Subdivisions of Helsinki

The city of Helsinki, the capital of Finland, can be divided into various different sorts of subdivisions. The subdivisions include neighbourhoods, districts, major districts and postal code areas. The plethora of different official ways to divide the city is a source of some confusion to the inhabitants, as different kinds of subdivisions often share similar or identical names. <!-- To my knowledge, the different subdivisions of the city have no official English terms. I've seen the City Planning Department use 'district' for peruspiiri and 'major district' for suurpiiri, but the rest are pretty much made up to differentiate the different sorts of subdivisions. -->

Neighbourhoods

Helsinki is divided into 59 neighbourhoods (kaupunginosa in Finnish; stadsdel in Swedish). The division into neighbourhoods is the official division created by the city council and used for city planning and other similar purposes. Most of the neighbourhoods have existed since the 19th century as numbered parts of the city, and official names were assigned to them in 1959. Five neighbourhoods (numbers 55 – 59) were annexed on 1 January 2009.

Today, each neighbourhood is identified by both a two-digit number between 01 and 59 and an official name in both Finnish and Swedish (in some cases they may be identical). Neighbourhoods are further divided into quarters (osa-alue) and sectors (pienalue), numbered with three and four digits respectively. Sectors divide further into individual blocks...
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