Timber nation: architecture, forest industry, and the construction of Finnishness

This thesis examines the politics of timber, a national resource vested with vital potentiality in Finnish architecture. Over the past decade, new engineered wooden products and decarbonisation efforts have recast timber from a modest rural material into an innovative resource for low-carbon urban development. The transformation of nature to provision the urban realm is an essential feature of urban modernity, yet urban researchers have often taken the natural resources for granted, whilst resource geographers have focused on the rural landscapes of resource production. In contrast, this thesis analyses resource-making and city-making as mutually imbricated processes. Drawing on multilocal ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with architects and public officials, the thesis argues that the resurgence of timber construction as a national project in Finland arises in response to experiences of faltering progress at different levels of society, compounded by global instability, neoliberal reforms and public austerity. In architecture, choosing timber offers a moral uplift in increasingly technocratic and financialised construction projects, but in a northern logging town it also surfaces new tensions between the promise of sustainable regeneration and intensifying forest harvesting. In suburban housing, timber represents a break from concrete to build an image of green middle-class living. Across these distinct topographies, the politics and aesthetics of timber are structured by an ideology of improvement and social differentiation that inscribes ideas of Finnishness onto changing landscapes. Even as timber architecture trades on uplifting metaphors of socioecological reconciliation, it simultaneously obscures and naturalises the extractive and exclusionary dynamics underlying the fractured present.