‘Have you been to [Neighbourhood Y]? I was there yesterday, and I have to say, like, if someone thinks it’s rough here in Itis, I’d tell them: Here it’s nothing compared to there! ‘
During fieldwork in eastern parts of Helsinki, the neighbourhood of Itäkeskus in particular, I often heard people speaking about places, their characteristics and reputations, in relation to other places. Such relativization seems to be a common way of making sense of the urban environment people navigate in their everyday lives. Not in the practical sense of ‘navigating’ as finding one’s way from place to place, but rather, a navigation of socio-cultural meaning and belonging in relation to emplacement.
Besides the ‘that other place is worse than this’ narrative, I frequently heard the assertion ‘Itis is actually better than its reputation’. To me, both versions talk about the relative location and value of Itis on the social map of the city and also suggest that the speaker has some close affiliation with the place, a sense of attachment or belonging to it, and that they are likely speaking to someone (the ethnographer) who represents a perspective that doesn’t share that same proximity.
Alternatively, some people I spoke with would use ‘lumping together’ of places as a technique to attach certain characteristics to Itis. As an example, I was told by another interlocutor that Itäkeskus is part of the broad area of east Helsinki (Itä-Helsinki), which is actually a very diverse area where some wealthy people live too. ‘Think of Kulosaari for example’, my interlocutor stated. By lumping Itis together with areas such as Kulis, it was possible for my interlocutor in this instance to create affiliation and sharedness between the two places (and their inhabitants) that have very different kinds of reputations.
Interestingly, very rarely was Itis compared to or linked to areas that are considered most central in the city, such as what in Helsinki is often called kantakaupunki, or to areas in the western side of town. This dynamic is present also in the common perception of Itis as a centre in the northeast (Itäkeskus literally means ‘east centre’) and a crossroads of sorts—a place of encounter for people coming from different directions, backgrounds, and walks of life.
Itis was quite often referred to as a cultural ‘melting pot’ and a place with many transnational connections. For some, for instance the young adults I exchanged words with at the shopping mall, Itis is ‘the place to be’, where people come to meet each other, hang out, do sports, attend a religious ceremony, purchase certain products in certain languages, run errands, fill out paperwork in one of the governmental offices, work, etc. For others, such as one interviewee, a student from Bangladesh, it is dirty, dangerous, and suspicious compared to the area of the city where he lives.
Thus, the relative location of Itis is constructed in discourses that entail the element of both communicating as well as manipulating the meaning and significance of it in relation to other places in the context of the city and the world more broadly.
Somewhat paradoxically, the relative discourses of Itis I have described attach simultaneously elements of centrality and marginality to it. Thus, the sense of place transmitted can be seen to embody ‘the complex dynamics between emplacement and displacement as lived and felt in people’s everyday lives’ (Lems 2018: 4).
Pondering about the meaning of these kinds of relative discourses of place in the framework of understanding everyday living together and the different perspectives and experiences that people may have of the same place, I was reminded of anthropologist Keith Basso’s work on placemaking. Writing in a time when the notion wasn’t yet common among ethnographers, Basso (1996) asserted that people’s sense of place is central to understanding their ways of life, and that the way places are named and the narratives that are told about them are very revealing in this regard.
More recently, working on ‘crosslocations’, anthropologist Sarah Green and her colleagues at the University of Helsinki explored how locations ‘gain different values and meanings according to a range of different ways to measure and compare their value in relation to other places’.
This relative approach to location is intriguing in relation to the topological approach that we in Co-Imagine take to the study of everyday coexistence, seeking to understand how people ‘make home’ through forming relationships and developing ways of coping with various marginalizing forces and structural inequalities, some of which can be understood as ‘locating regimes’ such as legal, religious and economic knowledge systems or structures that calibrate the relative value, significance and meaning of locations (see, again, crosslocations).
Exploring my interlocutors’ relative remarks about location explicate the significance attached to being located in Itis—of all places—from different vantage points and positionalities that together form the dense entanglements of relationships that shape everyday experiences of coexistence there.
One interlocutor whose parents migrated to Finland shortly prior to his birth, shared with me childhood memories of growing up in Vuosaari and having a yearly tradition of celebrating the end of the school year in Itis with his parents. To this day, Itis evokes these fond memories for him. After this recollection, sitting in a restaurant in Itis, he told me of his plans to travel to the country where his family originates from to discover the culture and explore his roots.
Relative discourses are one means through which places are constantly (re-)shaped by people, who in doing so negotiate their own relative position in the wider world (see, again, Lems 2018: 4). This includes memories of places that they may have inherited or inhabited in the past and dreams of places that they may visit in the future as well as the connections that are forged between these locations through stories and reflections.
References
Basso, Keith (1996), Wisdom sits in places: Landscape and language among the western Apache. UNM Press.
Lems, Annika (2018). Being-Here: Placemaking in a World of Movement. New York & Oxford: Berghahn Books.
University of Helsinki, Research Groups: Crosslocations: Locating Regimes. Available online: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/researchgroups/crosslocations/locating-regimes (accessed 12.6.2026)
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Text by Saara Toukolehto, saara.toukolehto@oulu.fi
The fieldwork blog posts introduce little snippets of the ethnographic research that our team members conduct in different parts of France and Finland.