Kauniainen (Swedish: Grankulla) is a Finnish city located in the
province of Uusimaa. Kauniainen is by far the smallest of the four
cities in the Helsinki metropolitan area and the smallest
municipality in Finland. Kauniainen is part of the Helsinki
metropolitan area. Kauniainen is known as a bilingual city with a
low municipal tax rate and high-income residents. The city is also
exceptional in that it is completely surrounded by Espoo. Kauniainen
is a densely populated self-governing area originally established by
the residents as a limited company.
59.5% of Kauniainen's
residents are Finnish-speaking and 34.1% Swedish-speaking. The
largest parties in Kauniainen City Council are the RKP, which
previously lost its simple majority (16/35 council seats) and the
Coalition Party (13/35) in the 2017 municipal elections. The
Kauniainen Council's small parties, the Greens (3), the Basic Finns
(1), the Christian Democrats (1) and the SDP (1) have a total of six
seats. 91% of Kauniainen's working-age residents have completed
post-primary education, which is the highest in Finland.
Kauniainen is a villa town and the villa area has been designated a nationally significant built cultural environment. In addition to nature, the area's most significant attractions are the old villas, for example Villa Wulff, Villa Junghans, Villa Heikel and Villa Vallmogård, Kauniainen Church, Kauniainen War Wounded Hospital and Heikki Häiväoja's Through the Fire sculpture, which is located in front of Kauniainen Town Hall.
The original Swedish name of Kauniainen, Grankulla, is a combination of the words Gran (fir) and kulle (hill, mound) and has been used in this form since the beginning of the 20th century. Before that, the place was known in the dialect form Gränkull, which appears on modern maps as the name of Kauniainen water tower hill. The Finnish name Kauniainen comes from a farm called Kauniais, which in turn got its name from a farm near Tampere. The Finnish name was introduced in the 1930s and became the official Finnish name of the township in 1949.
After the retreat of the ice after the ice age 10,000 years ago, only
a couple of small islets could be seen in Yoldiamere from present-day
Kauniais: among others, present-day Gränkull (67 m) and Kasavuori (64 m)
and Kiikarivuori. 4,000 years ago, the Kauniainen area had become part
of the inner archipelago due to land uplift. Ancient remains have been
found from this period, but it is still very likely that the first
inhabitants came to Kauniai only in the 19th century. Today, Kauniainen
is located far from the coast.
At the beginning of the 20th
century, the Kauniainen area belonged to the Espoo farms and the
building stock consisted of individual crofts. The place was then known
in the Espoo dialect of Swedish as Gränkulla. The Helsinki-Turku
highway, known today as Old Turuntie, ran through the beautiful northern
parts. An important time in the history of Kauniainen falls in 1904,
when the Kauniainen railway station was opened on the new Rantarada.
Today's Kauniainen started in 1906, when the company AB Grankulla
was founded. The company bought land from local landowners and sold it
on as lots. As a result, a cluster of villas was formed in the area, as
well as elsewhere in Helsinki's surroundings: Kulosaari, Haaga,
Leppävaara and Puistola. Janne Thurman was one of the founders of the
company and the woodman of the community, who was active in Kauniainen
for many decades. AB Grankulla's shareholders were satisfied with their
investment: it paid for itself within a year. The villa era had already
started a couple of years earlier, when master builders Elia Heikel and
Emil Lindstedt bought a 30-hectare area north of Gallträsk from the
Glims farm and built their own villas there. The Art Nouveau Villa
Heikel, designed for summer villa use, was the first to rise in 1903 on
the shores of Gallträski, followed shortly thereafter by Villa
Lindstedt. At that time, the size of the villa plots was often one
hectare or even larger. The idea of the garden city was that the house
was surrounded by a garden, around which there was a free zone of
nature. Plots of less than 3,000 square meters were not sold at all.
There are roads in Kauniainen named after Thurman, Heikeli and
Lindstedt.
The rural municipality of Espoo was not very
interested in the new settlement that appeared in their area, so the
company was solely responsible for the development of Kauniainen. Among
other things, it built roads, lobbied for a station (completed in 1908)
and a police station, and founded a school and an electric utility. In
1915, Kauniainen received the rights of a densely populated community
and at the same time limited self-determination rights, and thus the
company's responsibility was reduced.
The first known exact
number of inhabitants of Kauniain is from 1917, when 1,647 inhabitants
lived there. In 1920, Kauniai became a town when it became completely
independent from Espoo. The community structure of Kauniainen also
differed considerably from the farming villages of Espoo, with its
building arrangements, road networks, villas and electricity plants. The
building order forbade industrial buildings, because in Kauniainen they
wanted to preserve the idyllic, rustic environment. Most of the villas
were built according to the styles of neoclassicism or late 1920s
functionalism. The store began to prepare a new site plan at the end of
the 1920s. The proposal aroused controversy: especially the width of the
roads puzzled the residents. When the architect died in the middle of
the preparation process, the compromise proposal was only approved in
1937. From 1917 to 1939, the population of Kauniainen grew by only 10%,
but in the villages immediately outside the township's boundaries, the
growth was 30% at the same time, when the Viherlaakso settlement was
born, among other things.
Kauniainen has been officially
bilingual since 1936. The municipality's Finnish name, Kauniainen, was
officially adopted alongside the Swedish name, Grankulla, in 1949.
Already in the 1930s, the name Kauniainen was used by the post office
and railways. With the Second World War, the villa era ended and was
replaced by the reconstruction of the 1940s and 1950s and economically
worse times.
The existence of Kauniainen was threatened due to
municipal obligations and the small number of inhabitants. In the 1950s,
an attempt was made to annex some nearby areas of Espoo to the
municipality, but the application was rejected in 1953. Instead, the
Kasavuori area, which the municipality had bought, was annexed to
Kauniai in 1957. The municipality entrusted the preparation of a new
site plan to Otto-Iivari Meurman. He suggested that the villa character
of the area be preserved, but the number of inhabitants be increased
from the then 2,500 to 10,000. Impractical villas should be replaced
with new ones, and apartment buildings should be built. A new shopping
center was planned to the south of the railway, modeled after
Stockholm's Vällingby. The plans were approved in 1959 for Kasavuuori
and in 1961 and 1963 for the rest of the township. The shopping center
was opened in 1966. Later, this site plan was criticized because a
considerable part of the villas were demolished and the unity of the
villa milieu was destroyed. A ski resort similar to Oslo's Holmenkollen
was also planned for Kasavuori, but the plans never came to fruition;
today the area is a nature reserve.
The population of Kauniainen
grew rapidly – in 1967 even a quarter. In 1972, Kauniai became a city
and the following year Finnish became the majority language. At that
time, 6,400 inhabitants lived in the city.
At the end of 2017, there were 9,624 inhabitants in Kauniainen, of which 9,484 lived in agglomerations, scattered settlements had no inhabitants at all, and the places of residence of 140 were unknown. The urbanization rate of Kauniainen is 100.0%. The population of Kauniainen agglomeration belongs to only one agglomeration. The agglomeration areas of Kauniainen do not form their own agglomeration, but they are part of the central Helsinki agglomeration, which extends beyond Kauniainen to the area of several Helsinki suburbs, and of which 9,484 inhabitants lived in the area of this city at the end of 2017. In total, the central area of Helsinki has 1,268,296 inhabitants and its area is 680.12 square kilometers.
According to the 2018 regional division, the Kauniainen Finnish
congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland and the
Swedish-speaking Grankulla svenska församling operate in Kauniainen.
These parishes form the Kauniainen parish association (Swedish:
Grankulla kyrkliga samfällighet). The parishes were founded in 1978,
before which Kauniainen had long belonged to Espoo. The Finnish parish
of Kauniainen was separated from the parish of Kanta-Espoo, and the
Swedish parish of Kauniainen was separated from the Swedish parish of
Espoo.
Among the congregations of the Finnish Orthodox Church,
the Helsinki Orthodox congregation operates in the Kauniainen area.
A renewing center
The center of Kauniainen was renovated in the
1960s by building a new concrete precast center with shopping centers in
line with the ideal of the time. The once modern shopping center has
since been perceived as ugly and impractical.
In 2000, the Grani
shopping center designed by Kai Wartiainen was completed in the city
center. However, the appearance of the new shopping center with its
bright colors has aroused mixed reactions.
The city has prepared
a new site plan for the city center. The new city center plan has been
realized except for one central block of the city center area, where the
project has been at a standstill for years. The city has started the
redemption procedure for the plot owned by the construction company NCC.
In honor of the 100th anniversary of Kauniainen in 2007, a new
sculpture called "Foni" created by Kimmo Schroderus was erected in the
city center in front of the Town Hall.
Although Kauniainen is a
prosperous city, investment in public areas has only started in the 21st
century. For example, graffiti and pavements in poor condition can still
be observed. However, the situation has improved considerably due to,
for example, road construction projects. The infrastructure has been
improved especially in and around the city center area, for example with
the renovation of Keskuskatu Tunnelitie in 2010.
Tract
Kauniais has good road connections in all directions. In the
east-west direction, Turunväylä runs on the south side of the city and
Turuntie on the north side. The completion of Turunväylä accelerated the
growth of the city's population in the 1960s, when the center of
Helsinki could be reached quickly by car. In the south-north direction,
Ring II runs mostly east of Kauniainen, of which a portion of just under
150 meters is in the Kauniainen area.
The internal roads that
lead to the center of Kauniainen are Kauniaistentie starting from
Turunväylä, Helsingintie starting from Turuntie Viherlaakso and
Asematie-Bembölentie from the west and Kauppalantie from the south.
Public transport
The main means of public transport in Kauniainen
is the train. Rantarada has played a very important role in the
development of the city as a suburb of Helsinki. Trains run in the
direction of Helsinki every 15 minutes with the codes U and E. To the
west, the U train runs to Kirkkonummi every half hour and the E train to
Kauklahti every half hour. During quiet times, the L train runs. The
trip to the center of Helsinki takes less than 20 minutes from
Kauniainen railway station. In addition, in the western parts of the
city, right next to the Espoo border, there is the Koivuhov railway
station, which serves, among other things, the residents of the
Kasavuuori area. With the completion of the Espoo city line, train
connections from Kauniais will continue to improve, and the travel time
to the center of Helsinki will be shortened by several minutes.
Regional line 212 from Kauniais runs from Kauniala via Kasavuuori to
Helsinki Kamppi. Internal bus lines and connecting lines to the metro
station also pass through Kauniainen, such as lines 548 and 549 through
Mankka to Tapiola and line 533 from Järvenpera to Matinkylä. Line 224
runs from the center of Espoo via Kauniainen and Karakallio to
Leppävaara. On weekends, the night line 118N runs in the direction of
Tapiola and Kampi through Kauniainen. In addition, the northern parts of
Kauniainen are served by Turuntie lines 226, 227, 235 and 238 to
Leppävaara, 565 to Länsi-Vantaa and 235 to the center of Espoo, and via
Pitäjänmäki and Mannerheimintie to Elielinaukio.
Kauniainen is divided into 8 districts, which are numbered 1–8. These
parts of the city cover the whole of Kauniainen. The only area that is
usually thought of as a different district is Kasavuori in the western
part of the city. There are no other designated areas in Kauniainen.
Sport
Kauniainen has a wide range of different sports facilities,
and the city has actively supported sports activities. Junior activities
can be practiced in many different sports. The city's largest sports
association is Grankulla IFK (GrIFK), which was founded in 1925. GrIFK's
sports today are ice hockey, football, handball, floorball and slalom.
HC West, one of Finland's best handball clubs, which plays in the
Championship series, played in the city and plays its home matches in
Kauniainen Palloiluhalli. In May 2016, it was announced that HC West's
operations will return under the GrIFK name as its own operating unit.
The football club FC Grani Airbags is also from Kauniain, although
its activities also extend to the Espoo side.