At the time of writing this, from the window of a spare room in our apartment that during COVID-19 work-from-home restrictions has doubled as an office for my partner and I, I can see the European rowan tree bearing its clusters of small red fruit. The rowan in Finnish is called pihlaja. The neighbourhood of the Finnish capital city of Helsinki in which we live is called Pihlajamäki, which translates to Rowan Hill. But despite the copiousness of its namesake shrub, Pihlajamäki is much better known for something else altogether. It is the quintessential working-class apartment-block suburb built in the forests around central Helsinki from the 1960s onwards using new construction technologies and standardised designs, replacing the traditional brick and mortar with prefabricated concrete elements. Pihlajamäki, built as a trial run of its sort of neighbourhood, is also the first of its type of development project in Helsinki that followed the development principles of the era. These principles defined how millions of people across the Nordic region live today. For example, roughly one and a half million Finns live on housing estates (Ministry of the Environment 2022) and two thirds of them on estates built in the 1960s and 70s (Stjernberg 2019). As part of its Million Programme, Sweden built over one million units between 1965 and 1974 which now make up a major part of the country's housing stock. And a majority of this housing was in multi-family housing blocks, which came to form large residential areas in peripheral locations (Hall and Vidén 2006). And even in the least urbanised Norway's biggest city Oslo, about a third of the city's population of 500,000 live in suburban areas dominated by large post-war housing estates (Brattbakk and Hansen 2004).