Background

The population of Helsinki increased significantly after World War II (1939–45) with an increase of 82 per cent in 30 years.Footnote ⁷ Evacuees from the ceded Karelia region and migrants from the countryside poured into the capital city and the baby boom further increased the number of inhabitants. Moreover, the area of Helsinki expanded geographically in 1946.

In the 1950s, before the city of Helsinki effectively responded to the housing shortage, homes were generally overcrowded. Living was cramped in all social classes. In the late 1940s, the city authorities had even ordered that spare rooms in the bigger apartments should have compulsory lodgers. This coincided with a rapid increase in the birth rate, with the Finnish post-war baby boomers being born between 1945 and 1950. Due to overcrowding and small apartments, urban children spent plenty of time outdoors with other children. In line with studies carried out in Amsterdam, Finnish reminiscences confirm the dominance of outdoor play in 1950s Helsinki.Footnote ⁸ As Lisa Karsten put it, public space was defined as the ‘natural’ place for children, while home space was primarily defined as an adult space.Footnote ⁹ This was the case particularly with working-class children, who rarely had an opportunity to play with their friends at home.Footnote ¹⁰

The effort made for children to get as much fresh air, light and sunshine outdoors as possible was a major part of the hygiene movement in the early decades of the twentieth century, both in Finland and elsewhere. Tuberculosis was common, was spread in cramped living quarters, and there was no cure. All that could be done was to strengthen one's lungs and body to prevent the disease. Cities coped differently with increasing worries about urban health and the welfare of the young. According to David Pomfret, in inter-war Nottingham in England, young people were provided with clinics, open-air schools and playing fields within the city, whereas in Saint-Etienne in France the youth were offered extrication services.Footnote ¹¹ The custom of sending urban children to the countryside during the summer was also introduced in Finland.

However, not all outdoor spaces were recommended. Street life was often morally condemned; only vagrants and youth gangs wandered along city streets. From early on, the cities had been active in constructing legitimate public spaces for outdoor recreation, including parks and sport facilities for both children and adults. However, this was not enough for the post-war social reformists. They were urging that there should be proper facilities and better urban environment for families, i.e. garden cities.

The ideas were realized rather rapidly during post-World War II reconstruction. The structure of urban Helsinki began to change profoundly as new ideal suburban areas were built. In Kirsi Saarikangas’ words, ‘Finland was urbanized and modernized through becoming suburbanized.’Footnote ¹² The new suburbs offered not only bigger homes with proper heating and sanitary facilities for a greater number of people, but also outdoor green spaces for residents. Those close to nature suburbs were considered particularly ideal for families with children.

The contrast with earlier urban planning was pronounced. The new suburbs created during the 1950s and early 1960s featured either long four-floor apartment buildings or separate high-rises loosely scattered among the natural formations of the landscape. The street design was branch-like and there was plenty of space between the buildings, in strong contrast to urban city blocks. The new housing areas were praised by contemporary media: ‘there was sun, freedom and fresh air for the new generation to grow up as brave and high-spirited youngsters’.Footnote ¹³

Due to the massive suburban construction projects, overcrowding in the central city was alleviated even though the capital continued to attract migrants from the countryside. From 1962 to 1987, the population of central Helsinki dropped 39 per cent, whereas that of suburban Helsinki grew almost 66 per cent, from 195,000 to 324,000.Footnote ¹⁴ New city streets and an expanding transportation system altered the urban landscape of Helsinki. From 1950 to 1980, the number of registered cars rose from 6,035 to 114,796.Footnote ¹⁵ Concurrently, the number of car accidents increased.

Professional discourses and children's experiences

In a well-known pamphlet, Koti vaiko kasarmi lapsillemme (Home or barracks for our children) from 1946, Heikki von Hertzen demanded better housing quality, and greener and more spacious living environments for citizens and especially for families. Von Hertzen was the executive manager of Väestöliitto (the Finnish Population and Family Welfare Federation), which later published the journals Asuntopolitiikka (Housing Policy), 1950–66, and Valtakunnansuunnittelu-Asuntopolitiikka (National Planning), 1967–72, delivered to politicians and professionals dealing with housing issues. The authors of these magazines were respected architects such as Alvar Aalto and planner and architect Otto-Iivari Meurman, politicians such as Kaarlo af Heurlin and the social reformist and garden city advocate, Heikki von Hertzen. Von Hertzen and Meurman were active in demanding family-oriented urban planning and referred to visionary reformists such as American sociologist Lewis Mumford. They were also influenced by earlier social reformists. For example, Ebenezer Howard, according to Robert Fishman, had believed that ‘radical reconstruction of the cities would solve not only the urban crisis of their time but also the social crisis as well’.Footnote ¹⁶ Von Hertzen and Meurman believed too that family values could better flourish in proper housing conditions instead of the dark and cramped slums of the old city. This was the general consensus in all the source materials examined up until the 1960s, when newly built suburbs started being increasingly criticized by a new generation of architects.

In order to include the views of another type of expertise, the magazine Lapsi ja nuoriso (Child and Youth), 1955–72, was also incorporated in the source material for this study. It was published by the Central Union for Child Welfare, aimed at audiences working with children and young people and gave voice to various professionals: psychologists, social workers, teachers, day care workers as well as playground leaders and other experts.

The concern for children's spatial needs both indoors and out was also strongly present in three publications by a Finnish NGO, the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare.Footnote ¹⁷ The authors, architect Tapio Periäinen and child advocate Seppo Sauro, did not make an argument for the reconstruction of entire cities but pointed out that children's diverse needs, such as play spaces and protection, had to be taken into account in urban planning.

In addition, the corresponding garden city ideals were discussed widely in the popular media. Even though primarily an interior design magazine, Kaunis koti (Beautiful Home), 1948–71, which merged with Avotakka (Open Hearth) in 1971, debated issues of housing environment, but often from the perspective of individual families. Even wider audiences were reached through documentary films, either those produced for tax reduction purposes shown before feature films in cinemas or the later ones produced for television. We selected five documentary films for analysis. Two short documentary films presented reports on children's free time from an adult perspective.Footnote ¹⁸ Additionally, two longer 20-minute documentary films were directed by a promising young filmmaker Risto Jarva. The documentary film in particular, which described the possibilities of the new urban life in a positive tone, received a lot of attention in Finland. The last one selected was a three-minute clip from a 1976 television documentary forcefully criticizing the dull life of children in a Finnish suburb and using strong words and images.Footnote ¹⁹

The published material gathered for analysis was available for both professional and wider audiences. Some authors wrote with the agenda of raising money for construction projects, thus the rhetoric used was rather forceful. Accordingly, the focus of the research has been on the active role of the written and visual material in constructing social reality. The methodology used could be called historical discourse analysis, where the emphasis is on the historical context of the categorizations and the logic of the argumentation. The analysis was systematic, identifying typical structures of signification in the statements of authors holding expert positions. The texts were analysed as social practice, with a coding frame of problem, reason, solution and an ideal state of matters, and possible threats. Special attention with thematic coding was paid to arguments and descriptions of the old and densely populated centre of Helsinki, as well as to claims about the garden city, suburbs and children's needs in the city in general.

The view of the social reformists, urban planners and other experts would be rather one-sided if the experiences of the children themselves were not considered here. For that purpose, an oral history perspective was also included. A similar approach has been used by environmental historian Simo Laakkonen, whose research project collected written reminiscences from an earlier period, mainly from the 1920s to the 1950s. The responses depict a rather active and nature-oriented picture of children's mobility in Helsinki. Even the pre-suburban capital offered plenty of nature and open spaces, and children wandered freely, went swimming, cycling and picked berries and mushrooms.Footnote ²⁰ This was very different from what one would conclude from the writings of the urban planning experts at that time.

Reminiscences related to the urban surroundings in the city of Helsinki have also been collected by different city district organizations. Here, we made use of reminiscences gathered in Helsinki's central Töölö as well as suburban Siilitie and Kontula.Footnote ²¹ In addition, the major newspaper Helsingin Sanomat collected experiences of living in 38 suburbs of the Helsinki metropolitan area in the 1990s, which provided plentiful memories from childhood and adolescent years.Footnote ²² Despite the different purposes and occasions of these collections of reminiscences in the late 1990s and early 2000s, either for research, community history or journalism, the contents are very similar. They are all written reminiscences, and represent answers to open calls by the organizers. The tradition of collecting personal reminiscences is strong in Finland, and the idea of writing one's own history is one that has gained considerable popularity. Of course, this kind of oral history material naturally has its own characteristics and limitations.

Written reminiscences offer an insight into experiences, emotional positions and attitudes rather than proof of events in the past. However, for the purposes of exploring how children interacted with their environment during these times, the reminiscences are very fruitful. As Pia Olsson has noted, children tend to value their environment for the framework it provides for different activities, not for its aesthetic qualities.Footnote ²³ Of course, childhood memories are afterimages, filtered by adult views and later life courses. They are full of nostalgia, and the negative memories of unfortunate incidents, fear and anxiety are most frequently reported when trials and tribulations are overcome. Consequently, the contemporary professional discourses and the reminiscences are not juxtaposed as such, but are triangulated for a multiperspective analysis.

The dangers of downtown streets

How was the ideal urban space for children projected in the public discourses by social reformists and other planners after World War II? First and foremost, a city environment was considered too dangerous for children. This message is expressed frequently in the source material, even though the number of cars was quite modest in the early post-war years. In 1950, there were approximately 15 automobiles per 1,000 inhabitants; 30 years later, the number was 291. The increase within what was roughly the same spatial area was very notable, and led to the increase of accidents. On average, three people died in Finland every day in traffic accidents in the 1960s. The rate began to fall only in the early 1970s due to improved roads, safer vehicles, tighter road legislation, new and safer infrastructures and education as well as more effective first responders and medical treatment.Footnote ²⁴

Childhood reminiscences, professional discourses and traffic accident statistics all confirm the significant change that automobiles brought to the city and its children. In Amsterdam, too, the loss of children's outdoor space has been mainly explained as a result of the space lost to increasing traffic especially between 1950 and 1975.Footnote ²⁵ This was an important agenda for contemporaries in Finland as well. One of the main arguments for the new kind of residential areas was said to be the dangers of automobiles in the city centre. As increasing traffic was seen as inevitable and uncontrollable, children were to be relocated from the city centre to safer areas, i.e. the garden cities and suburbs.

However, the benefits of having a large variety of children's play spaces and the importance of free street play, often depicted in childhood reminiscences, was ignored in Finnish discussions, whereas in England, for instance, despite some criticism, special play streets were introduced as early as the 1930s. According to Krista Cowman, play streets closed to traffic for the most of the day became popular in post-war England and were actively defended by working-class mothers.Footnote ²⁶ Campaigns for play streets in working-class districts were fuelled by growing criticism of cars ‘which they [campaign leading women] considered illegitimate travellers through their streets rather than an accepted part of their life’.Footnote ²⁷ The solution offered by social reformists to the traffic problem in Finland was the total separation of motorized traffic from pedestrians. ‘Children have to get from home to school without crossing one road’Footnote ²⁸ was written in Asuntopolitiikka in 1950. This separation was not carried out in downtown Helsinki but it was in the new suburbs. In the Finnish discourses, the need for separate playgrounds, sports fields and other child-specific spaces was also emphasized.

Not only the traffic but also the ‘social dangers’ of the city were central justifications for relocating families from the city centre to the suburbs of Helsinki. Social dangers were rarely defined clearly by contemporaries; however, they were essentially considered to be related to crime and alcoholism.Footnote ²⁹ Improving housing conditions, substituting the dark and cramped habitation of the downtown with new dwellings in the suburbs was believed to have an instantaneous positive effect on families. The pursuit of shaping the urban environment and especially children's use of space was a tool for shaping the whole nation.

Architect and planner Otto-Iivari Meurman had a solution to the poor living conditions of urban children. In his influential textbook Asemakaavaoppi (Town planning), widely used in the training of the new urban planners, Meurman expressed in detail the demands for a child-friendly scale in urban planning and refined the ideas of the garden city movement. Although complete garden cities were never actualized in Finland, according to Ulla Salmela ‘the garden city idea was consciously adopted as a manifold whole’ by Finnish planners.Footnote ³⁰

In Meurman's view, a ‘stroller-distance’ was the ideal scale for a residential unit. Homes were expected to be close enough to shops, children's day care centres, playgrounds and other services. The neighbourhood unit was supposed to offer services such as a school and a small shopping centre. The standard distance for a child's walk to school was short, ideally 600–800 metres. The neighbourhood would ideally also include services such as sports fields and other recreational facilities.Footnote ³¹ Not all the suburbs wound up with such good services, although similarly designed services can be found in many of the Finnish suburbs.

It can be argued that the mission to create safer environments for children was fulfilled. Traffic accidents decreased despite the fact that the volume of traffic kept growing.Footnote ³² It can even be argued that the new suburban environments enabled the continuation of children's independent mobility – the separation of traffic and pedestrians and the walkability of the suburbs made it possible for children to move about without constant adult supervision.

However, city planning also ended up isolating families with children in their own suburban neighbourhoods by choosing not to develop downtown Helsinki into a more child-friendly environment and by assigning the suburbs as the only suitable option for family living. The post-war suburbs with their roots in garden city utopias continued to be considered an ideal urban environment for families for decades. Lilius has argued that there is still a lack of understanding about family living in the city centre among city planners and politicians because ‘modernist ideals on proper family living still prevail’.Footnote ³³

The desire for green

The journal Asuntopolitiikka for professional audiences continued to repeat the ideas presented in the pamphlet ‘Home or barracks for our children’ (1946) during the 1950s and 1960s. Also, Kaunis Koti for the public emphasized the need for greener environments for children. New ideal woodland suburbs were actively discussed in other media too. What was not mentioned, however, was that even the old downtown areas of Finnish cities were also relatively green.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, depicting them as sunless stone quarters was an exaggeration.

Helsinki was founded in 1812 as the capital city of the new grand duchy of the Russian empire. Urban green became an important part of construction of the new capital especially from the late nineteenth century. However, for a long period of time, the planned parks were concentrated in better-off areas.Footnote ³⁵ The need for green areas for the lower classes as well had been articulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but the proximity of open green spaces in Helsinki may have hindered the motivation to plan new parks in working-class neighbourhoods.Footnote ³⁶

According to historian Katri Lento, from the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1960s, the interest in planning and building green areas was exceptionally high in Helsinki. The private garden community of Kulosaari, the working-class garden projects of Käpylä and rental district of Vallila, public parks, sports fields, the increasing number of children's camps in the countryside and German-style allotment gardens attest to the interest in green planning.Footnote ³⁷ However, in the material analysed for this study, the presence of existing greenery in the city centre was overlooked.

In 1950, architect Alvar Aalto complained that there was only one tree per 17 families when the situation was supposed to be the opposite.Footnote ³⁸ Parks in the city were no longer considered to be sufficient by many post-war commentators; instead, family homes needed to be relocated closer to nature.

All in all, the threats and problems that city life, with its dangerous traffic and poor housing conditions, posed to children in Helsinki were to be avoided by relocating residents to the new garden cities, rather than imposing restrictions on city traffic or making the city centre safer, greener or friendlier for children.

Contemporary ideals were given a testing ground with the model suburb of Tapiola, built 10 kilometres west of central Helsinki in the 1950s and 1960s. With housing and shopping centres close to green areas, Tapiola was promoted as a ‘Garden City’ or ‘New Town’.Footnote ³⁹ The realization of Tapiola was an initiative of the Housing Foundation (Asuntosäätiö), founded together with six social organizations. The aim was to build a new housing environment as an alternative to Helsinki's densely populated centre. Children and families were at the core of the planning: numerous facilities for children's hobbies ranging from scouts’ huts to youth centres and sports fields were created.

Tapiola was actively promoted and the project received much publicity both in Finland and abroad. The newly fashioned apartments and neighbourhoods were introduced and praised in dozens of articles and the new city was warmly received. However, in the late 1960s, some criticism emerged. The suburb was criticized for its lack of services, for being too family-oriented, and the residents of Tapiola were said to be too homogeneous. Distances to services and children's routes to school were considered too long. Sidewalks were still missing and the bicycle paths and pedestrian crossings were felt to be dangerous. Children were playing in the streets and in parking lots. The goal of a safe urban environment had not yet been achieved, some thought. However, it was noted that Tapiola residents were content with their neighbourhood and the city itself could still be considered an exemplary residential area.Footnote ⁴⁰

In reply to the critique, the managing director of the Housing Foundation, Heikki von Hertzen, wrote that he was still content with Tapiola. He argued that the expectations for the garden city had been very high, even impossible to fulfil, but that the area was still extraordinary compared to the other suburbs built elsewhere at the time.Footnote ⁴¹ However, the uniqueness of the project can be questioned. The principles of functional and green urban planning had led to rather similar results in other contemporary suburbs, although the extent and range of the elements of a ‘garden city’ varied. Be this as it may, the post-war social reformists had (yet) again accomplished their mission: children were saved from the increasing traffic, and many families had relocated from city centres or the countryside to more spacious homes in the green suburbs.

Designed and undesigned space for physical activities

In the pursuit of more beneficial neighbourhoods in the discourses of the 1940s, the demand for green surroundings was closely related to the need for physical activity, which had been a cause for concern since the late nineteenth century. Living close to nature was thought to be automatically stimulating, whereas traditional urban dwelling was considered to make people passive, or to drive them to less desirable activities such as going to the cinema or to cafés!Footnote ⁴² Increasing interest in people's physical condition was connected with concerns about indecent behaviour and other moral issues. Health issues were increasingly being defined as social problems. Disease had earlier been viewed as a natural and mainly unavoidable phenomenon, but growth in scientific knowledge had framed it as a problem of the individual and the nation. The size and the health of the populace was seen as an important indicator of the strength of a nation. On the other hand, the project of public hygiene was undertaken to correct the negative effects of industrialization, urbanization and poor living conditions.

In the texts of garden city advocates, children would ideally play in their own backyards or in the nearby forest. If that was not possible, they would be offered playgrounds, sandboxes and apparatus such as climbing frames and swings. During the winter, children needed skating rinks and hills for sledging. Making use of the natural environment and good sports and hobby infrastructures would solve the problem of increasing free time and the lack of other appropriate activities. Indeed, the greater amount of available spare time was seen as a problem that needed to be solved.

Active work to promote playgrounds had begun in Helsinki at the beginning of the twentieth century. Teachers of physical education had submitted a proposal to the city council to develop its playgrounds. In addition to parks, they requested funding for playground leaders to supervise children's play in the afternoons.Footnote ⁴³ Playgrounds were seen as the solution to cramped housing, poor air quality and social isolation, especially for working-class children. At the same time, teachers had introduced summer camps and visits to farming families in the countryside for urban working-class children. The health and decency of children were a major concern of the different non-governmental organizations of the emerging citizen-state.

The network of sport grounds and parks with play areas was rather dense in the 1930s, but proper supervised playgrounds for children were mostly established from the 1950s onwards. The number of year-round playgrounds increased in Helsinki from 2 to 56 between 1951 and 1994, on top of smaller playgrounds and schoolyards freely open for the afternoons.

Because of the centralized organization and a tradition of strict regulations by the superintendents, the playgrounds remained as quite disciplined environments. Playground leaders had silver whistles carved with the city coat of arms, a manifest symbol of municipal power. Organized activities, such as games and singing, were preferred to free play.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1957, the playground officer of the city of Helsinki participated in a UN Europe playground seminar. Much of the discussion focused on ‘Robinson playgrounds’, where older children could be active and creative. According to contemporary experts, playgrounds should be more rudimentary, inspiring imagination and ingenuity and thereby cultivating children's spontaneity and self-esteem.Footnote ⁴⁵

Robinson playgrounds provided material for making camp fires, building sheds or even digging tunnels on a model already established in Switzerland and Denmark. The Danish idea of ‘junk playgrounds’ was developed further in post-war Britain. Blighted or blitzed urban neighbourhoods provided a unique solution, for bombed-out empty lots contained genuine junk for children to play with. These adventure playgrounds would promote active citizenship and reconstruction through play.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Finnish delegation was reluctant to accept these kinds of ideas, for how could a sense of beauty be developed in children in this way? The need for more adventurous playgrounds was for the most part denied. First, there were still plenty of green spaces in Finnish cities, and in any case, city children were sent to the countryside during the summer ‘where the best play areas actually existed’.Footnote ⁴⁷

Countless childhood memories describe the excitement of exploring wastelands, empty plots and sand pits. Such places were found everywhere in constantly transforming cities where construction, rebuilding and even restoration took place after the ravages of war. In one reminiscence, a wasteland area within the middle-class urban neighbourhood of Töölö was described as ‘a world, as essential as the “grund” of school boys in Ference Molnár's Budapest’.Footnote ⁴⁸ As another writer from the same quarter portrayed his childhood as a 10-year-old boy in the 1940s: ‘if there hadn't been a vacant lot nearby I have no idea where kids my age could have played’. There was a well-kept park in his area, but the swings were restricted to small children, it was closed at night and it had a park guard.Footnote ⁴⁹ The asphalted backyards provided some excitement along with the lively street life, but children were often not allowed to play there. This prohibition was enforced by the strict caretakers of the apartment buildings, often remembered by the fear they instilled in the children.

While the garden city advocates focused their critique on the dark asphalt quarters downtown, they forgot how green their city actually was. In addition to the designed parks, sports grounds and allotment gardens, there were plenty of wooded areas with rocks and boulders and the seashore at a short biking distance from anywhere in the city.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, the city playground officer in 1957 was right – nature provided more than enough diversity to feed the imagination of children in the city itself. As they wrote at the time, the situation was not as drastic as in the slums of London.Footnote ⁵¹ The extreme outbursts of post-war planning experts demanding green areas meant they were stuck in the old discourse of cramped industrial city slums, ‘the filthy vaults of European cities’ already feared in the nineteenth century. Although alarmism was, of course, an efficient rhetorical means to promote their causes.

The suburban reality of the 1960s and 1970s

In the mid-1960s, a major paradigmatic change occurred in suburban planning ideals. The notion of forest suburbs close to nature was rejected. It was replaced by a compact city model, reintroducing the square shape block and street pattern, and emphasizing efficiency and the support of sociability.Footnote ⁵² As a manifestation of this new paradigm, the new generation of architects organized two public events in 1966, Asuntopäivät (Housing Event) and Asuntonäyttely 66 (Housing Fair 66). The timing guaranteed wide attention; at the end of the same year, the National Housing Board was founded, and there were plans to build half a million new apartments during the next 10 years.Footnote ⁵³

The new generation's critique was directed at the principle of the scattered forests of garden suburbs and the spatial separation of different activities. The task of design, they argued, was not only to build decent apartments but also to create a socially functioning environment. This demand had been made before, but now it referred to quite the opposite from the 1940s and 1950s discourse. This time, a dense city structure which would guarantee a variety of services, leisure activities and contacts was required. The characteristics called for were diversity, vitality, stimuli and efficiency.Footnote ⁵⁴ To stimulate what was seen as the inadequate social life of the suburbs, these specialists relied on scientific planning of compact-type suburbs with space carefully created for diverse activities.

The western ideals of post-war urban planning, including the garden city and its Nordic versions – suburbs in the forest – were increasingly being questioned in the Finnish press from the 1960s on.Footnote ⁵⁵ The remote locations and poor public transport were criticized. The lack of infrastructure was also seen to have made suburban life monotonous, and the neighbourhoods were derided as being dull and lifeless. Suburbs were no longer even seen as ideal for children. There were no children's playground attendants as in the city centre, who would give mothers a chance to go downtown. According to the discourse, the lonely housewives felt abandoned and their small children suffered. The radical young architects of the 1966 exhibition had even questioned whether the peaceful surroundings of forest suburbs were suitable for children to grow up in. To them, it was the lively streets of the city centre that taught children to adapt to real society. Nor, they claimed, did children like the dull engineered playgrounds provided for them.Footnote ⁵⁶

The critique of suburbs as unattractive surroundings became stronger in the 1970s and the consequences for children were also at stake. Seppo Sauro argued in the report of the NGO Mannerheim League for Child Welfare in 1977 that children growing up in suburbs might be too separated from the rest of society. The television documentary ‘Children in the suburbs’ (1976) went even further, stating that it was a ‘crime against children’ to continue with the building patterns practised at the time. The documentary claimed that a childhood spent in a dull and lifeless environment could potentially cause ‘insensitivity, violent eruptions and inability to perceive beauty and affection’.Footnote ⁵⁷

The critics were right in arguing that children need organic and not overly organized space for play and creativity. This was also well known by contemporary playground designers, who advocated places that inspired creative play. On the other hand, the denigrated forest suburbs were exactly what many children loved. Innumerable oral accounts and written reminiscences describe the sense of free play and adventure in the open spaces between the apartment buildings, and the vast areas around them.

Urban experiences of children

During the era of cramped housing, the outdoor environment played a major role in the lives of children. There was a lack of space indoors, and, furthermore, family time was scarce because of the long working hours of both parents. If mothers did not have paid work outside the home, their time was taken up in household chores. In addition, due to the rigorous health education, outdoor fresh air was considered to be imperative for children. Finnish babies still sleep outside even with temperatures below freezing.

As Laakkonen put it, children and the urban environment were connected by play. The pre-war downtown backyards might have been dull and plain, but a lot went on there. The labyrinths of cellars and attics, chasing rats and spying on locals provided excitement. Log piles provided adventure, and during the winter there were huge snowbanks to play on. On the other hand, various aspects of city life, including drunks and vagrants searching for shelter and scanning garbage bins, aroused fear. However, children's territories were not restricted to yards. Except for the youngest children, the diverse urban nature was close at hand and independently reachable. This was also true of various industrial zones that attracted the curious.Footnote ⁵⁸ Along similar lines, Heikki Paunonen, Jani Vuolteenaho and Terhi Ainiala noted that children's play in self-discovered areas in central Helsinki's working-class neighbourhood of Sörnäinen was often similar to the play of rural children.Footnote ⁵⁹

However, in the professional discourses from the 1940s to the early 1960s, the downtown urban environment was rarely considered suitable for children. Only one article noted that school-age boys actually liked to play in the labyrinthine backyards of the old city.Footnote ⁶⁰ This paradigm started to change only in the late 1960s.

In several studies based on reminiscence, the ultimate enemies for children were adults. Caretakers and guards surveyed the yards and parks: ‘[he] chased away both girls and boys from the yard, no bouncing balls against the walls, no drawing hopscotch grids on the asphalt. You weren't even allowed to lean against the walls.’Footnote ⁶¹ In the Siilitie district, the caretaker made young boys wash a garage door marked by a football.Footnote ⁶² The right of any adult to give orders to any child was common at least until the 1970s. In an interview in 1972, a 10-year-old girl said she was pleased about playgrounds because everything was forbidden in her own yard. An 8-year-old boy wanted to get rid of the playground staff because adults were always nagging, and another girl, aged 10, continued that adults never allowed anything fun and considered everything to be dangerous.Footnote ⁶³

The new suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s particularly attracted families with children. The apartments were either sold with a special loan arrangement or were rented from the city. Dozens of accounts attest to the move from the very cramped and run-down one- to two-room residences downtown to bright and spacious new apartments with modern conveniences. Children enjoyed playing together in the large yards between apartment blocks. In addition, woods, rocks, cliffs and meadows opened up right behind the apartment buildings. As one female respondent recalled about the 1970s, the kids were wild and free and there were considerable opportunities for them to expend their energy.Footnote ⁶⁴ The forest suburbs promoted by the 1940s and 1950s experts and criticized in the 1960s were loved by the children themselves. They provided freedom for play and adventure away from adults’ prying eyes.

The reverse side of this freedom was the danger and accidents. Minor bicycle accidents were common and major ones were long remembered. Risky play was more typical of boys, but girls too were interested in adventure. The rocks and cliffs around Helsinki attracted both boys and girls, offering exciting experiences of danger. This was also true of the industrial areas within the city, strictly forbidden to trespassers, with even more serious consequences.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a reminiscence from 1970s Siilitie, a girl took part in searching for things in the garbage bins of an industrial plant. She described how they got there through a pipe tunnel, and mentioned how she enjoyed bicycling in the wide, quiet streets.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the suburbs as well as the central city, both the green and grey wastelands were explored by children. Traffic could cause harm anywhere, but the most warned about perils besides the traffic were child molesters.

During the 1970s, prominent public discourse related to the suburbs was problem-orientated. The suburbs were not only criticized for poor urban planning, they were also accused of having anti-social inhabitants. One aspect of the discourse was clashes between youth gangs. The children of the new suburbs had grown into rebellious youngsters, with nothing to do around their neighbourhood. This common negative view was challenged in the media of the 1990s by nostalgia for the suburbs. They had been wonderful surroundings for children to grow up in, plenty of playmates were at hand and nature was close by.Footnote ⁶⁷ Whatever the experts of the different decades had said, children preferred open and undesigned space to city streets.