Demographics
Helsinki has a higher proportion of women (53.4%) than elsewhere in Finland (51.1%). Helsinki's current population density of 2,739.36 people per square kilometer is by far the highest in Finland. Life expectancy for both genders is slightly below the national averages: 75.1 years for men as compared to 75.7 years, 81.7 years for women as compared to 82.5 years.
Helsinki has experienced strong growth since the 1810s, when it replaced Turku as the capital of the Grand Duchy of Finland, which later became the sovereign Republic of Finland. The city continued to show strong growth from that time onwards, with the exception during the Finnish Civil War period. From the end of World War II up until the 1970s there was a massive exodus of people from the countryside to the cities of Finland, in particular Helsinki. Between 1944 and 1969 the population of the city nearly doubled from 275,000 to 525,600.
In the 1960s, the population growth of Helsinki proper began to ebb mainly due to lack of housing. Many residents began to move to neighboring Espoo and Vantaa, where population growth has since soared. Espoo's population increased ninefold in sixty years, from 22,874 people in 1950 to 244,353 in 2009. Neighboring Vantaa has seen even more dramatic change in the same time span: from 14,976 in 1950 to 197,663 in 2009, a thirteenfold increase. These dramatic increases pushed the municipalities of greater Helsinki into more intense cooperation in such areas as public transportation and waste management. The increasing scarcity of housing and the higher costs of living in the Helsinki metropolitan area have pushed many daily commuters to find housing in formerly very rural areas, and even further, to such cities as Lohja (50 kilometres or 30 miles northwest from the city centre), Hämeenlinna and Lahti (both 100 kilometres or 60 miles from Helsinki), and Porvoo (50 kilometres to the east).
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