By any means necessary: the anti-segregation efforts and state-led gentrification in Helsinki

Gentrification has not gained much scholarly attention in Finland, although Helsinki has a long history of preventing concentration of disadvantaged groups through social mix, which in the international literature is closely linked to gentrification. Based on a qualitative case study and policy analysis of Helsinki’s new urban regeneration model, which reinvests in disinvested neighborhoods in the periphery of the city, the article analyzes the role of urban policy in making neighborhoods gentrifiable. This article contributes to the sparse literature of stalling urban regeneration, by analyzing the state interventions in stigmatized residential areas of Mellunkylä and Meri-Rastila, where the regeneration process is mostly stagnant. To attract development of owner occupied housing to the social housing neighborhoods, the city had to intervene both through attempts to raise the image of the areas and through subsidizing the risks for private capital. Despite the affordability crisis, which has been furthered by the state’s austerity measures on affordable housing production and housing allowances, the city persists on increasing property values in the regeneration neighborhoods. With social mix as a corrective measure to segregation, the city thus legitimizes neoliberal urbanism. • Helsinki justifies state-led gentrification with an anti-segregation discourse • Stagnant urban regeneration requires state intervention, symbolical and material • Social mix as a corrective anti-segregation measure legitimizes neoliberal urbanism