IDENTITY, IMAGE

Let us say that you are buying a new apartment for your family. What choice do you make first? Do you first choose the building firm you want the house to be built by? You do not.

Do you choose the colour of the kitchen cupboards first? You do not.
The first choice you make is the area you want to live in. An area that suits your lifestyle and day to day work journeys. An area where you think you and your family will enjoy living.

Older residential areas have developed strong identities over the years. Popular living districts attract people, even though the homes may be small or old-fashioned.
New residential areas are typically lacking in characteristic identities that serve to attract people to them. An attractive identity, answering the needs of buyers is not formed by accident, it has to be constructed. In planning an area, it first has to be decided what kind of identity it will have, and it then has to be aimed at systematically building this.

Why does a new residential area need a strong identity?

• People in the modern world express their identities more than ever before through their area of residence. People chop and change jobs and places of work much more than in former days and the tendency to identify yourself through your profession is on the way out.
• Instead people prioritise the need to belong to their area of residence more than ever before. To meet these needs residential areas need to be built with their own strong and attractive identities, to which residents will want to commit themselves.

Finland needs new attractive residential areas with their own individual flavour that answer the needs and dreams of their future residents. These new areas need to have an attractive spirit and identity built into them in order to become competitive, also in comparison to popular older living areas.

• Having secure and pleasant residential areas is a big competitive plus point in the fast globalising world economy, when it comes to luring educated leading experts in their fields to come and live in Finland rather than somewhere else.