Memories of My Town: The Identities of Town Dwellers and Their Places in Three Finnish Towns

This book is an exploration into how town dwellers experience their environment in a complicated way. Urban buildings and settings can be looked upon as a kind of collective history, as carriers or witnesses of times past. But it is only the town dwellers that experience urban time itself, the time they live in, but through their memories also times past. In this past some elements take symbolically dense expressions. Through reliving and narrating their experiences the symbolically important factors in this urban relationship are outlined for investigations concerning three towns: Helsinki, Viborg and Jyväskylä.