Editorial: Feeling at home in fifty-year-old Vantaa

We all have some place we call home. A place where we are from or a place where we have settled down and which we today consider our home. This home region defines our identity in terms of what separates us from and connects us to others. Next year, we will celebrate Vantaa’s 50th anniversary as a city that almost 250,000 people now call home.

The jubilee year of Vantaa will begin with New Year celebrations, and after that, one of the main events of the year will be the National Local Heritage Conference in August–September. In addition to cultural heritage, the National Local Heritage Conference will be about celebrating urban life, inclusion and our multicultural city.

The Finnish Local Heritage Federation, the Vantaa-Seura association, has been operating actively in Vantaa since the 1960s, and Vantaa has always had plenty of other associations – city district clubs are particularly popular. Supporting and strengthening participation and local democracy structures should continue in the future.

Therefore, I invite you, current and former Vantaa residents, to take part in the city’s history committee’s project that collects residents’ memories.

In Vantaa, local spirit is often seen through people’s own villages and city districts – people are proud residents of Korso or Martinlaakso, for example. This is the true Vantaa spirit!  

Vantaa is young and old at the same time. The historic heart of our city, the parish village of Helsinki, will serve as the stage for side events during the National Local Heritage Conference. The trips and tours held in connection with the National Local Heritage Conference are the perfect opportunity to learn more about the layered nature of Vantaa and its, perhaps partly forgotten, long history. Guides will lead their groups along King’s Road, the mediaeval main road of the city, to visit historical manors.

Vantaa is full of local uniqueness, and the layers of the region’s history and the present day shape the local spirit and love that residents have for Vantaa. Due to its location, Vantaa has always been a city of both migrants and travellers who have come and continue to come from other parts of Finland and different parts of the world. We consider every migrant a resident of Vantaa from day one.

Our city is the most international in Finland, and the theme of our jubilee year, Kotona Vantaalla (“At home in Vantaa”), reflects the city residents who in the summer 2022 survey said that being in Vantaa feels like you have found your place in the world. This is a fine way to express the feeling that you would want everyone to feel when they think about their home. The theme of the jubilee year is ‘At home in Vantaa’, and the purpose of the jubilee year is to show that there is no need to go anywhere; we are at home!

Pekka Timonen, Mayor

^{This article was published in Residents' magazine 4/2023. Read the other articles on the resident magazine home page!}