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 2time playing outside. They’ve got more new friends in a fewmonths here at Furuset than they did in many years at Tøyen.Her elder brother plays soccer with some neighbours. Herfather knows a few of the neighbours as well, and some ofthem come to visit them at home. She doesn’t know anyneighbours herself, as she is works in a flower shop every dayafter school. She is not used to spending time outside thebuildings, and she doesn’t play soccer as her brothers do (“I’ma girl, you know”), but she likes to go for walks in the area,often with her mother. On Saturdays she goes to a regionalshopping center with friends – either at Metro, Triaden orSandvika. “It is nice to live here,” she says; “the surroundingsare green and beautiful, and we have everything we need in theimmediate surroundings: We have a doctor and a socialsecurity office, shops, and the swimming pool is open even onSundays. There is a health center, a gym, and we havePostbanken and the pharmacy. (…) But it would have beenbetter if there were some kind of restrictions placed on howmany of us, that is immigrants, that could live in the samebuilding. It would have been nicer to live here if it was a betterbalance between Norwegians and immigrants. 50/50 would beperfect.” At the moment there are only two Norwegianhouseholds in their apartment building: one couple that is veryold and the others are drug addicts. “We would really like tolive with more Norwegians. (…) It may sound silly, but manyimmigrants don’t care about the housing cooperative and“dugnader”, and here there are not enough Norwegians toorganize us. (…) We do greet each other in the building, butwe don’t like the strong smell when the Pakistanis preparefood. Rumors say that a large Somali family is going to movein next door, and we don’t like to live that close to them. I havealways kept away from Somalis. It seems as if the differencesare to large to even have some kind of a starting pointtogether.” Almost everyone they know has moved out fromTøyen. “The development there was not good. There werechildren peeing in the backyards and the stairways, stealingeach others food. It is really difficult to live in a housingcooperative with shared responsibility when people are sodifferent” (#207).In contrast to at Grønland and Grünerløkka, where the repertoires of localneighbourhood encounter situations are described as more related to hasty307