In Helsinki, the current number of immigrants is quickly rising. Ethnic retail has emerged as a new, but visible, part of the city landscape. Compared to other European countries, becoming an entrepreneur is typically not very popular in Finland. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to comprehend this phenomenon and more specifically discover: what motivates immigrants to become entrepreneurs; what is the impact of their background and culture on the phenomenon; and finally, is the help provided by the city useful for them? Based on interviews and observations, we conclude that immigrant entrepreneurship facilitates in fluid ways the maintenance of cultural practices, while simultaneously enhancing meaningful encounters between immigrants and mainstream society. In our sample, we identify three types of entrepreneurs: growth-oriented, investors and status builders, as well as freedom and stability seekers. Although the groups are neither mutually exclusive nor collectively exhaustive, they display differences in certain aspects, which include their ways of entering into entrepreneurship, how their business is run, who their main clientele is, as well as in the future prospects for their businesses. We further infer that immigrant entrepreneurs, via their practices, also participate in making immigrant needs visible to politicians and policy-makers, thus also adding a layer to the local context within which they operate. However, we surmise that more effort is needed in addressing the freedom and stability seeker entrepreneurs if the aim of the city is to anchor immigrant retail in the city.
Cities acknowledge the diversity of their population and consider the multicultural component a richness of their socio-cultural assets. Immigrants contribute to the reshaping of urban space in many European cities through their amenities. Such amenities, be they secular or spiritual, are a clear spatialization of multiculturalism. Ethnic retail is an emerging phenomenon in Helsinki, and it has increasingly replaced declining independent mainstream retail. Often, clusters of immigrant amenities are formed around Muslim prayer rooms activating a mosque-bazaar alliance that enjoys a dynamic footfall. Such a setting takes place spontaneously and typically at abandoned spaces, called in this dissertation urban leftovers. The leftovers are located in, or nearby, the neighbourhoods with a relative overrepresentation of immigrant population. However, these neighbourhoods are exposed to urban renewal steered by anti-segregation policy, thus facing the threat of erasure.
This dissertation examines the capacity of urban planning to plan for diversity. It further studies the characteristics that ethnic retail requires to survive and emerge. The paradigm of The Right to the City is deployed to interpret the response of urban planning to multiculturalism. The findings are numerous. First, immigrant amenities prove their capability to play a role in place making and act as catalysts for public life recovery. Second, in doing so the created places not only fulfil the socio-cultural needs of immigrants, but they also attract mainstream clientele. Third, spontaneity, improvisation and authenticity are the main characteristics empowering the emergence of ethnic retail. However, the findings also show a failure of urban planning to reflect multiculturalism in the growth of the city. Often, the retail premises used by immigrants are demolished. Furthermore, conventional planning as well as alternative planning methods, such as scenario planning and urban planning competitions, have failed to reflect immigrants in the development.
The main constraint preventing planning from being multicultural is the absence of a political interest and, accordingly, a clear vision to deal with the spatialization of multiculturalism. On the contrary, the clear vision of the city is its anti-segregation policy, which is by nature a homogenizing mechanism. Thus, the dissertation concludes that immigrants' Right to the City has been ignored.
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