Designing for wellbeing

Based on the same survey, the inhabitants are not active in local activities:
only 45% have participated in a local event within the last year. Low
participation in neighbourhood activities can be assumed to be connected
with the inhabitants’ weak feeling of community cohesion.
In the following we discuss the building of a better neighbourhood
and improving social wellbeing in Kannelmäki based on two overlapping
projects: a Master’s thesis 2 project about participatory community design
and an intensive short-term student project called Repicturing a suburban
neighbourhood.
But what is a neighbourhood? The word can have different connotations
– something that became evident during our projects. One of the students,
for example, described what the word neighbourhood means for her in
the following manner:
“For me, the idea of my own ‘neighbourhood’ changes depending on who
I’m talking with. If it is with someone familiar with the area, I might speak
about a very small portion of a specific area as my neighbourhood. But if it
is with someone from another city, I might speak about the larger general
area as my neighbourhood.“
The variance of interpretations also becomes apparent in the following
quotations from the inhabitants of Kannelmäki:
“I live in an apartment so the people from your own stairway. I think that
a neighbourhood is…those who live in the same building.”
“For me it means the area where I live, the closest quarters and the houses
that are closest to my home. And it can also mean my old neighbourhood
where I used to live with my parents.”
2 Malin Bäckman
101 · Social wellbeing through participation in Kannelmäki suburb