Creative classes migrating to small towns
Loviisa, 100 km. from Helsinki, sees small influx from Helsinki area
By Ritva Liisa Snellman
“Find your own small town - come home to Loviisa.”
The website of the City of Loviisa knows how to entice those thinking of making a move. Who wouldn’t want to come home?
Slow life is a new middle-class dream. It means easygoing living in a small town with wooden houses, cobblestone streets, a traditional checkerboard town plan, and just enough cultural events that it is possible to participate in them.
Former Helsinki resident Camilla Berggren has done exactly what the City of Loviisa wants people to do. She moved from the centre of Helsinki 100 kilometres east, to a Loviisa neighbourhood dominated by wooden houses.
“I am originally from Vaasa, and for a long time I wanted to live in a smaller bilingual town with an active cultural life, which is close enough to Helsinki to visit now and then.”
“I thought about Tammisaari. Many Swedish-speaking Finns move there. It is full of pensioners and cultural figures.”
At the beginning of last year, Berggren was offered a job as editor-in-chief of the regional Swedish-language newspaper Östra Nyland in Loviisa. That was the deciding factor. Lush parks, old wooden houses, the sea, the peace of a small town, two languages, and an interesting job. It couldn’t have been better.
Her apartment in Helsinki is still there, but in the summer Berggren went and bought a house in Loviisa. The house, converted from a former Methodist church, was looking for a buyer, and the people in Loviisa felt that the new newspaper editor and the old house fit in well together. After a little bit of hesitation, Berggren agreed.
After a number of small repairs, the new home sits in well in its idyllic environment. The yard is frighteningly big, twice as large as what Berggren thought when she bought it. This brings on pressures, as it is the local custom to keep yards and gardens in tip-top shape.
“Time will tell, if this will be the first or second home. It depends on how Pena takes to living here.”
For now, husband Pentti Kemppainen spends more of his time in Helsinki with his writing and research, but Berggren has slipped into her life in Loviisa with its busy summer and sleepy winter.
“I am actually looking forward to the autumn, when silence descends on the city and I get to concentrate on my work."
The dimensions of Loviisa, a town of 7,000 residents, is topsy-turvy. An oversized church seems to block access to the city, administrative buildings look pompous, and the wooden houses of the lower town seem charmingly small.
Loviisa’s development has been the same kind of roller-coaster as that of many other seaside cities. Under the Russians, what had been an important fortress city turned into a spa location favoured by Russians. After independence, the city fell into hibernation of sorts, from which it was not aroused until the 1970s, when the construction of a nuclear power plant began in the city. But the surge of growth was followed by a hangover. In 1987 the population began to decline, and the city itself was overshadowed by the two nuclear reactors.
East was not a direction that interested those moving out of Helsinki, and if they did, Porvoo, which lies between Helsinki and Loviisa, got most of the movers. The road connection was also very poor for quite some time.
In 2004, the decline in the population evened out, and the number of inhabitants went into a cautious, although uneven rise. People are still leaving the city, but they also tend to move into it more than before.
“In the period between the years 2000 and 2008 there have been 3,500 newcomers”, says Timo Aro, a researcher into migration patterns.
A third of those moving to Loviisa are from neighbouring communities, but people also move there from Helsinki, Porvoo, and Espoo.
There are many returning former residents. Many former twon dwellers want to raise their children here, who in turn eventually want to leave - and then come back in their own time.
According to Timo Aro, the phenomenon can be seen in other parts of Finland as well. Many small towns that had been looked down on as dying communities have been revived. Naturally, compared with the biggest migration flows, the figures are quite small.
“The attractiveness of so-called old towns has grown in this decade. They attract residents who want more from the place where they live than just walls”, Aro says. “For instance, Kokkola has raised its profile, even though it is not reflected in statistics very much.”
The yearning for small towns is a reaction to the increasingly American style of urban development. In the 1990s, the slow city idea started in Southern and Central Europe, with the aim of emphasising the advantages of small size, local focus, and lack of haste.
The new migration trend also derives strength from nostalgia. When young people push into large cities, the older people dream of returning to their own roots. A return to an idyllic childhood is easier to carry out by moving to a small town that is already pleasant and quaint. More people also can afford to maintain two or even three houses or apartments, and to shuttle between them, depending on the season, and their frame of mind. The efficiency required by work has also led to the growth of slow hobbies, such as gardening, repairs, and restoration.
As emotions also have an impact on decisions to move, cities near growth centres, which can offer something extra, are attracting people. The sea, an idyllic environment, history, more than one language, and wooden houses interest many people. Adding to the attraction are the low prices of homes.
History, and bilingualism were factors when Satu and Timo Orenius made their choice.
“Two languages make Loviisa a town bigger than its actual size”, Satu Orenius says.
The two, who had lived abroad as diplomats for a long time, decided when they returned to get to know Finland again. They had a new place to live in mind, as Järvenpää, where they had lived before, had turned into a town of youth and merchants while they were living out of the country.
Timo Orenius retired five years ago, and a year later the couple became residents of Loviisa.
Their home is an old Russian villa on the southern ridge of the town. Remodelling the house was a frightening prospect for the two, who are not accustomed to home repairs. The two have turned slowness into a virtue. When rushing is slow, there is no time to make big mistakes.
The Oreniuses are happy with their third life: a pleasant community, pleasant people, and a job for Satu Orenius, who trained herself to be a restorer of furniture when she came back to Finland.
Near the Orenius workshop is the working space of composer Marcus Fagerudd, a typical sea-seeking mover.
The family started out in Helsinki, their life continued in Askola, and now they have been in Loviisa for more than two years.
Loviisa came as a coincidence. An appropriate house was found on the Internet, my wife was inspired, and now we are living here”, Fagerudd says. “The place seemed good intuitively.”
“This is no party town, but silence is good for a composer.
Translator Jaana Kapari has enjoyed the silence of Loviisa for eight years already. She moved here from Vantaa, following her parents’ example, after growing tired with life in the Helsinki region. Now her home is on the outskirts of town in the middle of a forest.
“A house from the 1950s is just right for a girl of the 1950s. The house is the only one that I looked at, and I bought it right away.
Most of the Finnish translations of Harry Potter originated in the upstairs working room, but the environment has inspired Jaana Kapari to do some original writing as well. Her first book appears in the autumn.
“At first I was so burned out over the Helsinki area, that I couldn’t even stand the sound of a combine harvester, thinking how much noise these country people make. Now I have calmed down.”
The creative classes seems to be pushing their way into Loviisa.
“It’s true, says Maria Schulgin. She knows nearly all of the old and new residents. The array of professions has certainly changed with the newcomers. “Photographers, cartoonists, artists, textile designers, theatre people, writers, craftsmen and craftswomen, graphic artists, architects, telecommuters, people of working age, and pensioners”, Schulgin says.
Schulgin is a good example herself of how newcomers can spruce up the atmosphere of a sleepy little town and have an impact on the image that it projects.
She moved to Loviisa herself eight years ago, when she was a journalist, and worked on a residential fair, in which residents could put their homes on display for people interested in old buildings.
Over the years the fair has developed into a massive event. Days of showcasing traditional construction and repair work are to be held in the last weekend of August for a fifth time running.
The event doubles the population of the city. During two days thousands of people interested in old buildings and in repairing them fill the streets and alleyways of Loviisa.
This summer as well, about 30 homes in Loviisa are open to visitors. This time the homes also function as galleries, as each of the houses has works of artists of the Finnish Artists Society.
One of the buildings on display is a duplex, in a building which used to serve as the Helgas Guest House. Living in it are the twin sisters Heli and Sini Hassinen with their children.
Theirs is the classical “I fell in love with an old house” story.
Heli Hassinen, who lived in Helsinki at the time, found an old guest house on Sibeliuksenkatu dating back to the 19th century. It had soul, but too much space. She persuaded her sister to look at it, even though she had sworn never to move out of Helsinki.
The sisters checked the house, sniffed around in the corners, and made an offer.
At Easter a year ago, the Hassinens became owners of a guest house. When schools let out for the summer, they quit their jobs, and moved with their children, cats, and dogs to Loviisa, and started to make the building livable, without any experience at all.
“For two months we worked on the house, and then we found jobs in Loviisa”, Heli Hassinen says.
The retirement community phenomenon, familiar from Tammisaari, can be seen in Loviisa as well. One in ten new residents is of retirement age.
Hanne Aromaa is a pensioner who has moved back to her old home town. The reason why she moved was the Villa Ekholm, her family’s house built 100 years ago, which she did not want to get rid of.
The building has been passed on from mother to daughter for four generations.
Today Aromaa goes to Helsinki only on her grandchildren’s special days. She spends her time from the spring to the autumn in the yard and garden.
But Loviisa also has summer cottages. Urban cottage folk prefer to get an old bungalow from a small town rather than a log cabin on the mosquito-ridden shore of a lake.
Marja-Leena and Juhani Tuunanen bought a building dating back to the 18th century 15 years ago as their weekend home, which they felt would be nice to fix and furnish.
Eight years ago the Tuunainens became residents of Loviisa, and their Helsinki home became a winter cottage. At the same time Marja-Leena Tuunanen’s career changed from that of a lawyer to that of a decorative painter.
“A cabin in Savo would not have been our thing”, Tuunanen says. “Here we have everything that a person could need within walking distance – the sea, the market, a library, the bus station, the hospital and an old people’s home.”
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.8.2009
Links:
Town of Loviisa website
RITVA LIISA SNELLMAN / Helsingin Sanomat
ritva.liisa.snellman@hs.fi
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| 25.8.2009 - THIS WEEK |
Creative classes migrating to small towns
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