Helsinki itself is only 600,000 people, but Helsinki has fused into a single big city with the neighboring municipalities of Espoo and Vantaa (and a bunch of smaller ones), and the total population exceeds one million people.

The OKC metro is also 1.5 million people. The two are very comparable by population/size. It doesn't detract from the point that Helsinki isn't a large city. I'm giving regional context to Americans that if you don't consider OKC large, you shouldn't consider Helsinki large.

It's fair to bring this up, but it's also worth noting that a medium fish in a small pond has a different experience than a medium fish in a big pond. A third of all the people who live in Finland live in Helsinki.

Helsinki is the capital city and cultural center of a nation. The best of the best in Finland live, work, and perform there.

For cities, as so many other things, it's not all about size.

For the great people of Oklahoma, the best of the best also live, work, and perform in OKC. OKC is also the capital (of Oklahoma). I won't touch culture because it's pretty pompous to assign culture to a single location. I'm sure the Sami people disagree with your location of the center of culture,

I'm not comparing cities and I certainly am not implying OKC is the same as Helsinki. Merely pointing out that the OP's comment about Helsinki being a large city with clean air sounded as silly to me as saying OKC is a large city with clean air.

> For the great people of Oklahoma, the best of the best also live, work, and perform in OKC.

A lot of them live Oklahoma, since it's easy to move to the coasts for opportunities. A lot less people leave Finland (it's harder to do to), so Helsinki gets higher proportion of its country's best.

I'm sure OKC is a great city in many ways, but the best artists in Oklahoma usually move to LA or NYC, engineers and entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley, political leaders to DC, etc.

Oklahoma City is a huge sprawling area on an essentially infinite two-dimensional plane. Population density of Helsinki is 8x that of OKC, plus it has natural features, so it's really going to have a different feel.

Ure being diseingenius. Helsinki is 650k, but actually it's a tri-city with Espoo and Vantaa, going over 1M population. That's more than SF in a similar area.

SF Bay Area is about 7.7 million, which is higher than the whole Finnish population.

I've been to Helsinki, it's a lovely place, but calling it a big city is misleading at best.

Interestingly, the few times I've been there SF felt cozy (I live in a metro area of over twenty million).

It's all relative, I suppose.

> Ure being diseingenius. Helsinki is 650k, but actually it's a tri-city with Espoo and Vantaa, going over 1M population. That's more than SF in a similar area.

Helsinki alone is almost twice the area of SF, Vantaa is more than twice SF’s area, and Espoo is closer to three times SF’s area, so, yes, that tri-city is more people than SF, but, no, it's not “in a similar area”.

Air quality is often driven by geography too; there are tons of cities that are notorious for their poor air quality due to being in a basin or an inconveniently placed mountain trapping car exhaust where the people are.

True. E.g. Salt Lake City

2,934 people per sq km in Helsinki, 1.5M in the metro.

321.9 people per square km in Oklahoma city.

IME helsinki these feels & has the dynamics of a big city.

Oklahoma city feels mostly like a suburban sprawl.