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.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
