The Absurdity of the Ordinary: The Fragile Affinity Between Imagination and Materiality in the Finnish Urban Periphery

Abstract

This anthropological study focuses on spatially ordered dimensions of sociocultural life in Kontula, a suburban housing estate located at the urban margins of Helsinki, Finland. With a notorious reputation since its construction in the 1960s, it has come to represent the numerous ills of contemporary urbanity, from poverty and substance abuse to failed immigration policies. Its urban transformation is explored as the entanglement of imagination and materiality, a make-believe space that privileges neither the social constructionist nor the purely materialist perspective. I study the everyday life of its inhabitants as recurring and routinized episodes, occasionally interrupted by events that disturb its embodied flow and force inhabitants to reflect upon their spatially situated practices. I argue that the everyday encounters in rapidly transforming Kontula are simultaneously experienced as absurd and ordinary, and constitute the ordering principles of its affective geography.

Introduction

The metro map of the capital region of Finland is extremely simple. One line connects the fringes of the city of Espoo in the west with the urban peripheries of Helsinki in the east. The otherwise solitary metro line forks into two for the last easternmost stops. The 15-min passage from the city center toward the east carries a specific significance in the vernacular geography of Helsinki; according to the dominant conception, reproduced vividly in the mainstream media, most of the eastern districts of Helsinki have an aura of a whole range of social problems. The specific character of these problems is both embodied and reflected in the course of daily life, with various logics of inclusion and exclusion, relative to their location. Kontula, my field site, is the second to last stop on the line.

I was traveling from the city center to Kontula with Jukka ¹ —a former bus driver who had retired early because of mental health problems and substance abuse—and we were only three stops away from our destination. We had been on a cinema excursion, organized by one of the active nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Kontula. Jukka regularly participated in various kinds of voluntary work and had lived in Kontula for more than 30 years.

It’s really quite rare that I leave Kontula; sometimes I go to meet my parents who live far away, and occasionally my brother takes me to see a band somewhere in Helsinki. I do not really fit into the city centre.

We overheard a discussion between two women, around 50 years of age, who spoke in a very self-confident manner: “Ok, we are now heading into the lawless east. It doesn’t look like Finland anymore with all these immigrants around,” the one right behind me started. “I wonder what it would feel like to live here. I think I wouldn’t have the guts, especially not with my children,” the other added. Jukka grew visibly agitated but did not say anything, and the women got off at the next stop, Itäkeskus, known for its large shopping mall.

After the metro doors closed, Jukka said, “If I’d have heard those words in Kontula, I would have challenged them immediately. The East might have its share of problems but I’m tired of hearing about them. There are lots of good people around, but everyone thinks that we’re all junkies and criminals—why is no one telling the truth about this? I tell you, I don’t understand why so many immigrants are placed in Kontula; I can’t stand all the noise they make where I live, but,” he struggled to find words, “I still prefer them to these idiots. Year after year I understand less what is happening in Kontula—it’s all getting mixed up to the point of madness, but, still, we have to stick together over here.”

This vignette raises several questions. I will explore here the relational qualities of urban space: how movement in the city does not occur on a neutral grid, but is shaped in an uneven manner, through the entanglements of the material, affective, and sensorial realms. For Jukka, the material aspects blended with memories and immediate sensations throughout the passage. The borders between the districts did not follow the official designations, but were experienced as fluid and subject to change. How is it that some urban spaces are endowed with distinct qualities that make them stand apart? In the case above, the passage toward Kontula and, on a larger scale, the gradual movement toward the east, signified a sense of homeliness for Jukka, not an entry into a lawless urban zone. At the same time, he was aware of the reputation of the area but felt that it was something he could not control, and that the two women, ignorant and coming from elsewhere, were reinforcing it. However, it still was easier to find solidarity in a lifeworld that Jukka found increasingly absurd and incomprehensible than to follow the mainstream views. My focus is on these ambivalent and rapidly shifting positions in everyday life; an urban space like Kontula is recognized as inferior and stigmatized, but is often, in a paradoxical manner, also a source of pride, or even seen as a safe haven for its marginalized inhabitants.

Jukka’s encounter, based on immediate and embodied experience rather than analytical reflection on the spatial divisions of the city, was one of many that demonstrate the affective geography of Helsinki in action. My aim here is to illustrate, supported by ethnographic data, how the deviations from what is experienced as normal and encounters with incommensurable lifeworlds have become part and parcel of the everyday neighboring practices of an urban periphery. I argue that explorations of urban futures, especially in rapidly diversifying margins, should acknowledge in a more detailed manner the embeddedness of the material and the imagined. In place like Kontula, questions of diversity and belonging do not fit into neat categorizations of class, origin, or ethnicity: they are in a state of flux, often simultaneously incomprehensible and ordinary. Everyday life revolves around “the capacity to live with difference” (Hall, 1993, p. 361).

Analytically, I will focus on two broad themes that can be summed up under the rubrics of affective geography (Navaro-Yashin, 2012) and accelerated urban change (Hall, 2012). Together they will help us understand in a more comprehensive manner how the residents of Kontula become aware of their lifeworlds, establish a sense of belonging in a marginalized area, and invest in the everyday rituals in surroundings experienced as increasingly absurd while, puzzlingly, perpetuating powerful associations of home. I use “absurd” here as a catch-all term for exaggeratedly unusual, unconventional, and unexpected characteristics, a sensation that there is too much of everything and that reality is becoming increasingly difficult to grasp. This glimpse into the current realities of the urban margins in Finland explores how the material and affective realms of urban space relate to sociocultural expressions of conviviality and confusion.

My curiosity was aroused already at the early stages of my research by the vividness with which the residents described their surroundings, commonly associated with mass-produced concrete structures and a lack of features to identify with. The gray walls of the central open-air shopping center, with its dilapidated squares and the adjoining metro station, had powerful affective qualities that connected with the embodied experiences, memories, and spatiality of the city. Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012) defines affective geography as “cartography, at one and the same time, of the affects of an outer environment and those of interior human selves, as they are interrelated” (p. 24). In this sense, the inner and the outer merge and become indistinguishable. From a slightly different angle, emphasizing the historical formation of affective atmospheres, Laurent Berlant (2011) points out how affective responses are anchored in history and “may be said significantly to exemplify shared historical time” (p. 15). Kontula’s urban history is short in years but extremely dense; it is shared by its inhabitants as an incommensurable fit between the demonizing accounts of the mainstream media and the lived realities of the everyday, realized through powerful affective responses.

Methodologically, the straightforward opposition between the self and the environment, the social constructionist and new materialist approaches, can be challenged by focusing on spatiality. This perspective emphasizes the notion of make-believe in the ongoing creation of spaces, the interplay between making and believing: “a play on the notion of the de facto: something that exists, but not really; an entity that has been crafted and erected phantasmatically, that has been believed through the making or materialized in the imagining” (Navaro-Yashin, 2012, pp. 5, 28). The aim is to bring the phantasmatic and the tangible together without privileging one or the other. However, while Navaro-Yashin studies how the uncanny affective geography of Northern Cyprus haunts the normal life of people, in my argument the positions are reversed: I look at how the absurdity of the accelerated urban change becomes normalized in Kontula. In my study, the making and believing are situated in an urban setting that is plagued by a notorious reputation and yet celebrated for its diversity. Kontula is, paradoxically, simultaneously filled with significance and associated with a uniform suburban landscape, consisting of nondescript human containers and minimal municipal services. The phantasmatic and tangible are entangled in often surprising ways that result in interesting considerations for the better understanding of diversity and urban futures—both in Helsinki and globally.

This study offers a critical perspective on super-diversity, a summary term for moving beyond a society divided into simple ethnic groups (Vertovec, 2007) into lifeworlds with more complex classifications, some of them ephemeral and others more lasting. I follow the view that the everyday has become filled “with new emergent modes of coexistence” (Back & Sinha, 2018, p. 25) and “the everyday multiculture that emerges though the senses has outpaced both cultural theory and many city dwellers’ own accounts of their lives” (Rhys-Taylor, 2013, p. 405). I argue here that ethnicity or cultural background are not the primary identifiers in the everyday encounters in Kontula. There are moments when they are foregrounded but, generally, the affective geography directs one’s attention toward a more amorphous sense of difference, not to be reduced into crude generalizations of race or origin. The local sense of affective geography is in stark contrast with the sensationalist news accounts of the area portraying it as a case of “failed integration” or a “multicultural ghetto.”

I begin with a discussion on urban geography and argue that the perspective based on affective geography bridges the division between the material and sensory in a fruitful way. I move on to analyze how the complex bordering practices based on the relative location of Kontula provide ways to establish connections and separations, as well as comparisons and evaluations, between urban spaces. After discussing the advantages of studying these issues ethnographically, I then focus on the most significant site of my study, Kontula’s dilapidated open-air shopping center. I discuss how the neighborhoods of Kontula have been situated in relation to different concerns throughout their history and how their inhabitants relate and react to the accelerated urban change.

Affective Geography and Accelerated Urban Change: Theory and Literature

Awareness of the Qualities of Urban Space

The neighborhoods of Kontula have occupied a special place in the vernacular geography of Helsinki since their construction in the mid-1960s. Unlike most Finnish suburban housing estates, Kontula has had a strong identity, with the historically shifting qualities of a problem zone that have also been shared by those who have never visited the place (see, for example, Kokkonen, 2002; Tuominen, 2020, 2022). Alongside its reputation on the municipal and national level, it is also situated in the global hierarchy of value (Herzfeld, 2004), a shared recognition of classifications that enable their comparison in different contexts. Globally, Kontula’s position corresponds to the small set of urban spaces in every country that have become renowned and reviled in “the discourses of journalism, politics, and scholarship, as well as in ordinary conversation as synonyms for social hell” (Wacquant et al., 2014, p. 1273).

Interestingly, Kontula occupies a paradoxical position in the classification of urban areas: it is both a bleak place with no significant sense of the past, a surface that forces the residents to live in its dreary present (cf. Reed, 2002, p. 137), and a place with too much meaning, impossible to order and categorize into a coherent whole. As I will demonstrate later, there are several ways to deal with the material and sensory overload of a place that for many residents has rapidly changed beyond recognition. While most of daily life lacks variety, the routinized episodes are heightened by occasional moments of increased awareness, reflection, and occasionally incomprehension (Taylor, 1989, 1992). My study illustrates the dynamic of making and believing in the practices of classification and bordering, especially in relation to the assumed normality elsewhere.

At the core of the bordering practices of Kontula is the concept of neighborhood, powerful as contested territory and meaning, resisting attempts at standardization (Martin, 2003, p. 362). Instead of a clearly bounded whole, I concentrate on “nested zones that subdivide the environment around one’s home into sections of distinct spatial, social, and emotional nearness” (Kusenbach, 2008, p. 231), an affective geography resulting from the mix of people and the built environment. In Kontula, the open-air shopping center signifies the core, bringing together the residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.

Much of my ethnographic fieldwork was characterized by encounters with the unexpected, often amusing, or even absurd, that had become central to the residents’ awareness of the place. Their most richly lived and felt relationships with the immediate environment were both embodied and reflected upon. In these situations, the quotidian flow of life was interrupted by a complex sensation that forced the individual to step back and concentrate on the qualities of the place as a way to challenge the previous understanding (Basso, 1996, p. 54; Taylor, 1992, 1995). In addition to self-reflection, the sensory experience of places—familiar or surprising—inspired thinking about “other places, other people, other times, whole networks of associations that ramify unaccountably within the expanding spheres of awareness that they themselves engender. The experience of sensing places, then, is thus both roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic” (Basso, 1996, p. 55). At the same time, the residents’ sensory experiences were closely tied to the habitual life of Kontula, realized in encounters reproducing its particular affective atmosphere (Berlant, 2011) and geography, entangling the material and sensorial aspects that were shared by its residents but were not immune to change (Navaro-Yashin, 2012).

Obviously, a comprehensive review of the vast literature on how affect has been studied in different disciplines, from experimental psychology to cultural geography, is outside the scope of this article.

Instead, for my argument, I follow Navaro-Yashin’s (2012) characterization of affect as “a charge that has a part to play in the sociality of the human beings who inhabit a space” (p. 20), as something that reaches beyond the realms of subjectivity but may be experienced by human beings. In my analysis, I combine the intricate ways that make-believe operates in urban space with a study of historically situated bordering practices that shape the modes of belonging and exclusion. In the beginning vignette, Jukka wanted to defend Kontula, but did not because we were not on his home ground. At the same time, he claimed that he understands less and less of what is happening in Kontula but still insisted on the need for solidarity among its residents.

Bordering Practices and Absurd Urban Life

In an approach that emphasizes the make-believe qualities of space, the conception of borders as tangible objects severely limits the analysis. It is more appropriate to see them as processes, a form of technique. Rather than the borders themselves, my focus is on bordering, “the process of classifying and ordering space and relations between here and elsewhere in the world” (Green, 2013, p. 350). The location of Kontula should be seen as relative, subject to a range of different ways of measuring and comparison, its meaning and value depending upon “its relations with, and separations from, other places” (Green, 2012, p. 6). Borders conceptualized in this manner are not fixed in the present but contain all the previous ways of how they have been thought and performed—this is an ongoing process of generating new connections as well as disconnections (Green, 2010, p. 272).

It is also important to note that the comparison does not only occur between units of similar size and standing. In addition to comparing different neighborhoods with one another, within a city or even globally, it is common to reflect upon distinctions at different scales: city and the suburbs, city and the provinces, city and the nation, and so on (Koefoed & Simonsen, 2012, p. 634). In this vein, Kontula is simultaneously bordered as an exceptional suburban housing estate, an exemplary case of global developments, the future of Helsinki, and a village-like collection of neighborhoods.

One of the recurring themes in my ethnographic data concerned accelerated urbanity, an ordered sense of one’s neighborhood and community disappearing and becoming harder to comprehend (see Hall, 2012 for a similar argument about London). Many of my informants experienced this sense of confusion and lack of comprehension as a permanent condition in their lives. This was not about dealing with economic uncertainty or a precarious work situation, which were in their own right very common among them, but rather about the unpredictability and absurdity of social encounters and the very nature of the urban environment. “Anything can happen around here!” was a very common way of describing the area, and “See, this is Kontula!” was a typical reaction to something unexpected. According to these statements, everyday life in Kontula did not follow the same rules as elsewhere in Helsinki, exemplified by the assumed normality of the central districts. This embodiment of rapid change is a crucial dimension of the make-believe processes in Kontula.

My approach to diversity in Kontula focuses on its ordinariness. Theoretically, I follow Paul Gilroy’s (2005) use of the term conviviality but emphasize its connection to living with all kinds of diversity. Everyday encounters between people who are familiar with one another from frequenting the same places are, for the most part, rather unremarkable. For young people, they signify normality, as they represent the only sociocultural realities they know. Les Back and Shamser Sinha (2018) summarize conviviality as “an unruly, spontaneous social pattern produced by metropolitan social groups living in close proximity with each other” (p. 134). I consider a place-specific sense of conviviality, embodied and routinized by the inhabitants, to be an important bordering practice that operates on both the material (referring to the physical boundaries, however porous) and affective (referring to the affective geography of relative location) realms. Life is considered to be different elsewhere.

Method

My research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Kontula in 2017 and 2018 (12 months/3 months). However, my participant observation has continued after this period in the form of participating in voluntary work for different NGOs, discussing my research and writings with the residents, and just spending time in the area. While the focus has been on long-term participant observation, the fieldwork has been supported with semi-structured interviews, studying media accounts, historical studies of the area, and statistical data. More than 30 interviews, lasting from half an hour to several hours, have been used, mostly to confirm and study further insights and questions arising from participant observation. Following Alpa Shah (2017), my ethnographic work emphasizes the “production of knowledge through being and action; it is praxis, the process by which theory is dialectically produced and realised in action” (p. 45). I will refer to this aspect throughout the article.

The advantages of long-term fieldwork already started to show during my first weeks in Kontula. The residents began to share their reflections in a more contemplative manner and discussions became more relaxed. Living in a place that had long been a symbol for the ills and evils of urban marginality had made most of them wary. There was a steady flow of journalists, researchers, NGO professionals, and students with questionnaires, almost all of them concentrating on social problems, reproducing the predefined classifications and mostly disappearing after the forms were filled in. I was once approached to provide contact information specifically for three “unemployed” and five “immigrants” for such research purposes. My long-term engagement with a holistic approach to sociocultural diversity and my detailed study of the relationships between different groups gave my research access to views that were very different to those expressed during the first encounters. Initial comments mostly confirmed the expectations of the mainstream society and sensationalist media accounts, reproducing the image of a problem area (see Back & Sinha, 2018).

In contrast to the rehearsed reactions to preformulated questions, everyday life is based on an embodied understanding of sociality, a way to act in different situations in an appropriate way, rather than following a ready map inside our heads (Taylor, 1992, p. 217). In Kontula, this principle was acknowledged in colloquial speech, with assertions of “senselessness,” “outrageousness,” and “madness,” and expectations that just about anything might happen. Trying to understand how people experienced and reacted to these situations became a crucial part of my research. The stereotype of a gloomy suburban housing estate, a landscape of uniform gray concrete, was brought together with urban diversity unlike anywhere else in Helsinki.

My own position as a White university-educated male researcher differed from many, but by no means all, of the people in my field site. There was a lot of good-natured banter about having a “Doctor” to observe how the marginalized people were living, and I had the unexpected advantage of having lived my childhood and youth in another stigmatized district in Helsinki—a fact that many in Kontula saw as bringing us together. The fluctuation of intimacy and estrangement, discussions of personal feelings and views on complex global developments are presented here as lived engagement, vignettes, and comments that illuminate themes and contradictions that were repeatedly brought up in the everyday encounters between people in Kontula. The interactions were at their most dense in the run-down open-air shopping center—the heart of Kontula, where people from its neighborhoods congregated and where material, sensory, and imaginary clashed in often surprising ways.

The Absurd Heart of Kontula: Encounters in the Open-Air Shopping Center

Building suburban housing estates was Finland’s response to the large-scale migration from the countryside to the cities that took place in the 1950s and 1960s (Lento, 2006). The Finnish word for them, lähiö, has connotations with this specific type of housing—uninviting but affordable blocks of flats with large green areas between them—but it also refers to a distinctive style of living, even a particular mentality associated with the inhabitants (see Ilmonen, 2016; Kokkonen, 2002; Stjernberg, 2019; Tuominen, 2020, 2022 for detailed discussions on definitions and history).

For the purposes of this article, the history of Kontula can be summarized broadly in three phases. Its first decades, since construction began in 1963, were characterized by the promise of modernization, especially for people who had moved from traditional working-class districts or the countryside to the new and spacious housing with modern amenities. However, the rowdiness of the place, its relatively large proportion of social housing, remoteness, and the rootlessness of its residents became part of its image early on through media accounts (see especially Kokkonen, 2002; Roivainen, 1999). Its notorious reputation and territorial stigma became all-encompassing in the 1990s with the deep economic recession and quick rise in unemployment, mostly as a result of the loss of traditional working-class jobs. From the 2000s on, the emphasis has shifted largely to supposed failures in immigration and integration (Tuominen, 2020).

In statistical terms, 36.2% of the 15,000 residents of Kontula do not speak the official languages of Finland (Finnish, Swedish, Sámi) as their native tongue (City of Helsinki, 2019). The figure is among the highest in Finland and has grown rapidly over the last 30 years, but is quite low compared with many other European localities associated with immigration. The percentage of inhabitants receiving social benefits is 20% (compared with 11.9% in the Helsinki region), almost double the average but not exceptional in Helsinki (City of Helsinki, 2018). There are many suburban housing estates that match these numbers but have not developed a similar sense of territorial stigma. I suggest that the sense of absurdity and accelerated change has to do with the distinct make-believe character of Kontula’s neighborhoods, especially the affective geography of its notorious open-air shopping center.

Thirty-eight open-air shopping centers were built in Helsinki and its surrounding municipalities in the 1960s to act as their effective centers. In addition to shops, they housed the municipal services and acted as local hubs for public transport. After the 1960s, a new type, the enclosed shopping mall, started to emerge in Finland and spread into the central areas of Finnish cities in the 1980s (Lahti, 2017). The open-air shopping center in Kontula was built in 1967 and expanded in 1986 together with the extension of the metro line. Currently, it is the biggest of its kind in Finland, with over 22,000 square meters of retail space and more than 30,000 visitors in a day. However, it is vastly different from the spectacular, fully enclosed indoor malls, associated with almost magical qualities (see Goss, 1993 and Miller & Laketa, 2019 for the affective sensibilities of the malls)—the shopping experience in Kontula is mostly limited to the bare necessities.

Despite that, for many of the residents it is the center of their public lives, with grocery stores, pubs and restaurants, a youth center, a municipal library, a health center, and other integral services. For the vast majority of those who do not live in Kontula, it has become a powerful symbol of urban failure, as expressed by a friend of mine, and conveying a familiar view of the whole district: “If the shopping centre area is the public face of Kontula, I don’t want to know what happens outside it, in private.”

Public life at the shopping center is public to the degree that people might refer to it jokingly as a theater or even a colosseum. Its three smallish squares, connected by narrow passages lined with shops, restaurants, and bars, make it very different from the sleepy residential neighborhoods surrounding it. It is composed of relatively uniform structures with two floors; the Central Square has a circular building resembling a tower that houses a night club, the Kontula Square is surrounded by a concentration of municipal services, and the Children’s Square hosts a dilapidated playground. These are all familiar signs of the centers of suburban housing estates, recognized even by Finns who have never visited one. Many of the open-air shopping centers have already been demolished, and the few remaining examples will probably follow soon. The architecture brings one back in time to the 1960s, but what the locals refer to as the atmosphere or feeling of the place is nowadays very different.

The overall appearance is dreary and unkempt, but, at the same time, extremely lively around the clock. People pass by on their way home from the metro, the residents use the services provided as a part of their daily routines, and, for a large group of people, it is the center of their social lives, a place to see and be seen. For them, in the words of Suzanne Hall (2012), “local worlds are places in which they are not simply dependent, but also highly invested” (p. 96). In the environment of accelerated urban change, the seemingly insignificant everyday rituals host countless encounters: “They potentially provide recognisable rhythms, thereby offering diverse individuals a format of time, space and etiquette in which to engage with one another” (Hall, 2012, pp. 59–60). There were, of course, also residents who avoided the shopping center area for its restlessness, or felt indifferent about it. However, I concentrate here on the loose community of people who have embraced the shopping center’s bounded social world.

“Everyone Has a Story”

My initial contacts in Kontula all emphasized the same thing: it would not be difficult to find “material” for my study, for everyone would have a story to tell. This was in unison with claims that Kontula is full of characters who do not fit into the uniform expectations of the central districts. The stories of differences reinforced the sense of absurdity and set the border between two kinds of normality. There was, for example, a woman with a briefcase and the look of an office clerk about her who would erupt into shouting obscenities at any minute, a man of scruffy appearance who supposedly had millions in his bank account, a woman who started giving hugs to strangers at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, an old lady who would come to feed the rats in the middle of the night, a man who would drink around the clock throughout the winter months but would spend summers abroad sober, and many more. They were presented as ordinary features of the place that invited different responses.

Abdi, 25, of Somali descent, had settled in Kontula after migrating to Finland 10 years ago and living in other parts of Helsinki for 7 years. He had just found a job filling shelves in a supermarket that specializes in products from the Middle East. It was located nearby, just two metro stops away, in another run-down open-air shopping center. Abdi’s everyday life was largely restricted to these two places. We were having a routine discussion at his local pub.

“Everything I need is close by, I belong here. I tend to forget how long it was since I visited the centre. A couple of weeks ago I had to go to the centre. The Eid celebrations were coming and I needed a new stylish suit—that’s very important in my community—and I couldn’t find one that I liked,” he began, and took a sip of his beer. “I went through every shop in East Helsinki but still no luck. I had to go to the centre. The big air-conditioned shopping mall made me feel nervous and I wanted to get back here quick. I don’t know what it is but I felt completely out of place. It’s the atmosphere of those places, not just the people.” Abdi did not want to be misunderstood: “Don’t think that I would be scared of those places. It’s true that there is more racism in the centre, but I don’t mind. Here, it is a crazy mix of cultures, but for me it represents a balance. I can go to a pub and I can celebrate religious holidays. Some of my friends living elsewhere say that anything can happen in Kontula. I tell them that I enjoy it, nothing is happening in the boring parts of the city.” As if to amplify his message, Abdi took a can of beer from his backpack and filled his pint glass in full view of the bartender. Noticing my amazement, he grinned: “I can drink my own beer here because I don’t like the brand they have on tap. Sometimes they make me buy something. This is Kontula!”

The distance of Kontula from elsewhere and the borders separating it from other places are measured not just in physical terms but in different interrelated hierarchies of value. According to the global hierarchy of value, it is peripheral and stigmatized, as opposed to the central and most valued districts (Herzfeld, 2004). Its difference from mainstream society is coupled with the assumed behavioral distance of its residents with regard to mainstream norms, values, and behaviors (Hastings, 2004, p. 236). The residential stigma makes it difficult for some people to leave their familiar areas (see, for example, August, 2014; Bourdieu & Accardo, 1999; Hall, 2012; Tuominen, 2016, 2020; Wacquant, 2010). As Abdi’s discomfort indicates, the difference between places was not just based on analytical reflection but on affective and embodied sensory experience. It is true that Kontula shopping center is loud and often rowdy; the large amount of substance abuse happening in plain site and the presence of over 10 small bars, among the cheapest in Helsinki, make it very different from the shiny shopping malls of Helsinki.

The affective geography of the place thrives on the public display that has become the cornerstone of its sociality: what is considered disorder consists of doing things like drinking and hanging out in public—things that are done legitimately in private in more reputable areas (Sampson, 2009, p. 7). Perhaps this is where the playful comparisons to a theater (or colosseum) come from. In the countless encounters that I participated in, Kontula was often referred to as energetic, diverse, and eager for new expressions. At the same time, it was absurd, out of control, and “too much.” The hierarchy of places and the careful drawing of borders connecting and separating them played a major role in how these qualities were evaluated. At the same time, it was possible to reorder this sense of chaos and marginality.

Ordering the Diversity

The make-believe space in Kontula is a result of historical transformations and their reactions. The vernacular history of Kontula, modeled as an accelerating urban transformation toward diversity, is related to developments in other areas. Jukka, Abdi, and many other residents often referred to feeling out of place or not fitting in elsewhere—Kontula had a diversity that they had access to. This was a way of situating oneself into the affective geography of Helsinki, for the cosmopolitan diversity of the city center was very different from the cosmopolitan diversity in the periphery. Neil Smith (2005) summarizes the difference thus:

The pursuit of difference, diversity and distinction forms the basis of the new urban ideology but it is not without contradiction. It embodies a search for diversity as long as it is highly ordered, and a glorification of the past as along as it is safely brought into the present. (p. 114)

On the basis of a short visit or the sensationalist media accounts, the everyday reality of Kontula’s shopping center area might feel out of control. Usually, this was vehemently denied by many of the residents, who blamed the media for stigmatization (see Tuominen, 2020). It was occasionally “too much,” but was, nevertheless, also associated with an affective sense of homeliness and belonging. The responses emphasized the embodied sense of attachment and solidarity:

I have never felt welcome in other parts of Helsinki. Here in the East I have room to breathe. I don’t feel like a Finn—I will never be one. But I sure am from Kontula. I know everyone and everything here! (Ali, 25, moved to Finland from Iraq ten years ago)

I was born here twenty years ago, but my family moved to Birmingham when I was one. Now I’m back here to do my military service [compulsory for Finnish males]. I don’t know that much about Finland, but every time I’m back here I stay in Kontula. Other people say that this is a shithole, but it feels like home to me. Perhaps I’m a little bit crazy to keep a smiling face here. I was born like that. Born to survive. (Suldaan, 20, Finn of Somali origin)

We have always welcomed new people here. Some people say that all the shit trickles to the East, but we are proud of what we have. Posh people might not like our way of life, but we stick together and survive no matter what happens. We’re not easily scared. I’m the type who can laugh in the middle of hardship. (Esko, 60, Finn of Finnish origin, born in Kontula)

These were general affirmations of belonging and community, and variations of them circulated widely throughout my fieldwork. They were expressions of territorial solidarity by people who had been denied a sense of belonging elsewhere. Their engagement with diversity was the result of limited mobility, both socially and physically. The affective geography of the city center of Helsinki created an uncomfortable feeling of being in the wrong place, outside the familiar surroundings. I also met many residents who had no problems leaving Kontula, yet who, nevertheless, joked about the outside world being sterile and bland, with twice as expensive pints and kebabs. These quotidian exchanges constituted important bordering practices, reproducing the make-believe space of Kontula, and established crucial senses of belonging, often unrecognized and ignored in urban studies. Understanding of urban diversity is highly localized and often polarized: in particular, recently gentrified former working-class districts closer to the city center often portray diversity, vibrancy, and nonconformist lifestyles, but in highly ordered sense.

The Normalization of Absurdity

The residents of Kontula often referred to what I interpret as accelerated urban change and the increasing absurdity of their everyday lives, but their reactions to this were varied. I came across moments of longing for a more comprehensible lifeworld, but they were usually contrasted with claims of resilience, of “pulling through” under any circumstances, possessing the moral strength to endure (cf. Hochschild, 2016). In a slightly gloomy way, the optimism itself, referred to as an inherent characteristic, was turned into an attribute that makes life bearable (Berlant, 2011, p. 14).

This pride in survival in an increasingly heterogeneous world was a key component of social relations. My ethnographic vignettes demonstrate the different ways of dealing with the absurd and the unexpected. In the beginning of the article, Jukka claimed that he does not understand what is happening in the place he calls home, but he would still prefer it to the pretentious lives of the mainstream. For Abdi, things were actually happening in Kontula, while most of Helsinki was boring. The affective geography of Kontula allowed Ali and Suldaan to be themselves, to breathe and to smile. They embraced it wholeheartedly, felt safe and at home despite the territorial stigma. Others used irony as a tool to negotiate the contradictions between the official narratives and their lived experiences (Juntunen & Laakkonen, 2019), or resorted to forms of cultural intimacy, taking features of external embarrassment—untidiness, noise, and cheap beer—as a source of pride and common sociality at the inhabitants’ collective expense (Herzfeld, 2016, p. 7).

As someone born in Kontula, Esko emphasized the ease of access and tolerance of diversity across racial, class, and other boundaries. However, this did not mean that discrimination did not exist in the make-believe space of Kontula. While different aspects of diversity were valued in Kontula compared with the central districts, and the desired futures of the areas followed divergent trajectories, the hierarchies were not a matter of individuals’ decisions. Many who did not conform to the expectations of mainstream society because of their cultural background or lifestyle found Kontula welcoming and open-minded, but this did not extend to everyone. The Bulgarian and Romanian Roma were generally shunned, just like elsewhere in Helsinki, and among the migrants there was a local hierarchy of belonging based on time of arrival into the country (see Back & Sinha, 2018, p. 72). However, even for the newcomers, the sense of belonging was easier to attain here than elsewhere in Helsinki. The relationships were convivial in Gilroy’s (2005) sense: the people spending time in pubs and attending NGO-organized activities did not necessarily like each other. However, the “strange others” often became “familiar others” through banal exchanges that increased attachment to the social environment (Koefoed & Simonsen, 2011, p. 355). These encounters made Kontula distinctive in the affective geography of Helsinki.

Conclusion

A cynic would argue that people who prefer Kontula above other districts, despite its stigma and deprivation, are just revealing simple defense mechanisms that have taken hold amid the squalor. Certainly, Kontula’s residents had their moments of doubt: conversations about enjoying the bleak surroundings of the dilapidated concrete structures in the company of undesirables were often accompanied with hesitation and hearty laughter. At the same time, they expressed choices by people who could have chosen otherwise and presented a prime example of everyday universalism—identifying and valorising something that is relatively common and accessible, independent of resources (Lamont, 2019, p. 686).

The group I have focused on here included both long-term residents and newcomers, ethnic Finns and migrants. For them, the everyday encounters had become “an unremarkable fact of life even with all of its irreducible kaleidoscopic complexity” (Back & Sinha, 2018, p. 164). This form of accelerated urbanity had created a shared experience of incomprehension and absurdity, shaping some neighborhoods and districts more than others, with varying responses. This is a sign of cultural vitality, a powerful experience that brings together the material and sensory qualities of urban neighborhoods.

For anthropological studies of space, the ethnographic analysis of affective geography opens up intriguing ways to understand urban transformation. The mundane details of everyday life grow in significance and reveal complex dynamics of borders and belonging in contemporary societies. A focus on affective geographies also opens up new possibilities for exploring social inclusion, which are much more spontaneous than the official narratives on integration. An ethnographic study of a place like Kontula reveals its affective geography at different scales, a make-believe space that is subject to historical transformations of spatial hierarchies. As scholars in social sciences have increasingly pointed out (see, for example, Back & Sinha, 2018; Glick Schiller, 2012; Hall, 2012), these everyday socialities have been insufficiently theorized, and the multiple spontaneous connections that create new possibilities for group life have likewise been insufficiently recognized. For many, it is easier to embrace the absurd urbanity of Kontula than to relate to Finnish mainstream society.