← #30DayMapChallenge 2026·Day 9

Urban–rural

Cities, countryside and the line between them

OutdoorFinlandUrban–ruralRasterPopulation

Finland in seven classes

Finland has an official answer to the question “is this the city or the countryside?” for every 250 metre square of the country. The Finnish Environment Institute sorts each square into one of seven classes, from inner urban to sparsely populated rural. I put that grid on one map and counted who lives in each class.

Finland in seven classes: a map of Finland coloured by SYKE's urban–rural classes. Most of the country, including nearly all of Lapland, is the palest class, sparsely populated rural. Green rural classes ring the south and the coast, and small red and peach urban cores mark Helsinki, Tampere, Turku, Oulu and the other cities. A chart beside the map compares each class's share of land and people: inner urban areas are 0.23% of the land and 37.8% of the people; sparsely populated rural areas are 68.2% of the land and 4.5% of the people. An inset shows the capital region at full resolution.
Tap the poster for the full size (2400 × 3000). Download it.

Find your town

The same 250 m grid on a live map. Zoom in to see where a town's inner core gives way to its fringe, hover or tap to read a class, and switch classes off to see what's left.

Loading the 250 m grid…

Classes · tap to hide, double-tap to show only one

Showing 100.0% of the area and 100.0% of the people.

Go to

Two-thirds of the map, one in twenty-two people

The palest class, sparsely populated rural, covers 68% of the classified area and is home to 4.5% of the people. At the other end, the inner urban cores cover just 819 km², 0.23% of the area, and hold 37.8%. The three urban classes together are about a twentieth of the map and three-quarters of the people.

ClassArea km²LandPeopleShare
Inner urban area8190.23%2 106 28137.8%
Outer urban area2 2350.62%1 405 45625.2%
Peri-urban area15 8094.4%650 60911.7%
Local centres in rural areas7310.20%256 0504.6%
Rural areas close to urban areas42 91411.8%387 1646.9%
Rural heartland areas53 16314.6%516 4999.3%
Sparsely populated rural areas247 72568.2%250 5204.5%

Land is the share of the 363 396 km² the classification covers; people are the 5 573 552 residents on the 2025 grid.

How it was made

The classes come from SYKE's urban–rural classification (2018), drawn on the national 250 m grid: inner and outer urban areas and the peri-urban fringe around cities of more than 15,000 people, then rural local centres, rural areas close to cities, the rural heartland, and sparsely populated countryside. Population is Statistics Finland's open 1 km grid for 2025. Its finest open grid is 1 km, so each square kilometre's residents are split evenly over its sixteen 250 m cells. Totals near class borders are therefore approximate.

The classification covers lakes and some coastal water as well, so its area is a little larger than Finland's land and inland waters together. The country map averages the colours of the 250 m cells inside each pixel, so a small town tints its pixel instead of vanishing. The inset shows the capital region without averaging.

Data: Finnish Environment Institute SYKE / YKR, urban–rural classification 2018 (CC BY 4.0); Statistics Finland, 1 km population grid 2025 (CC BY 4.0).

Day 8 turned a half-empty mall into a town. More maps from the month are in the #30DayMapChallenge 2026 gallery.