Challenging Neighbourhood Conceptions: The Stockholm Study

Abstract

Through the following investigation, I examine how the compact neighbourhood type is conceptualised and experienced in Sweden, so as to contribute to wider deliberations about the relevance of a historically-derived form in relation to emergent—and sometimes divergent—notions of contemporary sociality or meaningful coexistence, particularly within metropolitan landscapes. Recently, compact neighbourhood development has been critiqued as problematic because of its association with new urban discourse and, thus, efforts to effect elusive notions of community. Such efforts have been shown to be ineffective at best and to approximate determinism at their worst. Yet recent impulses to re-evaluate agency in relation to larger discourses and structures hint at the potential of neighbourhood form, its designers and inhabitants to transcend such problematisations of new urban discourse and objectivist social orders. In other words, the following study builds on emerging work of more-than-relational human geographers, critical realists in the post-positivist landscape of planning theory, and reception theorists in landscape architecture. Similar to these researchers, I tread a middle-ground approach that values contextualisation or relational influences, but also recognises that built form and individual persons amount to more than the sum of their relationalities. In addition to contextualising the compact neighbourhood type via literature that has addressed its formal precedents and conceptually entangled formal-social relationalities to date, I critically evaluate it as a formal type in relation to which social meanings are continually co- constructed, adapted and transformed through new conceptions and experiences. Defining the neighbourhood as a typological system of material forms with agency and, thus, causal or communicative capacity, I carried out empirical research to reveal new meanings described or embedded in conceptions and accounts of lived experience in relation to the compact neighbourhood type in Stockholm, Sweden, from May through June 2014. From qualitative data collected in Stockholm primarily via interviews, but also through solicited diaries, self-directed photography and observation, I have unveiled themes that—when analysed via the middle-ground approach mentioned above—point toward the simultaneity of separateness and connectedness in how contemporary sociality is entangled with compact neighbourhood form. I argue that various depths of social meaning co-constructed in relation to compact neighbourhood form reveal the type’s situated capacity to mediate or provide temporary buffering between individuals and larger, more complex contexts. In other words, the following investigation reveals potential for the compact neighbourhood to contribute to the meaningful coexistence of persons in Stockholm—and, potentially, in other cities—through its provision of cosy or just right spaces of temporary reprieve amidst more challenging landscapes. In order for such contribution to be meaningful, however, I argue that neighbourhoods—as well as other built forms that might provide shelter or buffering—need to remain porous or penetrable to outside complexity, just as the self ought to remain open to others. Urbanity is on the rise in this century, particularly within metropolitan landscapes where lifestyles, cultures and perspectives are thrown together as individuals pursue various promises of a good life. New conceptions of compact neighbourhood form—and, more broadly, of the neighbourhood typology and other urban development patterns—are needed that take into consideration diversity of lived experience and its variable echoes of meaningful coexistence. Yet such diversity also necessitates understanding or the possibility of common themes and research-based predictions emerging to improve city-making efforts genuinely. Whilst there is a significant and growing body of research and practice in relation to neighbourhood community, there is a dearth of information on individual motivations and the causal capacity of individuals to seek out various—yet possibly also resonating—notions of meaningful coexistence within compact neighbourhoods. Therefore, this thesis contributes to academic and practical knowledge not only through its investigation of social meanings co-constructed in relation to compact neighbourhood form, but also through its conceptualisation of and empirical research into what constitutes meaningful coexistence for contemporary individuals in all their complexity.