The Great Migration was also a process of urbanization. Mechanization of agriculture and forestry meant fewer jobs in these sectors that had traditionally taken the bulk of Finland's work force. Redundant workers found new employment in the economically burgeoning south. Just before World War II, three out of four Finns lived in rural areas it was not until 1969 that more than half the population had come to live in urban communities. The trend continued, and by the early 1980s some 60 percent of Finns lived in urban areas. The largest urban settlement in Finland was greater Helsinki, which, with a population of about 950,000 in the 1980s, contained one-fifth of the country's total population. Two of Helsinki's suburbs, Espoo (established in 1963) and Vantaa (dating only from 1972), were, by a wide margin, the country's fourth and fifth largest cities. The greater urban areas of the cities of Tampere and Turku each contained about 250,000 inhabitants.

Data as of December 1988