New light on community dynamics
Researchers in the EmergentCommunity project are investigating neighbourhood relations and how people co-exist with each other in today’s diverse, dynamic urban environments. We spoke to Principal Investigator Eeva Puumala about how the project’s interdisciplinary approach can help shed new light on community dynamics.
A community can be formed in many different ways, for example by people living in the same street who come to know each other, establish friendships and share resources, or around daily routines like walking the dog, running errands or visiting the park. Communities can also be based on a traditional understanding of identity or cultural background, all factors which may then influence how we interact both with those inside our networks, as well as those outside them. “All of these factors play a certain role in how people form their sense of belonging within a city, within the area that they live in,” says Eeva Puumala, Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere
University. As Principal Investigator of the ERCbacked EmergentCommunity project, Puumala heads an interdisciplinary team of researchers investigating how people live together in today’s diverse, highly complex urban landscapes.
“We want to look at what co-existence and community can mean in societies and cities that are home to socio-economically diverse populations, where intersectional inequalities around ethnicity, class, gender and age are also present,” she outlines.
Puumala and her team are looking at how communities matter, and how they gain their importance in daily life. “Communities can work in different ways, both in terms of people forming attachments, but also in
establishing lines of separation,” she says.
“In some of the neighbourhoods we have looked into we have found that communities are so tight, and people have built such a strong sense of connection to their local communities and environments, that it actually can prevent them from feeling a broader sense of belonging to the city, not to mention wider society.”
The project team are investigating people’s everyday experiences, through which they aim to gain deeper insights into how social bonds and boundaries are formed and how people coexist with each other. While some communities can be based on common interests like sport or music, they may also be formed around shared
resentments or frustrations with existing social and economic structures and the inequalities people see around them, which can then deepen their sense of marginalisation. “In cities, there are both populations and neighbourhoods that suffer from stigma,” acknowledges Puumala. This issue is central to the project’s work, with Puumala and her team looking at the forces that hold societies together, and also those that can cause division and deepen a sense of alienation and marginality in some communities. “In policymaking, it is often suggested that more action needs to be taken to develop stigmatised neighbourhoods to better integrate them within the broader urban fabric,” she continues. “Sometimes these responses from the authorities are seen as being inadequate, or people living in these areas perceive them as not addressing the right issues.”
EmergentCommunity
The research is focused on urban neighbourhoods in Finland, Sweden and France, with Puumala and her team seeking to probe how people live together, as well as
how tensions and conflicts arise. Ethnographic data has been collected from nine cities, with the focus largely on Helsinki, Malmö and Marseille. “The main bulk of data has been collected in these three cities, while the others are essentially points of contrast, which help us distinguish between city-specific points and more general points,” explains Puumala. Based on statistics and policy documents, researchers first identified socio-economically diverse urban neighbourhoods in these cities. They wanted to interview people from a broad cross-section of society, rather than focus on a specific group. “In the study areas we interviewed people that we met on the street, in cafes, community centres and urban public spaces, from different local communities. We worked hard to engage with people who identify with diverse groups and communities, in order to get a comprehensive insight into the issues that are present in the everyday,” continues Puumala. “The guiding principle was that if a group was mentioned, we would look for people who identified with that group, to hear their perspective.”
The project team have done extensive fieldwork and conducted altogether 341 interviews, asking people about their everyday experiences and probing their views on a wide variety of topics, from daily routines to how people use public spaces and how their neighbourhoods and cities are changing. In addition, the team delved into the socio-spatial dynamics in these areas and the conditions of the built environment. While each of these cities has their own specific features, the topics of social problems and spatial divisions, as well as mundane forms of caring and solidarity, are common to different research sites. Criminal activities, gang-related violence or avoiding encounters with certain people affected how people used their surrounding environment and made sense of change. “Importantly, our focus on the everyday encouraged people to also reflect on how they created connections and sustained peaceful coexistence. This means that our research is not confined by securitydriven and problem-oriented debates, but exposes the ambivalence that is central for coexistence”, says Puumala.
