Guest pen | Urbanization in the 2020s is based on immigration

The big ones the population increase of cities and urban regions reached a record level last year. The population increase in the regions of Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Kuopio was higher than in five decades. The background of the growth is increased immigration, one of the factors being the home municipality choices of those who came to Finland from Ukraine.

Urban areas make up only five percent of Finland's land area, but about 73 percent of the population lives in them and 80 percent of jobs are located there. In the years 2010–2022, their population increased by approximately 376,000 people.

Urbanization accelerated in the mid-2010s, but at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic it experienced an arrhythmia. The number of municipalities that benefited from migration doubled, and the migration gains were distributed more evenly across the country than before. The migration losses of rural municipalities decreased. The capital region suffered historic migration losses in internal migration. The migration flows turned to the urban framework areas, the nearby countryside and large cottage and tourist settlements.

As a result of the pandemic, hybrid work and location-independent working became more common and digitization progressed permanently, but the changes in regional development and choices related to place of residence remained temporary. In 2023, we returned to the career before the corona crisis. Population growth and migration gains are again focused on large urban areas, despite the fact that remote work gives more and more people great freedom to choose their place of residence.

Urbanization and the acceleration of concentration is based on three different trends: metropolitanization, suburbanization and internationalization.

The appeal of big cities is increased by hard and soft factors. Hard attraction factors are related to, among other things, wide-ranging job, training and service offerings as well as future opportunities, soft attraction factors to events and experiences, atmosphere and comforts perceived as urban.

Suburbanization is increased by the fact that young adults and families with children prioritize housing and a comfortable living and living environment. Drivers for choosing a place to live are, for example, the price of housing, space and spaciousness, good connections, remote work opportunities, health and perceived safety.

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At the beginning of the pandemic, urbanization experienced a dysrhythmia.

However, urbanization in the 2020s is above all internationalization. The growth of cities is based on increased immigration, especially in the capital region but also in other big cities. The phenomenon can also be seen in the fact that, when moving from their first place of residence in Finland, immigrants seek large population centers.

The big ones alongside the growth of urban areas, there are still indications of migration from large cities to smaller and rural areas, which became more common during the pandemic. Large tourist centers, especially in Lapland, benefit from these counterflows of migrants.

However, the direction of urbanization and concentration development did not change after the temporary disruption caused by the corona crisis. What is new is that you no longer necessarily have to move to cities for work and live there expensively, if you have the option to choose otherwise or to work remotely.

The pandemic might even have been a tipping point, after which cities are considered even more attractive. Those who do not have to go there but want to live in the city because of its inherent attraction and holding power stay or move to cities.

In cities the growth of the population and housing estates is high, but new housing construction projects are at a standstill. If the situation continues to be similar, the challenge of urbanization may once again be the adequacy of housing production.

The key question is how big cities prepare for a significant increase in population and especially immigration. Now we should not drift into a similar dead end as in the growth pressures of the great migration of the 1960s and the turn of the 1970s.

Timo Aro is the research director of the City of Turku.

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