Love Your Neighbourhood and Leave It: Citizenship Ideals, Welfare Encounters and the Reproduction of Cross-Pressure in a Disadvantaged Helsinki Neighbourhood

Sociologists have long observed that living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood commonly means facing a moral and practical dilemma; the place one calls home is both good and bad, as it is a source of both support and social suffering. Based on five years of ethnographic research in a marginalised neighbourhood of Helsinki, I demonstrate how welfare professionals, in their efforts to mould local youth into ideal (middle-class) citizens, inadvertently reproduce this cross-pressure. Welfare professionals expect young people to be(come) both communitarian citizens rooted in their ‘home area’ and entrepreneurial citizens capable of leaving the ‘risk environment’, translating the current ideals of good citizenship into everday practices. The article argues that the simultaneous enactment of citizenship ideals that directly oppose each other increases the cross-pressure that young people experience, thereby contributing to their marginalised position.