city plan was drawn up by German architect Carl Ludvig Engel, who had also designed the new capital, Helsinki. Turku remained the largest city in Finland for another twenty years.
In 1918, a new university, the Åbo Akademi – the only Swedish language university in Finland – was founded in Turku. Two years later, the Finnish language University of Turku was founded alongside it. These two universities are the second and third to be founded in Finland, both by private donations.
In the 20th century Turku was called "Finland's gateway to the West" by historians such as Jarmo Virmavirta. The city enjoyed good connections with other Western European countries and cities, especially since the 1940s with Stockholm across the Gulf of Bothnia. In the 1960s, Turku became the first Western city to sign a twinning agreement with Leningrad in the Soviet Union, leading to greater inter-cultural exchange and providing a new meaning to the city's 'gateway' function. After the fall of Communism in Russia, many prominent Soviets came to Turku to study Western business practices, among them Vladimir Putin, then Leningrad's deputy mayor.
As for architecture in the city, both the body of architectural styles as well as the prevalent way of living has experienced significant changes in the 20th century. While having survived relatively intact throughout the years of war 1939-1945, the city faced increasing changes in the 1950's and 1960's due to rising demands for apartments, the eagerness to rebuild and most of all the new development of infrastructure (especially increased automobile traffic). The wooden one to two-story houses that were the dominant mode of building in the city were mostly demolished in the 50´s and 60´s to both enable more efficient building and to ease car traffic. Sadly, this resulted in the destruction of most that was in later decades seen as beautiful and worth saving. This was, however, the case in most of the cities in Finland and
