Convivial labour in mass housing in times of financialisation: A critical reframing of neighbourhood-making beyond methodological neighbourhoodism and migration lenses

Application summary

The project aims to explore neighbourhood-making through convivial labour among mass housing residents with different tenure statuses and housing situations, in the contexts of the financialisation of housing in Finland and the Netherlands. We look beyond the prevailing urban planning perspective that views conviviality as a political tool to pacify neighbourhoods as segregated communities and blames marginalised groups for the declining quality of life. The project develops a more comprehensive understanding of convivial labour, by including tenure and its stability as the basis for neighbourhood-making in mass housing and by examining how current neoliberal housing policies shapes lives in urban areas. We challenge neighbourhood studies through a multiscalar approach, connecting housing and neighbour relations, de-migrantisation that transcends the ‘migrant/citizen’ binary, and a view beyond methodological neighbourhoodism to diversify attachment to residential areas. The project is designed as a multisited ethnography in cross-national context. We explore the forms of convivial labour across four housing situations in Helsinki and Amsterdam: 1) collectivising of housing and neighbourhood through renting; 2) mediation of neighbour relations through homeowners’ associations; 3) reconstruction of belonging amid housing precarity through anti-squatting; and 4) maintenance of connection to the stigmatised urban margins through intermittent dwelling. Methodologically, we rely on in-depth interviews, participant observation, go-alongs, photo elicitation and long-term ethnography. We also employ co-production of knowledge with research participants by co-creating neighbours’ stories and digital city maps. By intersecting conviviality and tenure, we foreground a neglected discussion on how urban residents manage to live together and interrogate exclusion mechanisms and unequal power relations under financialisation and structural violence.