct participation of the Finnish Population and Family Welfare Federation. At the same time the project represented a change of direction from the model living in the 'New Helsinki' favoured by the intellectuals of the 1930s in Töölö: it was possible to build high apartment blocks in the forests as long as this allowed the residents access to the natural world.
     In 1967 the radical young generation branded Tapiola an unsuccessful 'forest city' and demanded that no more should be built. In the new, compact housing developments, the aim was for a five-fold increase in population density. Population forecasts were exaggerated so that efficient building looked essential: Koivukylä in Vantaa, the most bombastic of the new plans, was supposed to house 100,000 people by the year 2000, but today the population is only 12,000.

Elämä lähiössä brings out the different experiences of people who moved into the housing developments at different times. The younger people were when they moved, the fewer the problems they experienced during the early years. With their forests and rocks, the housing developments offered children good places to play and a lively childhood. From the point of view of the children, the adults, too, seemed happy. The adults enjoyed their contact with nature, but nevertheless sometimes the lack of people and street lighting, and the bad transport connections, further weakened by strikes, irritated people who went to work in the city.
     The occasional row, the odd divorce, bout of alcoholism or madness were dealt with 'normally', although they cast a shadow. Mothers who had moved from more central areas were not always happy; some dreamed all their lives of moving back to the city. Others experienced the housing development as a penal colony because of the remoteness of shops and the need to use buses. The surrounding nature, however, brought comfort to mothers who had moved from the countryside. The mothers created social networks which their daughters today do not succeed in creating in their 'posh' suburbs. But all young people dreamed of moving somewhere else.
     One woman who had moved from one housing development to another wrote: 'When I was still quite young I realised what a real city was, and that Vantaa wasn't one. We'd moved to the backwoods, we lived constantly with a building site as a neighbour, and we believed that this was how the better people lived. But this is how the common herd is housed, the mob.' The new housing development was troubled by 'rootlessness, social sameness, the lack of layers, the hopelessly unaesthetic environment, the unmendable, unfinished dreariness, the glaring ugliness. In brief: existence outside all civilisation. The development was totally lacking in the glamour - parks, statues, squares and admirers - which, in all of the girls' books set in Helsinki - swarmed after all the girls.'

There are a thousand realities to the history of everyday life, but how to find the right interpretations of today's everyday experiences and give them political influence is the question which Kyösti Pekonen examines in his book Politiikka urbaanissa betonilähiössä.
     Many developments were spoilt, in the opinion of their residents, by too much and too dense building. 'Two or three generations of continual forced settlement and restless moving from one apartment to another finally drive away even those people who, more than three decades ago, felt themselves to be pioneers of the good life,' Pekonen writes. Some return to the centre of the city when the change in their environment, the building of new housing developments, took with it the flower meadows and severed their ski-tracks.
     Pekonen's book also brings out the immediate importance of the built environment to people. I, too, believe that the built environment should be regarded as an essential part of humanity. Our immediate surroundings undoubtedly function as a manifesto of where and who we are, 'where the world is going' and what environmental changes are understandable and acceptable. In Pekonen's study, the fear of urban decay was one of the concerns that was expressed; the creation of beautiful environments was seen as its counterweight, the invention of places, so that people can say they come from a place with an identity. 'Social control is always difficult if all you have is a block like this one,' says a 40-year-old woman, but on the other hand, in the words of a social worker for young people with special needs, 'pastel colours on the walls are not enough.'
     In the Finnish housing development, immigrants are a phenomenon of the 1990s, and they generally do not form part of the workforce, but are refugees and asylum-seekers. At the same time it is precisely these housing developments that have experienced long-term unemployment; around 40 per cent of residents of developments of this kind have been without work for more than two years. The dormitory suburb has become a daytime suburb, and as many as 15 per cent of residents are of foreign origin, without a common culture or even language. For the moment, only a small skinhead group is symptomatic of the transformation of the suburb into a battlefield.
     If we understand the task of architecture to be the domestication of social reality for the people who use buildings, then I believe that it is reasonable to draw conclusions about changes in social structure at the level of architecture. In the context of post-modern, individuating capitalism, housing developments can no longer be experienced as natural phenomena of modernisation in the way described by many of the original residents. In the context of a society based on industrial salaried labour, housing formed a world that was considered ideologically less important than work and activity outside the home. In the post-industrial world of flexible working patterns and long-term unemployment, the home environment becomes a more central element in individual identities.
     For around a million people in Finland today - one fifth of the population - an apartment in a housing development is what they call home. For this reason and for the sake of the urban landscape, they should be allowed to develop into increasingly individual places supportive of a positive identity. Repairing the building stock offers an opportunity to establish the residents' new role as customers. Power of decision over the fixtures and fittings of one's own home according to one's own taste and values as part of a sense of responsibility for and control over one's own life should be understood as a resource for supporting citizens in a situation where there may no longer be any return to the security of mass society and standard living. This is perhaps best stated by one of Pekonen's interviewees, the social worker, who feels it is important to create, for both owner-occupiers and tenants, some kind of ownership system 'so that people would realise that they themselves are responsible for their living environment'.