At ease in the city: neighbourhood as an extension of the cosy Swedish home

This research paper contributes to deliberations about the well-being of home spaces by considering how professional expectations and everyday experiences of the neighbourhood, as an extension of the home, relate to the cultural situatedness of individuals in Sweden. To do that, it presents and discusses findings from a case-based investigation of two developments in Stockholm that represent the contemporary urban design and neighbourhood planning efforts influenced by New Urbanism. Building on the work of Lefebvre, Massey and others, our findings reveal a particularly Swedish construct of place that allows for and celebrates the interplay between an individual's cosy home environment extending into the public and communal spaces of their neighbourhood, with more complex or challenging urbanity beyond. Future research could examine neighbourhoods situated elsewhere to understand the extent to which similar experiences or social meanings exist outside of the Swedish context, and what impacts community formation and human well-being results.

Amongst the multiplicity of spaces that we think of and experience daily are those of the home. Home spaces are complex and contested and varied experiences of these spaces influenced by social, political and cultural contexts lead to wide-ranging notions of home as a place “both lived and imagined, with material characteristics and symbolic significance”. Furthermore and as evidenced by the research presented in this paper, notions of the home extend beyond the front door into “everyday experiences at the local scale”, so the “notion of home space” can be used “to embrace the idea of both housing and the neighbourhood” (ibid.).

For quite some time, urban planners, designers and researchers have sought to understand how and why communities form about certain neighbourhoods and not others – and whether or not community formation at the local scale is necessary for the well-being of those who call that neighbourhood home. A legacy of New Urbanism1 that has reverberated into mainstream, contemporary urban design and planning approaches is the championing of interrelationships between compact, walkable neighbourhood design and community formation at the neighbourhood scale. Yet important social arrangements or meanings about neighbourhood environments may exist outside of communitarian ideals, including those that help illuminate lived and imagined experiences of the neighbourhood as an extension of the home. As  theorises, home cannot be “separated from public, political worlds but is constituted through them.” So, taking account of more nuanced, contextually-situated neighbourhood socialities beyond strict notions of the community may reveal insights about the “plastic tendency [of home] that enables its boundaries to expand and shrink”  and thereby offer lessons in the quest for human wellbeing – particularly when thinking about how more people might feel at home in their city.

Relational multiplicities and place complexities:

i)

home is a site of constancy in the social and material environment (security)

ii)

home is a spatial context in which day-to-day routines of human existence are performed (security)

iii)

home is a site where people feel most in control of their lives (stimulation) because they feel free from the surveillance that is part of the contemporary world (security)

iv)

home is a secure base around which identities are constructed (security and identity)

In this paper, we examine previously overlooked design motivations for and lived experiences of, two neighbourhood developments in Stockholm. In these examinations, we pay particular attention to social meanings and notions of the community about neighbourhood form as an extension of the home environment. Both developments were influenced by protagonists associated with New Urbanism, and the construction of both began in the mid-to-late-1990s, a time when New Urbanism as a distinct movement was growing in popularity and influence. In 1996, the Charter of the New Urbanism was signed by the United States, and less than a decade later in 2003, the Charter of Stockholm was signed as part of the Council for European Urbanism, whose efforts to reform urban development parallel those of the Congress for New Urbanism.

In our investigation, the unique motivations and agency of individual designers and residents are given careful consideration, to understand better how they are navigating – and capable of influencing – the larger structures or discourses with which they are associated. For “ideas do not diffuse over a flat cultural plain. Rather, they are encountered in particular places”  by particular people with different backgrounds and worldviews. As a result of our approach, some important ways in which Stockholm designers, and lived experiences of their neighbourhood designs, diverge from the dominant discourse about New Urbanism and the contemporary role of neighbourhoods in engendering community are unveiled and discussed here. More importantly, the Swedish context reveals interesting considerations about the sociality of neighbourhood residents, and how that sociality reflects an understanding of home, neighbourly coexistence, and living life well within a contemporary metropolis.

In what follows, we give a brief overview of our conceptual approach and data collection methods (including the typological characteristics informing case selection criteria), then report on our key findings. Our data analysis is contextually grounded and reveals a particularly Swedish perspective of the neighbourhood as an extension of home and sociality, buffered yet fluid. We share findings about neighbourhoods as imagined and as lived from two developments. The findings point to people experiencing simultaneous connectivity and separateness with others living in their neighbourhood and the importance of these experiences for residents feeling at ease, thereby cultivating a sense of home extending outside of the individual dwelling. While these findings are particular to Stockholm, we encourage urban and housing researchers to consider their possible existence elsewhere and, thus, to undertake related studies of the formal and social arrangements of neighbourhoods in different contexts. Such investigations could help expand approaches to and expectations of neighbourhood planning about understanding extended home environments and cultivating social or well-being outcomes beyond geographically delimited communities.

Swedish situatedness and the concept of ‘mysig’

                                                           Sankt Erik's Grubbensringen