The Other Side of the Street

As often happens on a subtler scale, a few disconnected influences coincided over the past week which kicked off the thought process behind this blog entry.

First, I've been reading - in Norwegian - a book about the ongoing gentrification process in a section of my Oslo neighborhood which is becoming less and less known by the name 'Little Pakistan.' The book is called Tøyengata and written by a human geographer named Tone Huse who has conducted a research project somewhat similar to my thesis fieldwork, just five years or so prior. In the process of describing the neighborhood, Huse writes about the bias of both the passerby and of the researcher in a multicultural, largely Muslim neighborhood of a westernized city. To (somewhat poorly) translate and paraphrase, she writes that it is easy in this setting for one to allow themselves to be lead to misunderstandings, being blinded by the apparent foreignness of it all (the women in hijab, the asian pastry cafes, the exotic vegetable markets and the fabric shops).

"Miljoet er ikke ens egen. Og selv om en skulle være del av ett av Tøyengatas miljøer, er andre sider ved gata fremdeles ukjente." She writes that that environment is not one's own, and that even when you are a part of one of the street's communities, other side of the street remains unknown. Huse's words strike a resonance with me because I have been that passerby, that researcher, and I continue to be that resident misfit as I am now marking the end of my first year of living in Tøyen. Each day I leave my apartment and am confronted with cultures I know little about. Immigrant families in my neighborhood come from countries as far removed from Norway as Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. I feel like I learn a bit about these people each day, and each day I wonder more. We shop together in the markets and share public spaces and public amenities - in many cases we also share at least a second language knowledge (in my case) of Norwegian, but our lives rarely intersect.

In general, I greatly enjoy my neighborhood. In my personal, subtle ongoing cultural experiment of smiling to passersby on city streets, I quickly found that my smiles and nods are more often returned here than amongst higher native Norwegian populations nearby. Shopkeepers here strike up conversation and small communities develop around where people buy their vegetables. Despite these pleasantries, it is sometimes difficult to shake the perceptions of difference from all sides - boundaries do exist between groups of people here. There are stores and prayer rooms only frequented by the Somalian or the Pakistani populations, and there are local pubs only used by an older Norwegian crowd of regulars. These differences and boundaries can be frustrating to get past, but I find the interactions that happen in the spaces between to be of both great interest and of great potential as an urbanist and as a resident.

I think about these themes often, but they have seemed especially relevant in the aftermath of the 22 July attacks on Oslo and the heightened aftermath awareness of risks associated with prejudice. A Norwegian friend of mine shared a moving story on her blog about overhearing an account of Utøya from a surviver on a bus, with the poignant lesson of how we can never (and should never attempt to) know anything about a person at first sight, without hearing who they are, what they've been through, or what they aspire to.

These messages seem particularly important to me lately as well, while the political arena in the US reels. I'm afraid that sometimes it's all too easy for us as humans to forget humanity. Whether differences lie in opinions, ethnicities, social statuses or other realms, they are irrelevant at the end of the day. As humans, we are the same at the core and we hold the same basic needs and aspirations across our outward appearances and expressions. Political debates and pointing fingers against ideologies, immigration policies, or religious practices accomplish nothing towards what should be the greater goal of making society stronger and more sustainable.

I was contacted about my blog entry after the Oslo attacks via email by a film project called My Fellow American, which seeks to recognize the Muslim community in the United States as any other neighbors, any other group of citizens. To help them spread their message, I'm sharing their film at the bottom of this post. The point follows the the same in the US as in Oslo and Norway, as much as anywhere across the world. It seems to me that the understanding of our potential misunderstandings may be the key to cultural pluralism.

 

Film: My Fellow American - linked from youtube.com

Home

Somewhere in the midst of living in another country, writing a thesis based in residential neighborhoods characterized by immigration, and meeting people from all over the world I've noticed a theme in my thoughts and conversations lately - the concept of home. In the very global world of today, the question "Where are you from?" becomes more and more complicated to answer - in truth, I don't think it belongs in the introductory chapters of language learning books seeing as the reply nowadays is rarely as simple as "I am from city/country x."

An example of this phenomena - I recently made a new friend in my Oslo neighborhood - a woman originally from Vietnam who just so happened to also have lived many years ago a few blocks from my first NYC apartment on the Upper West Side. She generalized that in her adult life she has not stayed in any one place for more than three consecutive years - herself promoting an idea I have always loved - 'you need no more than two suitcases!'

This two-suitcase (or 100 item or however you'd like to phrase it-) mentality is one I find much tougher in practice than in theory. I even went through the exercise of dispersing (though not necessarily disposing) my New York apartment-life's worth of "stuff" down to two suitcases before I moved to Norway less than two years ago. Somehow I have since (jointly) accumulated a series of minimal yet substantial furniture and housewares that were deemed necessary when moving into an empty apartment. (I largely blame Ikea for making this possible.) After two moves with two suitcases and a bit of time in attempting to make a place into a home, clutter has amounted to the point that if and when we move next, there are certainly more than two suitcases to worry about.

The difference between having a place to live and a home is striking to me - particularly in the difficulty of defining what makes a home. One of my professor's here wrote a dissertation on re-housing displaced refugees and likes to quote John Berger's 'A Home is Not a House' that "Home was the center of the world because that was the place where the vertical line crossed with the horizontal. The vertical line was a path leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld. The horizontal line represented the traffic of the world, all the possible roads leading across the earth to others." All religious connotations aside, I like the definition because there is an inherent amount of mobility - where ever one chooses to place their vertical axis is the place from which they identify themselves within the world around them.

I am, however, finding a bit of struggle with the concept of identity with the act of mobility. My readings on place identity largely link residence - real time spent in a place - with being able to have a personal identity and sense of stewardship over it. My own research is seeing the breakdown of that potential happening in the context of growing rental trends in Oslo - when people can easily move (away from neighborhood/building/apartment problems) they have little incentive to care about or work towards improving the place they reside. Simultaneously, the detachment of property owners understanding a place solely as an investment leaves little personal attachment or incentive - all in all creating a difficult cycle for those of us who seek to maintain quality or promote sustainability in the built environment.

So now I wonder, as more of the world's population increases the rate at which we move and change place, where will we consider ourselves most at home? And can our attention spans alter at similar rates to maintain and steward the concept of neighborhood despite this near constant flux?

Taming Wilderness

Over an hours drive from the nearest city, about 5 kilometers on a windy uphill path from the highway and across a couple rivers in Nordland lie a series of farms which were established in the 1830s. Making the hike up from the E6, on what is now a series of decently marked paths in part of Friluftsliv (or outdoor, literally 'free air <=leisure> life') tourism, makes one wonder how and why these farms were ever founded and maintained up until the 1970s. 

(Bredek farm is top, center in the distance)

The answer turned out to be fairly simple - at the time, the farmland in the valley served by roads was running short, so farmers were forced upland and into remote areas to establish fields and grazing pastures. Along with this, I can only imagine, came a heavily work-ridden life removed from society around. The alternative option or next step in this migration turned out to be the expensive and arduous move to America where accessible, flat land was still plentiful. 

Above is one of the first fields found on approach to Bredek. The stone wall is as old as the cultivation - having been built from the rock found when clearing the land. The full farm follows, with much of the older equipment still intact - from wooden sickles to steel wood stoves which must have been hauled to the site. The farm's environment and site is exquisite in nature with the views to the mountains, shelter from strong winds, natural water sources and constant reassuring sounds of a nearby waterfall and the woods full of birds and wildlife. 

Two-thirds of the way back, spotting the highway and railroad infrastructure below, the remoteness really sank in.

The concept of living off the land, and the very real proof that this earth does not hold the capacity for everyone to do just that today. The need for cities and densities becomes clear, but how do we reconcile this with man's desire for space and yearning for natural surroundings. My very presence in this place seems to bring the story full circle without quite answering any of the questions. Settlers moved from Europe to the New World for land and opportunities, built cities far removed from farming sensibilities and nature, and bred a generation of assorted urbanites - some of whom, like myself, now seek a break from the stifling city life to better reflect on its problems only to find that perhaps we simply end up back where we started.