Forssa
Forssa is a town and municipality of Finland. It is located almost in the centre of a triangle defined by the three largest major cities in Finland, in the Kanta-Häme region, and which is crossed by Highway 2 between Pori and Helsinki and Highway 10 between Turku and Hämeenlinna. The town has a population of and covers an area of of which is water. The population density is. Only a little part of the surface area of Forssa is water, but the river Loimijoki forms an important element in the cityscape, with the city being located at its starting point. Other notable water areas in Forssa include the lake Kaukjärvi and the lake Koijärvi, known as the birthplace of the Green League.
The municipality is unilingually Finnish. However, the name Forssa comes from the Swedish word "fors", meaning rapids.
Forssa is the central locality of the Forssa sub-region. The city is bordered with Jokioinen to the west, Tammela to the east and south and Humppila and Urjala to the north. As well as Forssa, the Forssa sub-region includes Jokioinen, Tammela, Humppila and Ypäjä. Forssa is the smallest of the three cities in Kanta-Häme, with a population of about 16,500, and in terms of population Forssa is the 67th largest municipality in Finland. The population in Forssa has concentrated on the Forssa central conurbation in the southern part of the municipality, which also spreads over to the municipalities of Jokioinen and Tammela. The area of the former municipality of Koijärvi in the northern part of the city is a sparsely populated rural area.
Forssa grew and developed in the 19th century when the textile industry grew. In the 20th century the city barely grew at all between the two World wars. A new growth phase began in the 1960s, sped by construction industry. The population of Forssa was as its highest in the middle 1980s when the city had a bit over 20 thousand inhabitants for two years. The growth of the city since stopped as the industry started diminishing. By 1994 the population had decreased by a few hundred people, but after that the decrease in population grew. By late 2005 Forssa had lost over two thousand people compared to its highest point. In 2008 the population of Forssa increased for the first time since 1993. After 2010 population has again decreased, with the population in 2016 being about 17,300. Today the food industry is a notable employer.
The location of Forssa, in the middle of the triangle formed by the cities of Helsinki, Turku and Tampere, is sometimes seen as ideal, as commute trips to the largest cities in the country are fast. The distance to Helsinki is 110 kilometres, the distance to Tampere is 87 kilometres and the distance to Turku is 88 kilometres.
History
The development of Forssa into an industrial conurbation started when industrialist Axel Wilhelm Wahren founded a spinning mill on the shore of the river Loimijoki in 1847. Today the Forssa industrial community has been classified as a notable constructed cultural environment in Finland.In 1903 a party meeting of the Finnish Workers' Party, known as the Forssa meeting, was held in Forssa, where the party was renamed as the Social Democratic Party of Finland and a new party program was accepted into use.
Forssa only became an independent municipality in 1923 when it was separated from the municipality of Tammela into its own market town. Forssa received city privileges in 1964. The depression in the early 1990s had a large impact on Forssa, resulting in economic problems and an unemployment rate that still remains high today.
Coat of arms
The current coat of arms of Forssa was designed by Olof Eriksson in 1962. Its heraldic description reads: A silver waterwheel on a blue shield. The coat of arms depicts water power and the river Loimijoki running through the city. The coat of arms was taken into use on 29 August 1962.The former coat of arms of Forssa was designed by Arne Wilhelm Rancken in 1947. The coat of arms had a wavy division with a silver waterwheel on a blue background at the bottom part, and three blue wavy lines and a red letter F on a silver background at the top part. This coat of arms was later discontinued as unheraldic.
Population
The population development in Forssa from 1847 to 1990 has been researched in the 1995 annual of the Homestead and museum association of Southwestern Tavastia and in the book Forssan historia by Risto O. Peltovuori, published in 1993. After Forssa became an independent municipality in 1923, its population in 1925 was 7,681. The development of population was modest until 1945; at that time the population was 8,045. After this, the increase in population sped up: Forssa reached 9,000 inhabitants in 1952, 10,000 inhabitants in 1957, 11,000 inhabitants in 1962, 12,000 inhabitants in 1966 and 13,000 inhabitants in 1968 with a population of 13,157. The annexation of Koijärvi to Forssa in 1969 raised the population to over 15,000. In 1971 the Lempää area of about 9 square kilometres was annexed to Forssa from Tammela, raising the population by about a hundred.Forssa grew rapidly in the 1970s, but in the middle 1980s this growth stopped. The city population was at its highest at 20,074 in late 1985. After the middle 1990s the population of the city and of the entire region started to decrease rapidly. From 2005 to 2010 the population settled at about 17,900 people, but after that it started to decrease again with the population at late 2016 being about 17,300.
90 percent of the population of Forssa live in the urban central conurbation of Forssa, where population is dense. In the rural areas in central and northern Forssa both the population and the population density are low. The Forssa central conurbation also reaches over to Jokioinen and Tammela. Of the entire population of the Forssa region, the population of Forssa proper is about one half.
Population concentration spots of the Forssa industrial community are the Kalliomäki wooden house area to the north of the river Loimijoki and the wooden house areas of Vanha Kuhala, Uusikylä and Yliskylä to the south of the river. Throughout the decades, new city districts have been built around this historical centre. The Viksberg apartment building suburb was mostly built in the 1970s and the suburb of Tölö in the 1970s and 1980s, but their population has been decreasing. Recently the population has increased in the city outskirts through construction of detached houses and also in the city centre through construction of apartment buildings.
In late 2011, about 13.5 percent of the population of Forssa belonged to the age bracket of 0 to 14 years, 63.2 percent to the bracket of 15 to 64 years and 23.3 percent to the bracket of over 64 years. In the long run, both the absolute number and the proportion of children have significantly decreased. The elderly are the only age group to increase in either absolute number or proportion. In 1997 the number of children fell below the number of the elderly.
Most of the children live in new small house areas on the edge of the central conurbation. Most of the elderly live in Korkeavaha and the city centre, where the proportion of people of 64 years or older is 40 percent.
From 1980 to 2010 the language distribution in Forssa has remained fairly stable. The absolute number of Finnish language speakers has decreased by about 1,900 people, but the proportion has only decreased by a little from 99.6 percent to 97.1 percent. The number of Swedish language speakers has decreased by about a third. The most significant increase has been in the group of people speaking other languages than Finnish or Swedish, which has increased manifold.
Congregations
In 2023, the Evangelical Lutheran Church was the largest religious group with 70.9% of the population of Forssa. Other religious groups accounted for 2.3% of the population. 26.8% of the population had no religious affiliation.According to the 2018 division Forssa includes its own congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. The former congregation of Koijärvi was annexed to the congregation of Forssa in 2007. The city has an activity centre of the Hämeenlinna Orthodox congregation, a Jehovah's Witnesses Kingdom Hall, a Pentecostal Salem church and activity of the Evangelical Free Church of Finland. The Evangelical Free Church has its premises in the Kerhola building commissioned by the Forssa company. Forssa also has a cemetery of the Union of Freethinkers of Finland.
The Pentecostal Church of Finland has its own congregation in Forssa and the Evangelical Free Church of Finland also has its own free congregation in Forssa.
Geography
Development of population
From 1847 to 1946
The first planned constructed areas in Forssa were Wahreninkatu and the buildings at Viksberg. Kalliomäki with its lines was born starting from the 1870s after Wahren had ordered a zoning plan in the area. In addition to Kalliomäki, the oldest inhabited areas in Forssa include Vanha Kuhala to the south of the river Loimijoki, Uusikylä between Rautatienkatu and Räynynoja and Yliskylä, also known as Ameriikka, slightly to the west of Uusikylä.According to Helga Keränen's 1930 research, the market town of Forssa was divided into ten physiognomical areas, including the Kalliomäki area, the greater population area of Hämeentie, the Puisto area, the Forssa industrial area, the Viksberg industrial area, the Forssa business centre, the smaller population area of Keski-Forssa, "Amerikka" and the new population area of Yliskylä. This division only concerned the tightly built areas in Forssa, not the rural areas around them.
Until 1946, the area of tightly-built wooden houses was fairly small compared to the conurbated area of today. A large part of the currently populated areas were still fields. As well as the aforementioned areas, there was inhabitation in Kekkala, a little in Pispanmäki and some buildings on the lands of the Viksberg manor. The construction of Rantalanmäki had already started at this point.