Although the majority of Finns live in towns — and a very large proportion of those in the capital metropolitan area — I often notice that the concept of home is thought of in terms of the countryside: fields, forests, lakes, individual houses or villages.The great migration from country to town which has been in progress over the past century is still familiar to a large proportion of Finns; there are still very few second- or third-generation Helsinki-dwellers.
     When I had lived for two years in a southern Finnish village and was preparing to move back to my home town, Helsinki, I was told that I was 'longing for the big smoke'. I tried to explain that I was just homesick.
     The images of the photographer Pentti Sammallahti (see page 120) beautifully depict my home city, not its monumental centre, the intersections of commerce and traffic, but sights and atmospheres which touch the heart of the native. Bo Carpelan's poems record life in this city at different times and for people of different ages. Sadly enough, Michel Ekman, commenting the poems and photographs, is also right in his characterisation of Helsinki today: greed and indifference are making the city increasingly boring.
     Once the city's charm was underlined by the fact that not everything was finished or planned. In the best parts of the city there were often empty sites growing buttercups and cow parsley. A waste in economic terms, but from the resident's point of view a breath of fresh air, even of positive anarchy.
     Hannu Luntiala's short story En ole mikään luontoihminen ('Nature's not my thing', page 98) describes a trip into 'nature': an urban man decides to acquaint himself with an unknown environment, the forest. It is said that Finns have a profound connection with nature, which Luntiala parodies; the story's Kumpula is not exactly a wilderness, just a residential area a few kilometres from the centre of the capital. Still, it is true that it includes water-ways, meadows and forest that have not been tamed into a park.
     Helsinki's contemporary building policies can be seen as a part of what is happening to Finland. The writer and poet Paavo Haavikko presents his own mercilessly pessimistic view of this in his new aphoristic prose work, discussing both people and trees (see page 103). He believes that Finland has sold itself to the European Union and its values. Decisions are dictated outside the country's borders, and in a world of globalising economics citizens have little power — and trees have even less!
     The filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki's 'loser trilogy' depicts life in the city (see page 129); it has become customary to add that it is 'Kaurismäki's Helsinki', his image of it. Of course his city is made up of many parts; the same is true of fiction in general. The trilogy eloquently describes what I have seen happen in this city. Where wasteland is scheduled for business palaces, something human is lost along with the landscape. The built environment reflects human values.
     New residential areas are being built everywhere, but who, in the excitement of development, has time to ask by whose rules, and for whom?

Kristina Carlson
Editor-in-Chief