Reading Socio-Spatial Interplay - Arkitektur- og designhøgskolen i ...

R E A D I N G S O C I O - S P A T I A L I N T E R P L A Y P A R T 2social meeting place for everyone in the building – and as suchmuch more important than the backyard, even though thebackyard is very nice and a lot of money has been spent on it”.They commonly invite guests there and the neighbors ofteninvite and are invited to each other’s parties. Sometimes theythrow neighbor parties there.Also the informants of this layer state that they use the backyards forcookouts, parties and socializing with friends (not neighbors), as a smokingarea and also that the children play there sometimes. But in this layer thereare also descriptions of avoiding the backyard, not because it is boring, butbecause spending time there involves unwanted and uncomfortableconfrontation with the neighbors:A Turkish woman (#443) who lives in a municipal apartmentin Grünerløkka, tells of how both she and her children avoidthe backyard “because there is so much unpleasantness, fromracism to bullying from the neighbors”. But she is often inSofienbergparken, to eat and play with the youngest of herchildren. The oldest plays at the ping pong area there; hespends a lot of time at Kuba and plays ball, too. She has twogirlfriends in the building whom she spends a lot of time with.They usually meet in her home “because she is divorced”.Another Turkish woman in the same building (#442) states thatshe also spends a lot of time in Sofienbergparken on a dailybasis with the children, but not in the other parks in the areaand never the backyard. When they moved there 15 yearspreviously they were the only immigrant family in the buildingand “the neighbors were helpful and pleasant, and they wereoften together with the children and everything in thebackyard”. All of this changed after “so many refugees withproblems” moved in. The family has an allotment garden theyoften go to, or on Sundays they go on excursions toFrognerparken.A pensioner (#106) who has lived in Grünerløkka all of hisadult life, meets with old friends from the neighborhood at theSenior Citizens Center, where he often eats dinner and takesdifferent courses. Otherwise he does not use the neighborhood;he never walks in the parks and avoids meeting neighbors inthe backyard. He meets friends from the entire city in amotorcycle club where he is an active member, and old friendsoften drop by his home. Besides this he travels quite a bit and276