When I first visited the local village around 1998 or so, the place was called Vilppula. The village center had three supermarkets, two banks, four pubs, a book store and a number of other specialized shops selling about anything from chainsaws to daily clothing. Seven kilometres away there is a small town called Mänttä, which has a bit more services and those high quality art museums which are an unexpected thing to find in a small industrial town. At some point Mänttä merged into Vilppula, for they wished to save on costs if the whole area is administrated as a single unit called Mänttä-Vilppula It is likely that no money was ever saved because of the fusion, and both the population and the services and the local economy has been on slow decline. Nowadays the center of Vilppula has one supermarket, one pub (which is not at the very center, but down at the riverside), no banks, no book store, and only a handful of other special shops remaining. Well, but the art museums are at Mänttä, and they have seen some development over the years. Mänttä-Vilppula has been branded as an "Art Town". In the beginning that was little more than hollow pr, and a long time ago I remember talking with an artists who had moved to live here and then was disappointed to see that a local artist community was nowhere to be found, as the whole place appears as more like a big factory and then sleeping areas and basic services for the factory workers. Well, but I'm under the impression that as they never abandoned the "Art Town" brand, it has been slowly gaining some content to it. Cultural figures from the capital city have realized that living costs at the small town Mänttä are only a fraction of costs at Helsinki, and some of them have bought flats here, using them as "urban summer cottages", somewhere to go to escape the busy Helsinki. And more and more artists have settled to live here, so maybe a local artist community is actually starting to build up, spiced by the international artists residency. (Hehe, thinkin of it; I remember there was a time when I wanted to integrate with the local community, to contribute and to participate in the voluntarily organized activities and local politics, development projects and such. But eventually that lead to something like a burnout, and nowadays I'm just happy to be a semi hermit, I often feel like an outside spectator just witnessing the things happening around me.)