IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/rppexx/v40y2025i3p707-724.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Old and New Vallila. The early years of affordable housing production in Helsinki

Author

Listed:
  • Riitta Nikula

Abstract

Vallila is a showcase of Finnish social housing at the beginning of the twentieth century. Old wooden Vallila was built 1908–1915. It consisted of 22 small building lots, all meant to be built as one family houses by standardized drawings. As times were poor, the population grew out of control. In 1908, Bertel Jung started his work as the first town planning architect of Helsinki. He signed the first town plan for New Vallila in 1913, aiming at a clearly urban environment. Houses of three to four floors height were regulated by detailed facade schemes. Trees and greenery were respected in New stone Vallila and some blocks were built around private courtyards (Swedish name: storgårdskvarter). The biggest and most impressive of them is the block 555, started in 1916 as a company dwelling, and finished as a semi-communal project in 1929. The architects were Armas Lindgren and Bertel Liljequist. During the 1920s townscape was internationally in the spotlight, and Finnish architects followed keenly Nordic and German examples. They read and travelled a widely. Contacts with Swedish colleagues brought the peculiar dwelling type of landshövdingehus from Gothenburg to New Vallila. Italian architecture gave faith in the ever-lasting value of classicism.

Suggested Citation

  • Riitta Nikula, 2025. "Old and New Vallila. The early years of affordable housing production in Helsinki," Planning Perspectives, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 40(3), pages 707-724, May.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:rppexx:v:40:y:2025:i:3:p:707-724
    DOI: 10.1080/02665433.2024.2367634
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02665433.2024.2367634
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/02665433.2024.2367634?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:rppexx:v:40:y:2025:i:3:p:707-724. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/rppe20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.