Additional TitleLiikunta ja tila kaupunkipolitiikassa: Helsinki ja Dublin 1940-luvulta 1980- luvulle.
Note (Content)Sport, Recreation and Space in Urban Policy: Helsinki and Dublin from the 1940s to the 1980s This study analyses the development of sport and recreation facilities in Helsinki and Dublin. The period of the study, from the end of the Second World War until the 1980s, was an era of rapid urbanisation and modernisation in both Finnish and Irish societies, with 1960s and 1970s being the watershed decades. This is a comparative study combining perspectives from the fields of urban and sport history. Particular focus is given on the actions of the municipal authorities of the Helsinki City, and those of the Dublin County Borough and Dublin County. However, the development of sport and recreation facilities is not only looked at through the planning and urban policy framework, but the evolution of sport and recreation cultures is incorporated in the study.
The primary sources analysed in this study comprise official local authority minutes and reports, urban plans, surveys, and to some extent national level documents. In addition, this study uses professional publications, magazines and newspapers, as well as histories and archival materials produced by sports associations. Whereas postwar urbanisation and suburbanisation as well as the development of associational sports and more unorganised recreation are topics that have attracted historical research, studies combining these aspects and setting them in a comparative framework are less common. This is particularly the case in Dublin. This study argues that although leisure and sporting trends increasingly converged during this period in Helsinki and Dublin, urban policies towards these issues remained different.
Planners and professionals in both cities were influenced by wider international models, but in the realisation of facilities, differences in local authority resources and in how public authorities saw their role in the sphere of sport and recreation, played equally significant role. In Helsinki, the role of the