Suomiatlas — Finnish area statistics

Resolve a Finnish place name to the code every other Suomiatlas tool takes. Handles postal areas (e.g. Toukola, Töölö), municipalities (Espoo, Akaa) and regions (Uusimaa). Diacritics are optional: "toolo" finds "Töölö". Call this first whenever the user names a place rather than a code. Many Finnish neighbourhood names are shared across cities, so several results is normal — present the choices instead of assuming the first one. Postal-area results carry an inhabitant count with the year it was published for; if you quote it, quote the year with it. `population` is null for municipalities and regions — the count is carried per postal area only — not a sign the place is empty.

Current statistics for one Finnish postal area or municipality: population, age, income, employment, education, housing sale prices (€/m²) and municipal crime rates, with national/regional percentiles where available. Accepts a name or a code and resolves it automatically; if the name is ambiguous it returns the candidates instead of guessing. Answers questions like "how many people live in Hervanta?", "how many live in Akaa?" and "how much is an apartment in Matinkylä?". Returns a headline set of metrics by default — pass `variables` to fetch specific codes from list_variables. A postal area's result also includes `ratios[]`: household composition and jobs-to-residents ratios compared against Finland as a whole (see each entry's `nationalBasis` and the response's `notes`). A null value is a figure Statistics Finland suppressed (small-area confidentiality) or never published for that vintage, and a null percentile means one could not be computed — report both as unpublished, never as zero; `ratios[].areaValue` is null when the area's denominator is under 30 or an input is unpublished.

Time series for one Finnish postal area or municipality, with the direction and size of change computed for each metric so the trend does not have to be eyeballed. Answers questions like "have apartment prices been rising in Espoo?" and "is the population growing?". Defaults to housing sale prices and population. For a postal area it also returns `trendMetrics`: precomputed 1/5/10-year indicators — population growth, income momentum, aging velocity, family share change, dwelling count and stock change, education-level change, and unemployment relative to the national change. They describe how the area has changed ("has the population grown? have incomes risen faster than nationally?"), not why or what comes next, so do not present them as a verdict such as "gentrifying" or "declining". Each carries `history`, its per-year values for up to 10 years, when the backend has computed them. Series points are index-aligned to `years`: a null point is a year the source did not publish for this area, and `trend` is null when fewer than two points have values or the series starts at zero — call that too sparse to read, not flat.

Measured annual-mean air quality (PM2.5, PM10, NO₂, O₃) for a Finnish postal area or municipality, from Finnish Meteorological Institute and municipal monitoring stations, each compared against the WHO 2021 guideline and the EU limit. Answers "is the air clean in Vantaa?" with a verdict rather than a bare number, and returns each pollutant's multi-year `series` beside its latest reading. Coverage is sparse: Finland has ~160 stations, so a pollutant with no nearby station is reported as a gap — report that as unmeasured, never as clean.

What is physically inside one Finnish postal area: public transport stops (bus, tram, metro, train, ferry) from Digitransit; daycare centres from the Suomi.fi service catalogue (PTV), with OpenStreetMap adding only those with no PTV daycare within 250 m; and schools, higher and further education, health clinics, pharmacies, supermarkets and libraries from OpenStreetMap; and swimming pools and beaches from LIPAS, the national register of sports facilities. Answers "what is there in Tikkurila?" or "is there a school in 99980?" with counts and names. With `withinKm` (up to 5) it also looks beyond the area: places within that straight-line distance of the area's boundary, nearest first per category with their distance — one call for "is there a pool or a beach near 00250?". Postal areas only; a city name returns its areas to choose from. Transit counts are platforms (most stops have one per direction); `names` groups platforms by stop name. A zero for an OpenStreetMap category means none is mapped there, not that none exists; a null count means that source has not been loaded; a null name is a place its source has no name for. This says nothing about travel times or service frequency. Licensed per source: the OpenStreetMap places and the daycare layer are ODbL 1.0, the pools and beaches CC BY 4.0; credit "© OpenStreetMap contributors", Digitransit, the Suomi.fi service catalogue and "Jyväskylän yliopisto, Lipas Liikuntapaikat.fi" when reproducing it.

Side-by-side statistics for up to 12 Finnish postal areas, with national benchmarks and percentiles. Accepts names or codes. A null value or percentile is suppressed or unpublished for that area and year (small-area confidentiality), not zero.

Rank Finnish postal areas by any metric — highest or lowest income, population, unemployment, education, housing prices — nationally or within one municipality or region. Crime rates (crime_total_rate and friends) and air quality (aq_pm25_avg, aq_pm10_avg, aq_no2_avg, aq_o3_avg — annual means in µg/m³) rank municipalities instead, since both are published only at that grain; the aq_ codes are not in list_variables, pass them directly. For air quality order="bottom" gives the cleanest municipalities first and order="top" the most polluted, so "which municipality has the cleanest air?" is rank_areas with aq_pm25_avg and order="bottom" — get_air_quality answers for one place only. A municipality absent from an air-quality or crime ranking has no published value there: report it as unmeasured, never as clean or safe. A null in `additionalValues` means that metric is unpublished for that area, not zero. For gender_balance_20_39 the useful question is usually which areas are closest to an even split, not which are most skewed: pass order="balance" for that, since both a high and a low ratio mean imbalance. Get valid metric codes from list_variables. `near` plus `withinKm` narrows the ranking to areas within a straight-line radius of another place. That is distance over the ground, never a travel or commute time. To screen areas on several metrics at once — "above-average family share and below-average housing prices" — rank by one metric and pass the rest as `includeVariables`; that is a single call. Do not call get_place_stats per area to collect a second metric.

Postal areas most like a given one across its whole statistical profile — income, age structure, education, housing and employment together, not one metric. Useful for "where else in Finland feels like this neighbourhood?". Similarity is statistical, not geographic: the results are usually spread across the country. An area whose statistics are suppressed shares too few dimensions to be compared and is left out, so absence from the list is not dissimilarity — it is unmeasured.

The catalogue of every metric Suomiatlas publishes — population, income, education, employment, buildings and dwellings, housing sale prices, crime rates, composite scores — grouped by theme, with codes, units and types. Call this to find the right `variableCode` for rank_areas or get_place_stats. Pass `variableCode` to get the years that metric covers instead; coverage differs per metric (Paavo 2010–2024, housing prices 2009–2025, air quality per municipality from 2019 with fewer stations in the early years). Air-quality codes (aq_pm25_avg, aq_pm10_avg, aq_no2_avg, aq_o3_avg) are municipality-grain and not in this catalogue; pass them to rank_areas directly. An empty year list for a code means it is unpublished, not that the metric is zero.

The download link for one postal area's printable PDF report (composite scores, trends and the full statistics table). Returns a URL and never the file itself — the report renders the same data the other tools return, so offer the link when someone wants the document, and answer questions from get_place_stats instead. Downloading requires an Area Pass for that area; without one, the link still comes back and `locked` says what it costs. Reports exist per postal area only, not per municipality.