Love Your Neighbourhood and Leave It: Citizenship Ideals,Welfare Encounters and the Reproduction of Cross-Pressure in a Disadvantaged Helsinki Neighbourhood

Abstract

Sociologists have long observed that living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood commonly means facing a moral and practical dilemma; the place one calls home is both good and bad, as it is a source of both support and social suffering. Based on five years of ethnographic research in a marginalised neighbourhood of Helsinki, I demonstrate how welfare professionals, in their efforts to mould local youth into ideal (middle-class) citizens, inadvertently reproduce this cross-pressure. Welfare professionals expect young people to be(come) both communitarian citizens rooted in their ‘home area’ and entrepreneurial citizens capable of leaving the ‘risk environment’, translating the current ideals of good citizenship into everday practices. The article argues that the simultaneous enactment of citizenship ideals that directly oppose each other increases the cross-pressure that young people experience, thereby contributing to their marginalised position.

Introduction

‘It makes me anxious to think that I might live here for the rest of my life’, Sanna told me. She was a 15-year-old who had lived in ‘Steephill’, ¹ a low-income, stigmatised neighbourhood in Helsinki, Finland, her whole life. Sitting on a couch at the local youth centre, I asked Sanna why she did not want to stay in the neighbourhood and imagined her future somewhere else. ‘Life here is the same from one day to the next. You go get groceries; you go home. It’s just too much. And I’m not sure I’d want to raise my kids here’, she added, raising her eyebrows as a sign of mutual understanding. ‘So where would you like to live when you can decide for yourself?’ I asked. Sanna was lost in her thoughts for a while. Finally, she turned to me and said, ‘Well, probably here, to be honest. So that my mom would also live here. A cool crib in a more civilised place would be nice, of course, but . . . all I know is here.’

Sanna, with whom I became acquainted as I conducted long-term ethnographic research in Steephill, expressed ambivalence regarding her neighbourhood. Studies have shown that this feeling is common among citizens living in disadvantaged urban territories. On the one hand, social bonds make these neighbourhoods feel like home and help residents cope and feel recognised; on the other hand, these neighbourhoods expose inhabitants to stigmatisation, poverty-related human suffering and marginalisation (Desmond and Travis, 2018; Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Koch et al., 2021; MacDonald et al., 2005; McKenzie, 2015). For Sanna, growing up with this ambivalent perception of her place of residence as both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ meant having to deal with a moral and practical dilemma; she felt that she both needed and wanted to stay, but she also felt pressure to exit the neighbourhood as soon as possible.

This article deploys the concept of cross-pressure as a tool for understanding the marginalisation of young people growing up in disadvantaged urban territories and for examining the state actions and interactions that ensue. I take the dilemma that Sanna and her peers experienced as my point of departure to consider how cross-pressure is reproduced in the interactions between the local youth and teachers, youth workers, community workers and other welfare professionals aiming to promote opportunities for the youth. Drawing on my ethnographic data on welfare encounters, I show how the current ideals of good citizenship intertwine and become contradictory as they are translated into mundane everyday practices. Welfare professionals, who aim to teach the local youth how to act and feel like good citizens, end up pulling them in opposite directions: towards their neighbourhood and away from it. On the one hand, these professionals draw on the ideal of the communitarian citizen (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016), working hard to fashion community-minded citizens who display place attachment, appreciate their neighbourhood and feel proud of it. On the other hand, they aim to raise self-reliant entrepreneurial individuals (Colombo et al., 2021) by framing the area of Steephill as a risk environment that young people would be wise to perceive as a dead end and leave behind them. This article argues that the simultaneous enactment of citizenship ideals that directly oppose each other increases the cross-pressure on young people, thereby deepening their marginalised position.

A Good and Bad Neighbourhood: Growing up with Cross-Pressure

As previous research has demonstrated, young people’s experiences of growing up in disadvantaged and often stigmatised neighbourhoods are complex and ambivalent (e.g. Harding, 2010; Hayward, 2000; Junnilainen, 2019; McBride, 2024; Reay, 2007). Reay and Lucey (2000: 411) drew attention to this ambivalence, showing how children’s relationships with the disadvantaged places in which they live are characterised by ‘conflicting feelings of longing, belonging and abhorrence’. Their view is supported by a large body of literature exploring the importance of places in shaping people’s experiences and identifications. Many recent studies on territorial stigma have found that residents’ perceptions of stigma are deeply ambivalent and that instead of just internalising the negative representations of their neighbourhoods, residents commonly display profound attachment to place and demonstrate acts of getting by (e.g. Kirkness and Tijé-Dra, 2017; McBride, 2024). Outsiders’ perceptions that disadvantaged neighbourhoods cause problems, reproduce poverty and offer a poor quality of life harm residents in concrete ways, but residents might still want to stay for the support and recognition that localised networks can offer (e.g. Atkinson and Kintrea, 2004; Forrest and Kearns, 2001; Koch et al., 2021; MacDonald et al., 2005; McKenzie, 2015).

Thus, adolescents at the bottom of the class structure, who grow up in more marginalised parts of the city, face a situation where the place they call home is both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. In contrast, more privileged adolescents inhabit places that are understood as being self-evidently ‘good’. The juxtaposition between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ describes the cultural context of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, which Harding (2010: 5) described as culturally heterogeneous; adolescents are exposed to various competing and conflicting cultural models, which give them mixed messages about how the world works and what to do with their lives. Compared with more affluent areas, their social environment contains more cultural models that are contradictory (not just diverse) and less information about choosing between these models (e.g. when it comes to choosing a course of action or prioritising various goals), which adds to their marginalised position (Harding, 2010: 156).

This article deploys the concept of cross-pressure to illustrate how informal state practices add yet another layer to the cultural heterogeneity of social environments, deepening the contradictions young people face. Simmel (1955: 146) introduced the concept in 1908 to describe the cross-pressures that arise from multiple group affiliations and situations where groups that have an influence on individuals are ‘juxtaposed’. Since then, cross-pressure has mainly been used in political analyses following Lazarsfeld et al. (1948), who claimed that citizens often have difficulties in reaching voting decisions since being in close contact with groups that hold conflicting political views puts them under cross-pressure. Desmond and Travis (2018) applied the concept to poor neighbourhoods in their exploration of the political consequences of living in concentrated poverty. They indicated that poor neighbourhoods ‘create their own cross-pressures’ as residents are pulled both towards their neighbours (who help them to get by) and away from them (as solving ‘structural problems through democratic engagement’ requires distancing oneself from the troubles of neighbours) (Desmond and Travis, 2018: 890). I build on their discovery and extend the idea of cross-pressure beyond the development of political (dis)engagements to explore the broader processes of becoming a citizen and being exposed to the demands of good citizenship. I suggest that there is a pressing need to understand the broader dynamics of cross-pressures affecting disadvantaged young people, whose lives are significantly tied to their neighbourhoods. They are relatively territorial in their behaviour, often have social networks that are constrained to small areas, have limited possibilities for independent mobility and rely on their home areas as building blocks for their identities (Forrest and Kearns, 2001; MacDonald et al., 2005; Pickering et al., 2012). Also, policies aimed at fixing disadvantaged neighbourhoods and promoting good citizenship – which I now turn to – particularly target young people approached as not-yet-citizens.

Place-Based Policies and Tangled Ideals of Good Citizenship

As in many other western countries, public policies in Finland have become increasingly concerned with the consequences of living and growing up in marginalised parts of cities. Disadvantaged neighbourhoods have come to symbolise everything that is wrong with current societies. As Vollebergh et al. (2021: 744) argued, ‘it is there that the limits of traditional welfare structures and the ills plaguing the diversifying, polarising nation are thought to accumulate and reproduce’.

In Finland, moral concerns have targeted ‘segregated areas’, regularly referred to as ‘problem suburbs’ (‘ongelmalähiöt’) (Junnilainen, 2020). In public discourses, the representations of these areas have become very similar to those of the sink estates in the UK (Slater, 2018), quartier prioritaires in France (Wacquant, 2008) or achterstandsbuurten in the Netherlands (Vollebergh et al., 2021). These neighbourhoods are understood as suffering from a dissolution of social cohesion and a lack of democratic participation. Residents are construed according to a landscape of pathology, which is set against the healthy and ‘normal’ landscape of the middle class (see Reay and Lucey, 2000: 422), and local youths are considered ‘at risk’ (Reay, 2007) as they grow up in a ‘risk zone’ (Junnilainen, 2019).

These perceptions justify current policies that aim to fix local communities of precarious populations. As various studies have demonstrated, welfare programmes across Europe have moved towards what Rose (1999) called governing through community, which entails fostering citizenship that is place-based and community-oriented (e.g. De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016; Fortier, 2010; Muehlebach, 2012; Somers, 2008; Van Houdt et al., 2011; Vollebergh et al., 2021). Current policies and debates on citizenship tend to stress belonging and ‘feeling at home’ at the national level, but in practice, the enactment of these policies and discourses is highly territorialised, promoting belonging mainly at the neighbourhood level (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016; Haapajärvi, 2022). Thus, the multifaceted problems that comprise urban marginality are seen as issues that can be tackled by producing what De Wilde and Duyvendak (2016) called communitarian citizens: neighbourhood residents who participate locally, feel attached to their immediate living environment and express positive neighbourhood community spirit. Aside from seeking to design particular kinds of human behaviour, these policies seek to design people’s attitudes, emotional states and feelings (Fortier, 2010). As a consequence, community building in disadvantaged urban peripheries is increasingly taking the form of ‘governing through affect’ (Fortier, 2010: 20); structural problems are being tackled by encouraging residents to feel good in and about their neighbourhoods (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016).

In the neoliberal age, the ideal of communitarian citizenship has gone hand in glove with the promotion of citizenship that is self-reliant, autonomous and entrepreneurial (Evans and Sewell, 2013; Peck, 2010; Somers, 2008). As societies embrace and educate neoliberal subjects, who take care of themselves and participate in the labour market, thereby counteracting the ‘dependency’ culture of the welfare state, they call on individuals to live their lives as if it was an enterprise (Colombo et al., 2021; Hardy et al., 2021). From a government perspective, the production of both communitarian citizens and entrepreneurial neoliberal subjects is compatible; the underlying logic is that either way, autonomous citizens capable of taking care of themselves are produced. As Rose (1999: 249) described, ‘neighbourhood participation, local empowerment and engagement of residents in decisions over their own lives will . . . re-activate self-motivation, self-responsibility and self-reliance in the form of active citizenship within a self-governing community’. However, while policy documents might define ‘social problems’ and suggest governing strategies to manage them (Fortier, 2010), they do not constitute social life until they are practised at the level of ordinary interactions (Blokland, 2012: 503). This article argues that when the ideals of both communitarian and entrepreneurial citizenship are enacted on the ground and imposed on young people, they produce demands that directly oppose each other.

Ethnography in Steephill

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2016 in the neighbourhood of Steephill located in the outer fringe of the city of Helsinki. Built during the mass construction in the 1960s and 1970s, when Finland urgently needed housing for working citizens, this post-industrial working-class neighbourhood once evoked social mobility but has come to represent social stagnation as high levels of unemployment, low levels of education, high benefit dependency and high levels of single mother-headed families concentrate in the area. ² Although Finland continues to function as a welfare society with high living standards, it has undergone a profound neoliberal transformation, reflected over recent decades in economic, political and cultural reforms across the Nordic region (Andersson and Howell, 2025; Hyötyläinen, 2024). Accordingly, Finnish public and urban policies have taken steps towards governing through community, ‘removing questions of welfare from the national terrain of the social to the moral realm of local communities’ (Haapajärvi, 2022: 3062). At the time of my fieldwork, several policies were introduced that aimed to engineer problematic neighbourhoods as localised spheres of belonging. Both state-funded neighbourhood programmes directed at ‘excluded neighbourhoods’ and city-led projects aimed at developing ‘neighbourhoods in urban peripheries’ shared the goal of decreasing exclusion by promoting place attachment, communality and appreciation of one’s living environment (Junnilainen, 2019).

The data I present in this article were collected as part of a larger research project ³ aiming to examine the effects of spatially concentrating disadvantages in two social housing neighbourhoods in Finland (Junnilainen, 2019). Here, I only draw on the data collected in Steephill, where I spent four years using the participant observation method (Lofland and Lofland, 1995) to follow the lives of local youths, focusing on interactions between them and welfare professionals working in the area. In Finland, the presence of the welfare state in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods is intense and clearer than in other parts of cities as networks of professionals aim to provide welfare directly to those in need. I refer to workers implementing public policies as ‘welfare professionals’. In other contexts, they have also been referred to as ‘street-level bureaucrats’ (Lipsky, 1980), ‘policy practitioners’ (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016) and ‘frontline workers’ (Koch, 2021).

My empirical data consist of field notes taken throughout the course of the fieldwork, as well as 17 recorded interviews with welfare professionals (teachers, headmasters, special need assistants, youth workers, community workers and librarians). For two years, I visited the Steephill youth centre on a regular basis. In a normal week, I spent two evenings there playing snooker and PlayStation, watching early evening soap operas and chatting with 13–17-year-olds. In addition, in the first year, I volunteered every Thursday evening to help prepare a simple dinner, which we all ate together. I also followed a class of 14–16-year-old students as they attended their last year of comprehensive school. Each Thursday morning, for five months, I participated in their lessons, attended their breaks and followed the ‘My Neighbourhood’ project, on which the empirical part of this article focuses. Throughout the fieldwork period, I attended meetings where welfare professionals coordinated their efforts, such as the monthly ‘Steephill team’ meetings, where they gathered to share information and plan collaboration. I also followed a broad range of meetings and events where they met with locals, such as neighbourhood festivities, parents’ evenings at the school and community meetings called to address problems such as juvenile vandalism.

The argument I present in this article emerged gradually as I collected data, thematically coded it after careful reading and mirroring to relevant literature, and then went back to the field to further explore and finetune the codes. The preliminary codes I used were informed by the urban and cultural sociological theories guiding my research project on the processes of marginalisation carried out both in the evaluative structures of larger society and at the level of ordinary interactions (Blokland, 2012; Desmond, 2014; Lamont et al., 2014). Here, I draw on codes educing oppositions that the fieldwork period focusing on welfare encounters proved to be meaningful, such as ‘good neighbourhood’, ‘bad neighbourhood’, ‘pride’, ‘shame’, ‘attachment’ and ‘detachment’. My analytical process was guided by the sense of puzzlement I experienced while observing and identifying interactional patterns, and noticing the contradictory messages to which young people were constantly exposed. It took a while to recognise the dynamic presented in this article, since tracing relational processes, which take place in trivial happenings and routine interactions (Lamont and Small, 2008: 78), requires participating in people’s everyday lives over a long stretch of time. However, once I began to focus on the mixed messages as my object of analysis, I came to realise just how profoundly they shaped the localised interactions between state actors and the adolescents of Steephill. In order to understand where these messages came from, I turned to policy documents and interviews, which shed light on shared understandings guiding welfare professionals’ practices. For this article, I selected encounters and quotes on the basis of their ability to encapsulate the observations on which my argument rests. I particularly draw on the case of one schoolteacher, Emma, as it helps me to construct a generalisable thesis about how welfare professionals deploy different citizenship ideals that, when enacted in practice, produce cross-pressure. Emma, in other words, is not a special case but rather ‘stands in’ to help reveal cross-pressure and how the process works (Jerolmack and Khan, 2018: xxiv).

It feels unfair to recognise the invaluable work that welfare workers do in often burdensome circumstances and yet bring up the problematic outcomes of their well-meaning actions. However, a considerable body of literature has called for research that would broaden our understanding of welfare workers as ‘agents of the state’ and draw out how they interpret and enact policies while trying to improve the lives of others with scarce resources (see Blokland, 2012; De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016; Fortier, 2016; Hayward, 2000; Koch, 2021). I hope that my analysis of the situated implementation of social policies shows how intersubjective meaning making might cause social inequality even without the intentional action of dominant actors, as a side effect – and in this case, as a combination – of other ongoing activities (Lamont et al., 2014).

Making Communitarian Citizens

‘But why don’t you value this place?’ a schoolteacher named Emma asked her 15-year-old students, who glanced at her with bored faces but said nothing. A moment prior, they had been asked to discuss how they felt about their neighbourhood. Their answers had been curt but concerted. ‘It’s a shitty place’, one boy had blurted, and the others had echoed the sentiment: ‘Total bullshit.’ Emma repeated her question, urging the students to provide a reason for their disdain, but her question remained unanswered. Emma had been trying to start a school project called My Neighbourhood that was supposed to encourage the whole school to see the stigmatised neighbourhood in a positive light. In a planning meeting a few weeks earlier, the teachers had decided that the goal of the project was to ‘look for nice places in Steephill and create lasting memories of the beloved home area’. Each teacher could decide how to implement the project in practice, and Emma had decided that her class would make short films titled ‘A Postcard from Steephill’. However, the beginning of the project was more challenging than expected. When the students heard that they were supposed to document spots that were meaningful to them, they rolled their eyes and ridiculed the idea. After failing to engender any dialogue, Emma cried out: ‘Why would anyone value this place if you don’t?’

The episode described above is an example of the persistent upbringing of community-minded citizens in which Emma and other welfare professionals working in Steephill were engaged. In line with policies promoting neighbourhood belonging, they arranged projects and events aimed at attaching young people to their living environment. They organised clean-up days, urban gardening and environment improvement projects (such as fixing and painting a damaged fence or refreshing a dark underpass with self-made art), repeatedly telling the youth that Steephill was their own neighbourhood worth taking care of and belonging to. More than anything, they encouraged young people to perceive their neighbourhood as their home: a place for which they were responsible and a place they should value and care for rather than dismiss or vandalise. Home, in this context, was a location and a material environment, but predominantly, it was a positive emotion implying attachment and fond memories (Boccagni and Kusenbach, 2020: 597). As the above interaction between Emma and her students shows, young Steephillers regularly used derogatory terminology, such as ‘shithole’, ‘ghetto’ or ‘wino village’, when describing their neighbourhood. A number of studies have reported that taking possession of negative representations is a strategy that young people often use to express symbolic and tactical resistance to stigma (Junnilainen, 2019; Kirkness, 2014). However, welfare professionals in Steephill rarely interpreted the use of derogatory terminology in this way; mostly, they understood it to be a sign of detachment and internalised negative representations. Hence, they worked hard to change the way young people felt about the neighbourhood, fostering emplaced belonging and ‘feeling at home’.

Consequently, as Fortier (2010: 23) posited, the welfare professionals hoped for the recovery of citizens as ‘feeling subjects’ and attempted to draw on their capacity for positive feelings. This is what the My Neighbourhood project also aimed at by employing photography as a tool to help young people see their neighbourhood in a new light. When the project finally got going, we began taking photos during weekly tours of the neighbourhood. Every Thursday morning, we walked to one of the spots that the students had pointed out as meaningful for them, taking photos and engaging in discussion. We photographed the surrounding nature, houses where the students were born, playgrounds and, for example, a place where one of the students had buried her guinea pigs. The teacher constantly reminded the students that the point of making the digital postcards was not to focus on problems but to ‘see the good’. In this way, the youth learnt the codes of ‘legitimate feelings for and within the community’ (Fortier, 2016: 1041), indicating that feelings of belonging and pride were regarded as desirable, whereas negative emotions were considered detrimental.

Fostering positive feelings towards Steephill was an explicitly stated goal among welfare professionals, fully aligned with policy documents emphasising the need to enhance residents’ appreciation of their own living environment in disadvantaged areas (Junnilainen, 2019). Accordingly, welfare professionals commonly drew on the register of emotions to define good citizenship. For example, Lena, a community worker hired by the city of Helsinki to improve ‘local interaction and feelings of community’ in Steephill, told me that she hoped residents would put aside their ‘anger’ and ‘denigration’ and start seeing their neighbourhood as a place as good as any other. ‘My message will be that it will not take you forward if you shout and insult your neighbourhood, that your own talk also marginalises the area’, Lena declared. Her words echoed the widely shared understanding that positive affects improved residents’ well-being and helped them to get on, whereas negative emotions worked to deepen their marginalised positions, so they needed to be avoided and turned into positive ones (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016; Fortier, 2010).

It needs to be highlighted that the youth’s feelings were not only what welfare professionals wanted to focus on but also what they could focus on while performing their tasks with limited resources. They had no tools to change the negative public image of the place, but they could try to change the way the local youth felt about it. Additionally, young people in Steephill increasingly suffered from the hardships of disadvantage, yet welfare workers could hardly change their position or circumstances in any meaningful way. The sense of powerlessness was evident in Steephill team meetings, where welfare workers regularly gathered to discuss the situation of the local youth. In one meeting, they talked about the nationwide School Health Promotion study that monitors the well-being of Finnish children. The situation in Steephill was even worse than expected; alcohol, drugs, sexual harassment, abuse, bullying and depression were widely reported. ‘We have a lot of work to do’, the head of the youth workers, Tupu, sighed. She then reported on another neighbourhood survey that the city of Helsinki had initiated to map citizens’ experiences of their living environment. ‘They [minors living in Steephill] report on violence, messiness and dirt. They say this [area] is a ghetto’, Tupu said. She called for intensive collaboration, but the welfare workers could not do much about the combination of linked problems that comprise urban marginality. Thus, they decided to engage the youth in caring for the deteriorating environment by organising schoolyard clean-up efforts, hoping that the youth would learn the code of conduct of the good communitarian citizen and ultimately recover from their ill feelings (Fortier, 2010). ‘We have to do this through positives’, Tupu advised her colleagues.

My intention is not to criticise the clean-up days or any of the other practices described. However, it is important to notice that the ideal of the communitarian citizen is not imposed on all citizens evenly; it is only imposed on people living and growing up in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, where the social engineering of the state ‘emerges in its most radical version’ (Johansen, 2022: 419). Only in stigmatised places like Steephill are young people expected to fight the ‘taint of place’ (Wacquant, 2008: 238) and recover from their ill feelings by developing positive emotional associations with their living environment. The key point is that the ideal of communitarian citizenship, when practised on the ground, relentlessly pulls young people towards their neighbourhood, aiming to produce place-bound citizens who feel loyalty and rootedness at the neighbourhood level. My argument is that cross-pressure emerges as this ideal intertwines with another ideal that – as the next part of this article shows – has a rather contradictory goal of producing citizens who can take care of themselves and leave behind the perils of poverty.

Raising Entrepreneurial Individuals Who Leave and Succeed

Above, I described how Emma tried to foster communitarian citizenship in her students and engineer positive feelings of attachment and pride. However, at other times, she focused on detaching the youth from their home area. A few weeks before our first photo session to capture ‘the good’ in the neighbourhood, Emma taught her students how to search for summer jobs online. She advised them not to look for jobs in the area but to turn their backs on the milieu that prevented them from getting on. One of the students told her that he would probably get a job at the local grocery store where his mother worked, and another announced his plans to ask for a job at the local youth centre. Emma approved but emphasised that it would be ‘worthwhile to look for something new and not stay here’. The students explained to her that it was difficult to find a job without connections and that it was convenient to have a summer job close to home. Emma nodded compassionately but encouraged the students to keep looking, telling them that this was their moment to ‘find new prospects’. In that moment, having strong ties to the place or valuing one’s home was far from desirable. Instead, the youths were expected to tear themselves away from the area, which in this context was considered a risk environment rather than a home. Developing proper citizens was not about contributing to the local community; here, the teacher focused on developing rationally thinking individuals engaged in self-making practices.

Nearly all welfare professionals in Steephill criticised residents for devaluing the area, while simultaneously stating that it was not a ‘proper environment’ for children to grow up in and openly describing it as ‘unhealthy’, ‘risky’ and ‘problematic’. Within this ‘landscape of concern’ (Reay and Lucey, 2000: 411), Emma described to me the local community, constructing a boundary between families engaged in ‘normal’ lives and those raising concerns:

There are working families who live normal lives and manage them well, and I’m sure they don’t know all their neighbours. But then there are these families who have difficulties in life management and in regularity in general . . . They don’t work, and they share this ‘it takes a village’ attitude, and everybody knows everybody. When they are in a desperate situation, they send their kids to live with a neighbour. There is a lot of this kind of mutual help to get by.

Emma’s description portrayed having a community-oriented mind as a problem rather than an advantage, implying that there are two kinds of community spirits: proper and improper. She opposed local networks and the provision of collective care for children in favour of the ‘normal’, revealing a broader tendency among welfare professionals to perceive residents and their lifestyles in a binary way: either they managed to live respectable lives, echoing the common understanding of middle-class lifestyles, or they engaged in lifestyles that were seen as rough. ⁴ As Emma’s description shows, the first group marked as normal and ‘right’ was narrated as not being too attached to the neighbourhood and not having too much bonding social capital, whereas those engaged in territorialised, ‘abnormal’ lifestyles sustained the communality that kept them in place and prevented them from getting on (see Koster, 2015).

From this perspective, the community that already existed in the area was not the community that urban policies aimed to design and build (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016: 974) but a hazard from which young people needed to be protected. Demonstrating this view, Salli, another teacher in Steephill, divided students into those who got stuck in the neighbourhood and those who managed to succeed: ‘A lot of my students have made it; they’ve become teachers, have received stable positions. So, even if you start here, you can go to a high school and move forward to working life’, Salli told me, ‘But then there are those who have stayed here to hang out at the mall.’ Many other welfare professionals shared Salli’s understanding that young people growing up in Steephill had two possible futures ahead of them: either they would leave and succeed or they would stay and become immersed in the local way of life. The future ‘at the mall’ is the Finnish version of the rough life, implying social ills such as intergenerational poverty, welfare dependency, violence, addiction and – particularly with respect to women – single parenthood (see also Hayward, 2000: 100). In order to help young people avoid the pitfalls of the mall, welfare professionals turned to concrete practices of detaching the youth from their neighbourhood. They directed them to keep their distance from the post-industrial working-class community that already existed in the area, since excessive exposure to local networks probably meant adopting lifestyles of irregularity and deficient life management. The most effective strategy for maintaining distance was leaving the neighbourhood entirely; therefore, most welfare professionals in Steephill shared the same understanding as practitioners interviewed by Atkinson and Kintrea (2004: 445): that ‘getting on’ means ‘getting out’. Hence, Emma in one moment promoted place-belongingness and in another moment determinedly pulled the youth away from the same place now seen as problematic. ‘I always tell them to leave. Go to the city centre, go somewhere else, anywhere, just don’t stay here’, she told me. Explaining her motivation for repeatedly telling the local youths to turn their backs on the place that restricted their life chances, she said, ‘Their whole life happens here. So I tell them to go to another school or look for a change of scenery, so they can meet new people and won’t just stay here stuck among themselves.’

When the welfare professionals’ focus was on saving young people from the ‘problematic environment’ (i.e. local community), they used language of self-reliance and individual agency. They tried to convince the youth that instead of being at the mercy of their social position, they controlled their own destinies and could choose which path they wanted to follow; they could follow the path of the mall or they could choose to detach themselves and follow the path of education, work and decent citizenship. ‘It all depends on you believing in yourself’, I repeatedly heard welfare professionals telling the youth. ‘Take your future in your own hands and leave’, they said, drawing on neoliberal scripts of the self (Evans and Sewell, 2013; Hayward, 2000; Peck, 2010) and implying that a person’s own effort largely determined whether they would succeed. In this context, positive emotions implying attachment and belonging mainly prevented young people from becoming calculating, rationally thinking individuals.

As already noted, welfare professionals working in Steephill had a clear understanding of the structural factors causing the hardships of poverty, but since they were powerless to change the situation, their only option was to try to manage it. Therefore, within the context of disadvantage, the ‘neoliberal mantra of active citizenship’ that urges citizens to take responsibility for themselves (see Koch, 2021) was not only a powerful cultural ideal but also a ‘survival skill’ that could save young people from the risk environment. In practice, however, young people were exposed to opposing demands as welfare professionals pulled them in contradictory directions: towards their neighbourhood and away from it (Hayward, 2000: 104).

Conclusion: Cross-Pressure Reproducing Marginality in Routine Ways

Diverse ethnographies have shown how young people growing up in the urban margins need to deal with and choose between the different – often opposing – cultural models and social norms that surround them (e.g. Harding, 2010; MacDonald et al., 2005; Reay and Lucey, 2000). However, most studies have only focused on the internal cultural milieu of neighbourhoods, failing to take into account the variegated forms and functions of state presence and its consequences. In this article, I employed a more relational approach and harnessed ethnographic methods that, according to Auyero and Jensen (2015: 361), allow the sociologist to ‘dissect the operation of formal and informal state practice, as well as how involved actors make meaning out of the sociopolitical milieu in which they find themselves’. Drawing on my fieldwork in Steephill, I examined interactions between marginalised youth and state actors promoting their opportunities, describing how neoliberal ideals of good citizenship directed at disadvantaged neighbourhoods play out in practice. As my data show, welfare professionals frequently mobilised the paradigm of communitarian citizenship with the aim of developing citizens who perceive their place of residence as their beloved home, value and take good care of it and express positive feelings of belonging and pride. Of interest here is that this approach promotes extremely place-bound citizenship that is enacted through and towards place. However, my data also indicate that welfare professionals were simultaneously engaged in a contrasting project – one aimed at producing entrepreneurial citizens who are not tied to place but recognise the disadvantages of remaining in a risk environment and, acting as rational decision-makers, escape from poverty by ‘getting out’. The fact that the same individuals mobilised both of these ideals highlights that the apparent contradiction did not stem from different welfare professionals holding dissimilar value systems but from the simultaneous presence of cultural models promoted by policies and deployed by actors responsible for implementing them.

It has been suggested that the ideal of the communitarian citizen advocates ‘a radical transformation from how citizens were previously perceived by governments: no longer rational, individual, calculating subjects, they have become relational, affective subjects in search of attachments to a greater good’ (De Wilde and Duyvendak, 2016: 974). However, the evidence from my study suggests that the ideal of the self-reliant subject has only been supplemented by the ideal of the communitarian citizen, at least in terms of young people growing up in disadvantaged parts of the city. More importantly, my data show that when simultaneously enacted on the ground, the two citizenship ideals generate significant cross-pressures as young people are expected to turn towards their neighbourhood and away from it. In one moment, the neighbourhood is a home, but in the next, it is a risk environment to be avoided. Being a proud Steephiller is encouraged in one moment but demonised in the next. These contradicting messages matter since they are related to fundamental areas of life, seeking to steer not only youths’ behaviour but also their attitudes, emotions, attachments, aspirations and social networks. As Harding (2010: 159–160) noted, young people are exposed to cultural heterogeneity everywhere, but in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, they are more often exposed to contradictory models in domains with direct bearing on their life chances and well-being. My results support this view, showing that the youth is put under cross-pressure concerning core questions about the self: is my home and my community good or bad, a haven or a threat, should I be proud or ashamed, is it appropriate to be connected to the place or not? These are fundamental moral questions that are related to practical questions, as one cannot both stay in the neighbourhood and leave it.

My results show the importance of space in shaping welfare encounters and affirm that place matters for citizenship. First, the dynamics I observed are likely to be unique to disadvantaged neighbourhoods, as communitarian citizenship only manifests in places where strategies of creating community spirit and place attachment are understood as forces of neighbourhood renewal. Second, the process of cross-pressure develops in situations where both citizenship ideals are put in practice through place: in terms of communitarian citizenship by attaching young people to the place, and in terms of entrepreneurial citizenship by detaching them from it. From the perspective of welfare workers, the enactment of these two ideals is far from contradictory, as both in their own way aim to create proper middle-class citizens. Through entrepreneurial citizenship, welfare workers help young people to access and succeed in middle-class society; through communitarian citizenship, they produce the types of citizens that fit the ‘new governance of welfare’: citizens who are not tied to the local community but participate in building the right kind of (i.e. middle-class) community spirit and operate in the right emotional register (Vollebergh et al., 2021). What is problematic is that these classed projects to produce good citizens deny – or at least privatise – the youth’s negative emotions. In terms of communitarian citizenship, emotions such as anger, shame and apathy are unwanted since they strongly belie the affective register of pride, empathy and love on which the ideal is built (Fortier, 2016; Muehlebach, 2012). In terms of entrepreneurial citizenship, the endeavour to raise positively thinking, energetic individuals who strive forward rules out everything else. In both cases, young people are taught that good citizenship means performing positive feelings, which not only censures their feelings but also teaches them apolitical citizenship that leaves little room for critical consciousness (Fortier, 2010). Moreover, research has shown that institutional efforts to turn young people into something ‘better’ can make them feel utterly unrecognised by making them think that they themselves are the problem and that they must change who they are (Meriluoto and Junnilainen, 2024: 90–91).

While it is true that what I have described related to one neighbourhood is not generalisable to all disadvantaged neighbourhoods as such, the process of cross-pressure (re)production may also be found in other similar contexts. Different policies might have various overlapping effects, affect diverse areas of life and be contradictory in several ways, but my investigation nevertheless paves the way for future research on state–citizen relations and the contradictory demands imposed on (young) people living in the urban margins. In this article, I have solely focused on the cross-pressure produced by state representatives, but as Johansen (2022) stated, marginalisation is not produced by the state alone. Rather, it is produced by the interface between conflicting social norms and rationalities promoted by state authorities and other important actors, such as family members, friends and neighbours (Harding, 2010: 146; Johansen, 2022). Therefore, further research is required to understand the various ways in which young people are put under cross-pressure and, more crucially, the impact of cross-pressure on their experiences, decision making and behaviour. As Sanna’s reflections at the beginning of this article show, young people grapple with various issues as they try to deal with the cross-pressure between loving and leaving their neighbourhoods. This is especially true if they are targeted by urban policy strategies that tend to reproduce cross-pressures rather than provide tools to manage them.