In this paper the authors first examine the concept of the rural area and the related typologies and then analyse changes in the internal structure of rural areas in Finland by using georeferenced data. Rural areas seem to have been defined on the basis of land use and population density for as long as they have been a topic of research, but no unambiguous rural – urban dividing line has ever emerged. Statistical areal typologies based on administrative divisions, as employed by the OECD and Eurostat, together with the national classifications prevailing in various countries, are the most commonly used tools for comparisons of spatial structures, but sociocultural analyses can also be used for defining rural areas. The empirical part of this work demonstrates that georeferenced data can be used for studying matters internal to rural areas without recourse to administrative boundaries. The example presented concerns the serious economic recession of the early 1990s, which is studied using the coordinate-based georeferenced census data collected annually by Statistics Finland from population registers. The results indicate that major changes in demographic and occupation structure and in the formation of incomes took place in the rural areas of Finland over a short space of time (1989–97) and that these affected different areas in different ways. Short-term developments of this kind cannot be observed on the basis of traditional census data produced at ten-year intervals.
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