Recent studies reveal that schools in Finland’s largest urban areas are increasingly segregated. Two dimensions of segregation, residential and school segregation, have been found to be strongly interlinked. In this study, we examine how pupils’ daily lives are segregated or integrated across three life domains – 1) home 2) school and 3) leisure activities, and what kind of negotiation and social distinctions are related to these domains among pupils. Our findings are based on an ethnographic study (48 days), including interviews with pupils (n=22) with different social and ethnic backgrounds in one urban lower secondary school. The results demonstrate that differences between the pupils’ life domains are interconnected in many ways and create social distinctions, hierarchies and divisions between pupils, thus forming breeding ground for detachment and segregation. The findings emphasize the need for urban and educational policies that are sensitive to complexities of local context in social mixing measures.

In Finland, urban segregation has been identified as a new and increasing challenge for pursuing the ideal of the egalitarian comprehensive school. Yet very little is known of particular school contexts, and public concern over school segregation runs a risk of reproducing segregation by focusing in a stigmatising manner on schools in less advantaged areas. In this chapter, we draw on interview data from five comprehensive schools in the metropolitan area of Helsinki to examine how students of schools located in areas that may be considered disadvantaged talk about their everyday life in the school and residential area. We build on the idea that young people represent their lives as ordinary rather than adopting ‘in-risk’ positions, and examine ways in which the schools and residential areas are discussed. We argue that despite their awareness of local problems and racialised and social class-based inequalities, young people are attached to their schools and residential areas, and tend to describe the problems encountered as manageable. While there are statistical similarities between disadvantaged residential areas, the particular local contexts and their effects for young people’s everyday lives vary from one area to another and according to the young people’s social class and racialised background. This highlights the need to understand the particularities and connections between schools and residential areas in discussions of segregation and in attempts to address it.