March 31

Giacomo Bottà

University of Turku

Some people, they like to go out dancing / And other peoples, they have to work: Nightlife, Neighbourhoods, and Urban Sustainability 

Nightlife is a vital part of urban culture, yet it often brings tensions that shape the social and spatial dynamics of neighborhoods. This talk explores the complexities of night-time research by addressing three key issues: noise conflicts and the mediation between nightlife participants and residents; gentrification, where the very success of nightlife can attract wealthier inhabitants, threatening its own survival; and touristification, which reshapes neighborhoods and nightlife economies, often at the cost of long-term sustainability. Drawing on case studies from Helsinki and other European cities, this presentation critically examines how urban policies and community negotiations can balance these competing interests, ensuring nightlife remains a sustainable and integral part of urban life. 

April 28

Oleksandra Nenko

University of Turku

Identity and belonging in artistic place-making

In this talk, Dr. Nenko explored how artists shape place identities and nurture a sense of belonging—especially in times of uncertainty and crisis, such as war. Drawing from her conceptual framework and examples like the ExoSound project in Helsinki and artistic practices in Ukrainian wartime cities, she discussed the transformative power of creative place-making.

May 26

Laura Mankki

University of Eastern Finland

Precarious Intimate Infrastructures: Low-Waged Migrant’s Housing and Everyday Living Arrangements

In this presentation, Dr. Laura Mankki discussed how the intimacies of migrants working in low-wage jobs are not only organized between people but also involve materialities, such as housing, in producing these intimacies. Drawing from post-humanist and queer notions of intimacies, she argues that human and more-than-human infrastructures actively participate in the formation of these intimacies. In this talk, she showed how views of infrastructures as passive, invisible structures are challenged in interviews with migrants working in Finland. In these accounts, infrastructures become active, visible, as well as precarious intimate formations that make the everyday lives of migrants liveable.

June 6

Anna Heinonen

University of Eastern Finland

Sounds, Smells, and Spontaneous Meetings: Sensory Connections and Spatial Movements in Shared Households and Neighbourhoods

In the presentation, Dr. Anna explored the embodied and sensory connections that people share when they live in close spatial proximity. She focus on analysing the connections in Finnish communal living and expand the analysis to consider them in the context of neighbourly relations. In shared living spaces, sensory and embodied spatial connections – such as sounds produced by others or smells, for instance, from cooking that spread through the space – connect people to each other. Similarly, shared spaces guide people’s movements and either create or limit opportunities for spontaneous encounters. People who inhabit the space navigate their mutual relationships through their daily use of these spaces. As they make sense of their relationships, embodied acts, spatial orientations, and sensory experiences become important ways of regulating the desired degree of connection. This presentation is based on her PhD research on intimacies in co-residing friendship and roommate relationships in Finnish small-scale communes.

September 5

Ebru Şevik

Tampere University

Everyday coexistence in cities: Navigating diversity and segregation in socially diverse neighbourhoods 

The question of living together is a pressing concern in contemporary cities marked by increasing diversity, socio-spatial inequalities, and segregation. In this talk, Şevik explores the complexity of everyday coexistence in urban neighbourhoods characterised by multiple diversities and intersectional inequalities. The presentation highlights how people navigate shared spaces and negotiate living together through everyday practices and informal encounters, which can foster solidarities and neighbourly relations, but also reproduce divisions and exclusions. Drawing on empirical examples from different urban contexts, the talk demonstrates how these experiences are spatially and relationally formed. It also reflects on the role of emotions in placemaking, and how affective orientations shape one’s sense of belonging and place attachment in contested ways. 

September 22

Paula Merikoski

University of Helsinki

Home and citizenship – Undoing the public-private divide  

In this talk, I discuss home as a site of citizenship; a societally and politically significant space in which we act as citizens. By referring to an empirical case of pro-asylum mobilisation at home, the home accommodation for asylum seekers, this talk aligns with feminist understandings of the private sphere as a political site that is interlinked with public spheres of agency. I draw from feminist notions of citizenship that highlight its intimate and everyday forms. Referring to my previous research on home accommodation in Finland in the context of the so-called ‘asylum crisis’ of 2015, I analyse the linkages between home and civic agency, and between home and asylum.