Helsinki

Helsinki is the capital and largest city of Finland. It is located in the southern part of Finland on the shore of the Gulf of Finland, at 60°10′N, 24°56′E by the Baltic Sea. The population of the city of Helsinki is 565,186 (30 April 2007). Helsinki, along with the neighbouring cities of Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen, constitutes what is known as the capital region, with over 1,000,000 inhabitants. The Greater Helsinki area contains several additional municipalities and has a population of 1,293,093,

History

Founded in 1550 as a rival to the Hanseatic city of Reval (today: Tallinn) by King Gustav I of Sweden, the town of Helsinki struggled in its infancy. The fledging settlement was plagued by poverty, wars, and diseases. For a long time it remained as a small low-key coastal town, overshadowed by the more thriving trade centers in the Baltic region. The construction of the Sveaborg (In Finnish Viapori, today also Suomenlinna) naval fortress helped improve its status, but it was not until Russia defeated Sweden in the Finnish War and annexed Finland as the autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland in 1809 that Helsinki began to truly change.

To help reduce Swedish influence in Finland, Czar Alexander I of Russia moved the capital from Turku, which had close ties to Sweden, to Helsinki. The Royal Academy of Turku, back then the only university in the country, was relocated to Helsinki in 1827 and eventually became the modern University of Helsinki. The move consolidated the city's new role and the following decades saw unprecedented growth and development for the city, creating the prerequisites for the birth of the modern world class capital in the 20th century. This transformation is highly apparent in the downtown core, which was rebuilt in neoclassical style to resemble St. Petersburg. As elsewhere, technological advancements such as railroads and industrialization were a key factor behind the growth.

In the 1918 Finnish Civil War, most of Helsinki fell to the Red Guard along with the rest of southern Finland after brief fighting in January. The Senate was relocated to Vaasa, although some senators and officials remained in hiding in the capital. After the tide of war turned against the Red forces, German troops fighting on the same side with the Finnish White Guard recaptured Helsinki in April. Unlike Tampere, Helsinki suffered relatively little damage in the war. After the White victory many former Red soldiers and collaborators were confined in prison camps across the country. The largest, having approximately 13,300 prisoners, was located on the former naval fortress island of Suomenlinna in Helsinki. Although the civil war left a considerable scar on the society, the standard of living in the country and the city began to improve in the following decade. Renowned architects such as Eliel Saarinen created utopistic plans for Helsinki, but they were never realized to full extent.

In the aerial bombings of the Winter War (1939-40) and the Continuation War (1941-44) Helsinki was attacked by Soviet bombers. The most intense air raids took place in the spring of 1944, when over two thousand Soviet planes dropped some 16,000 bombs in and around the city. However, due to successful air defense the city was spared from the large-scale destruction that many other cities in Europe under similar scale bombings had suffered. Only a few bombs hit populated areas.

Despite the tumultous first half of the 20th century, Helsinki continued to develop steadily. The rapid urbanization of the 1970s, which occurred relatively late in the European context, tripled the population in the metropolitan area, making the Helsinki metropolitan area one of the fastest growing urban centers in the European Union in the 1990s. The relatively sparse population density of Helsinki and its peculiar structure have often been attributed to the lateness of the urbanisation. Today Helsinki is the second most sparsely populated European capital after Brussels.