Introduction

This article builds on material collected in two ethnographic fieldwork stints that I carried out in 2011 and 2018 in the Viennese neighborhood of Monte Laa. The area is composed chiefly of subsidized estates that house many families from Central and Southeast Europe and Turkey.Footnote 1 In looking at the differences between the two bodies of ethnographic material, I discuss how changing commonsensical understandings may alter the lines of differentiation between “migrant” and “non-migrant” residents. I discuss how these shifts come with changes in residents’ spatial understandings and practices.

The population of Vienna, Austria, increased by 300,000 inhabitants between 1990 and 2015 (Stadt Wien 2016: 8). Proportionally, from 2005 to 2015, Vienna’s residents grew by about 10% (Stadt Wien 2016: 33). This ongoing growth has been mainly influenced by migratory developments. A municipal population projection published in 2014 calculated net immigration from abroad at about 14,000 persons per year up through 2024 (Himpele 2014: 7). These expectations were largely exceeded in just a few years (Krutzler 2016). While in 2013, the city grew by about 24,400 residents, in 2015, yearly population growth reached 43,200. This surge caused the city to grow by about 100,000 residents between 2014 and 2016. This acceleration was partly caused by the arrival of refugees, especially from Syria and Iraq, which intensified in 2015 (ORF 2015). After decades of urban growth, 36.7% of the Viennese population was foreign-born in 2020 (Stadt Wien 2021).

This population growth has taken place against the background of a series of geopolitical developments that have dramatically shifted Vienna’s role on the European stage. This repositioning was first triggered by the so-called fall of the “the iron curtain” in 1991 and Austria’s entry into the EU in 1995. Vienna is located next to the eastern border of Austria, about a half-hour car drive from the so-called iron curtain that once divided Europe into two separate areas. The territories of neighboring Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, and Croatia can be reached within 30 min to 4 h by car. Beside Croatia and Germany (a founding member of the EU), these states joined the European Union in 2004. Croatia followed suit in 2013 but still lies outside the Schengen Area. Czechia, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, and Slovenia have all joined the Schengen Area, which includes 26 European countries that have done away with routine passport control at their mutual borders. As a result, many citizens of Austria’s neighboring countries work in Vienna. Thereby, different strategies of transnational mobility are deployed, including daily cross-border commuting, weekly commuting, and seasonal work.

However, the arrival of labor migrants from neighboring countries is just one of several migratory developments that influences Vienna’s ongoing population growth. In 2021, the municipal diversity monitor counted more than 100,000 Viennese of Serbian origin, around 76,000 with a Turkish background, 40,000 persons originating from Bosnia and Herzegovina, and more than 24,000 residents with Syrian citizenship (Stadt Wien 2021)

In line with municipal plans, urban growth is mitigated through the realization of large areas of subsidized housing following the principle of “social mix” (STEP 052005). Monte Laa, whose development started in 2001, is currently one of the largest areas of urban regeneration in Vienna. Monte Laa is located in the Favoriten district in the formerly industrial south of Vienna. Many of the neighborhood’s apartments lie on the former industrial stock ground of the PORR Construction Company. About 2700 apartments were built in the area between 2001 and 2018.

Various housing estates were constructed by different housing cooperatives. The buildings comprise subsided apartments, whereby the form of subsidy linked to single apartments varies. This way, individuals of different incomes can be addressed. The awarding of housing subsidies in Austria is the responsibility of its individual federal states (Österreich.gv.at 2022). Vienna, as a federal state, enjoys considerable leeway in this respect.

Urban space and shifting commonsensical understandings

I engage with Gramsci’s work by looking at commonsensical understandings through a primarily spatial lens. As such, I take the relation between Lefebvre and Gramsci as an entry point in working with Lefebvre’s idea of spatial production (Lefebvre 1991). Lefebvre (1991) describes production of space as determined by the relationship between three spatial dimensions: spatial practice, representational space, and representation of space. Spatial practices are described as the non-reflexive everyday experience of space (Lefebvre 1991: 33). As such, they are intrinsically intertwined with dominant commonsensical perceptions. In this text, I will read them as a commonsensical understanding of space that “embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation” (Lefebvre 1991: 33).

Spatial practices first reproduce dominant relations while potentially challenging them in this purview. These tensions are part of a constant reassessment of the three dimensions of spatial production. Kipfer (2002) draws strong and direct links between the work of Gramsci and Lefebvre, underlining their common interest in everyday life, which they portray as both reproducing and possibly challenging hegemonic relationships (Kipfer 2002: 129ff).

Gramsci does not describe common sense as a coherent entity but as an altogether contradictory phenomenon. Common sense is depicted as process in which dissimilar elements of thought originating in very different periods relate to each other irrationally (Opratko 2012: 45). “Common sense is not a single conception, identical in time and place. […] The fundamental characteristic of common sense consists in its being a disjointed, incoherent, and inconsequential conception of the world […]” (Gramsci 1975: 1396).For Gramsci, common sense is, thus, in a constant state of flux.

At the same time, common sense is a disputed field in which certain elements can prevail over others. Therefore, every struggle for hegemony is a struggle for common sense. Struggles for hegemony might also concern persons’ definitions, classifications, and differentiations. Liguori (2015: 89) underlines how “the greater part of subjects (…) are not mobilised but defined (in their subjectivity, in their individual and collective way of being) by ideology and, therefore, also by common sense.” In this article, I refer to such understanding of common sense as a field of dispute that also comprises the definition of subjects and their identity. I link this understanding to Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of spatial production in asking how shifting definitions unfold in changing everyday experiences of space.

To discuss the shifting line of differentiation between “migrants” and “non-migrants,” I draw from Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018: 5) who understand migrants as floating signifiers that take on different, shifting meanings in different locations at specific conjunctures. This body of literature criticizes the “ethnic lens” in migration research (Glick Schiller and Çağlar 2013). Glick Schiller and Çağlar (2009: 179) propose taking individual migrants, rather than ethnic groups, as an entry point from which to focus on networks migrants form and on the social fields created by such networks.

Glick Schiller and Çağlar (2011) concentrate on the possibilities and constraints for “migrants” and “non-migrants” living in or moving to specific locations. Opportunities for migrants can vary enormously from city to city due to the different relative positioning of cities within global political-economic configurations. At the same time, opportunities for migrants are linked to specific historical conjuncture (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018). For Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018: 22), conjuncture is, first of all, a conceptualization of locality and located agency concerning “changing configurations of intersecting multiscalar networks of disparate power.”

The authors refer to Clarke (2014) who discusses the conjunctural understanding of Stuart Hall and proposes its integration into anthropological analysis. Clarke (2014: 115) sees Hall’s conjunctural thinking that was strongly influenced by the work of Gramsci (Hall et al. 1978; Hall 1986; Hall and Massey 2010), as an attempt to understand the character of the present moment as a condensation of “the forces, tendencies, forms of power, and relations of domination and subordination […].” Commonsensical understandings should hence be seen as embedded in a conjunctural context; at the same time, a specific conjuncture might offer the leeway to influence commonsensical understandings in particular ways.

When discussing the notion of conjuncture, Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018: 5) underline that processes of dispossession are legitimated by different narratives of national, racialized, and gendered differences. Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018) do, hence, engage with the differentiation among “migrants” and “non-migrants”; however, they do not explicitly discuss how changing commonsensical understandings relate to such processes of differentiation or how they express in spatial practices. Jessop’s (2005) discussion of the spatial dimension of Gramsci’s work also refers to the notion of conjuncture. Jessop (2005) sees conjuncture as a moment in time but also as always located, first of all in what Gramsci calls “locale,” i.e., in localized everyday life (ibid.: 424).

Several anthropology scholars state that space is constituted as place through practices of inhabiting (Ingold 2011; Lems 2016; Komarova and Svašek 2018). These authors highlight that inhabiting and dwelling primarily consist of place-making practices. In this paper, however, I concentrate on how residents are co-producing space through their residential practices in a dialectical relationship to representational space and representation of space. For Lefebvre (1991), lived space, which is practiced and thought on a daily basis, is mediated through symbols, thus becoming a space of representation or representational space. Thereby, he underlines that urban life is always also made of urban imaginaries; Soja (2000: 324) describes the latter as mental and cognitive mappings through which inhabitants understand and experience the places in which they live.

Such imaginaries might entail borders between “familiar” and “unfamiliar” urban spaces. Said (2000), in a broader sense, speaks about imaginative geographies. Said (1995; 2000) describes the concept of imaginative geography (Said 2000: 181) as the interplay of invention, memory, and place (Said 2000: 178). He defines imaginative geography as a universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” (Said 1995: 54). In this picture, imaginative geography is an aspect of identity construction that parallels spatial distance with cultural, ethnic, or social differences. In discussing the spatial dimension of Said’s and Foucault’s work, Frank (2009: 71) sees imaginative geography as tying the categories of “self” and “other,” which are at first non-spatial, to particular locations.

In translating such an understanding to Lefebvre’s idea of lived space (1991) as mediated and represented on behalf of symbols, this article inquires into how residents of Monte Laa imagine their neighborhood and its urban surrounding concerning questions of “ours” and “theirs.” More specifically, the article discusses which spaces are considered “ours” and which ones “theirs” or “foreign” by Monte Laa residents who participated in interviews. These inquiries are linked to the broader negotiations of how a “we” is defined in relation to “others” in the case of Monte Laa. The article, finally, discusses how the modification of these commonsensical parameters of differentiation affects the change of spatial imaginaries and practices.

Lefebvre sees dwelling or inhabiting as a form of appropriation — of making one’s own (Stanek 2011: 89 ff). He does not understand inhabiting as simply tied to the private housing space and a neighborhood. Rather, inhabiting is understood as a potentially multiscalar practice linking together the “daily reality,” “urban reality,” and further “routes and networks” (Stanek 2011: 130–31). In line with such multiscalar dimension of Lefebvre’s understanding of inhabiting, this article discusses how shifting differentiations among “migrants” and “non-migrants” come with the change of spatial practices and of imaginative geographies that draw lines between “familiar” and “unfamiliar” spaces on multiple scales.

Migration as a dominant political issue: 2011 vs. 2018

The described demographic dynamics have dominated political debates in Austria since the mid-1990s. There is, as Wodak (2016) points out, a long tradition of racist political discourse in Austria. Since the 1990s, Austria has seen consistent electoral successes of right-wing nationalist parties, especially the FPÖ (Freedom Party of Austria). The party was one of the first right-wing populist parties in Europe to become part of a national government coalition in 2000. In conjuncture, a strong countermovement emerged, composed of multiple actors, such as leftwing, ecologically engaged, and religious institutions. Consequently, migration has been debated in very emotional terms at different moments and in different ways. The paper engages with the changing nature of debates on migration in comparing the two fieldwork periods pursued in Monte Laa in 2011 and 2018.

The first period was carried out in 2011, right after the end of the first national coalition with right-wing extremist participation in 2010. In opposition to the national government, the social democratic municipal administration had turned from integration politics to an approach building on the cultural diversity paradigm from the late-2000s onwards. At that time, the city oriented itself toward EU policies to oppose the federal government (Perchinig 2010: 31).

The valorization of diversity acquired a central role in several policy fields, such as the renewal of inner-urban neighborhoods and the development of new subsidized neighborhoods framed as “intercultural” (Karasz 2021). Islam was frequently referenced in political debates, especially by the FPÖ in the 2010 municipal election campaign. At the same time, the election reinforced diversity politics, as a red–green government was formed for the first time.

At the time of my second fieldwork stint in Monte Laa in 2018, this situation had changed significantly. At the federal level, the 2017 National Council elections strengthened the right-wing populist camp. The country was governed by a right-wing coalition under Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, with the participation of the xenophobic FPÖ. Kurz’s restrictive stance on the refugee question in 2015 was decisive for his electoral triumph.

In 2015, Europe saw significantly increased movement of forced migrants, especially due to the wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Many individuals tried to reach Europe through the so-called Western Balkan route through Southeast and Central Europe, along which most countries refused to accept the arriving refugees. Finally, the German government decided to temporarily suspend its enforcement of the Dublin Regulation, which aims to determine which EU member state is responsible for examining an asylum application — usually the state where the asylum seeker first entered the EU (UNHCR 2022). The Austrian government, led by a social democratic chancellor, cooperated with the German government (Karasz 2015). Hundreds of thousands of refugees traveled through the country in 2015. At the same time, nearly 90,000 persons applied for asylum in Austria in 2015 and more than 42,000 in 2016 (BMI 2021).

In the following years, several very polarized election campaigns took place, on the occasion of Vienna’s municipal elections (2015), a federal presidential election (2016), and finally, the National Council’s elections (2017). Opratko (2019) has shown how racist and especially anti-Muslim positions became hegemonic even in the so-called liberal Austrian media during these years. At the municipal level, these developments led to a shift toward a more restrictive positioning concerning migration issues and urban renewal and housing policies. This led to restricting access to subsidized housing for persons without a permanent address in Vienna for at 2 two years (Stadt Wien 2022).

“Migrant” and “non-migrant” urban spaces

The 2015 municipal election turned out to be a triumph for the xenophobic FPÖ party in Favoriten. In Monte Laa, the FPÖ became the strongest party with 54.5% of the votes (Stadt Wien 2015). Against this background, it is important to underline that the composition of Monte Laa’s residents is characterized by the upward mobility of certain immigrant groups, especially of families from Central and Southeast Europe, as well as, to a lesser extent, Turkey. Many of these residents had the right to vote as Austrian citizens.

Although some families with a higher income have moved to Monte Laa from more expensive Viennese neighborhoods, many were living in substandard “rental barracks” in the Favoriten district. The housing type called “rental barrack” (Zinskaserne) was developed in the late nineteenth century. Since the 1970s, “rental barracks” have been mainly home to migrants from Turkey and former Yugoslavia who came to Austria within the framework of guest worker agreements. In the proximity of Monte Laa, one finds one of the most iconic “rental barrack” areas of Vienna, commonly referred to as “Kreta.”

The relationship to the adjacent neighborhoods shapes the understanding of urban space for many residents of Monte Laa, even if they previously lived in substandard buildings. In this context, I will refer to Said’s notion of imaginative geography (Said 2000: 181), which discusses how the categories “self” and “other,” which are at first non-spatial and second tied to particular locations. In reference to Lefebvre (1991), one could state that such differentiation is represented on behalf of symbols which again influence the space lived in daily practices.

When listening to conversations with Monte Laa’s residents, the neighborhood and its community are frequently perceived to stand in opposition to the historic part of Favoriten. The “unfamiliar” seems to be located in the parts of the district whose building stock is mainly composed of “rental barracks,” built around 1900. These houses have symbolized poverty and social marginality in the city for more than a century. In 2001, more than 40% of the Turkish citizens residing in Vienna lived in districts with a high concentration of substandard buildings (Hatz 2008: 319). The enduring importance of the substandard houses for many low-income migrants is also underlined by Lévy-Vroelant and Reinprecht (2014).

Many of Monte Laa’s residents described the inner part of Favoriten, which is characterized by the presence of substandard apartment houses, as “foreign,” “wild,” and “dangerous.” Ida, who was a teenager living with her parents when I met her in 2011, described nearby “Kreta” as an area, where “(…) on the streets, you have these fat cars, as you know them from movies about terrible bandits … and when you come into the area, you have these cafés and betting shops with some Turks standing in front. Well, this corner is exactly like in a movie … Let’s say that one becomes really afraid.”

In this example Ida locates the “migrant other” in urban space; however, the question of who is the “migrant other” can hardly be separated from its temporal dimension. As noted by Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018), “migrant” is a floating signifier that constantly changes its meaning. The commonsensical differentiation between “us” and “them” has to be contextualized in the specific conjunctural moment. Through a different set of terms, Crehan (2002: 6) underlines that according to Gramsci cultural understandings change in connection to shifting power relations in a specific historical context.

Drawing on this dynamic understanding of the differentiation between “migrants” and “non-migrants,” this article discusses how the understanding of the “migrant other” changed between 2011 and 2018. I will examine how this change effected spatial practices and understanding of four residents of Monte Laa.

Four inhabitants of Monte Laa: 2011 and 2018

Ivana: national media and “local” understandings of difference

Ivana is in her 40 s, married, and a mother of two children. She lived in a village of a non-EU-member state in former Yugoslavia until age 16.Footnote 2 After finishing the mandatory level of education, she moved to Vienna to watch the children of a relative living in Favoriten. She had imagined their life in Vienna would be magnificent because “people that have been working here before were always dressed super great when they came to vacation with their awesome cars. I thought that they live like gods.”

When she arrived in Favoriten to a run-down substandard building and the musty apartment she ended up sharing with four other people, she was shocked: “It was a 40m2 appartment with a walk-through kitchen, a living room, and just one bedroom. The toilet was in the hallway [referring to the fact that several households shared the same toilet] and there was no water inside the apartment. I was speechless, but I could not do anything. Slowly, I got used to it, but the toilet on the hall was always terrible for me because one had to share it with other people. We had to drive to the public bath to have a shower. It was better to live down there in our village than here in Vienna.”

After some years in Vienna, Ivana got to know her husband and they soon started to improve their housing conditions. They first moved into a better equipped, small apartment in Favoriten and finally to Monte Laa. When I first talked to Ivana in 2011, the new neighborhood stood for a feeling of “having gotten out of there.” The historic part of Favoriten was, for Ivana, a part of her own life that she had left behind.

In 2011, Ivana described her life in Monte Laa based on a duality among “Austrians” and “migrants,” especially migrants from former Yugoslavia. While the former would avoid contact with neighbors, the latter would enjoy active neighborhood relations. In this picture, Monte Laa was described to be “like a small city down there at our place [in Ivana’s country of origin]. As if it would not entirely be part of Vienna. […] the people here are friends with each other.”

When I met Ivana again in 2018, this picture had changed. First of all, the axis of differentiation that characterized the conversation was not one between “migrants” and “Austrians” but between “us” and “the Muslims.” According to Ivana, life in her estate in Monte Laa had changed because so many “Muslims” had moved into her building: “They are different from us ‘Yugos’ [colloquial denomination for persons from former Yugoslavia] and Austrians. The Muslims do not talk to neighbors and … look how dirty the staircases are now.”

In a broader picture, Ivana seemed scared that the building in Monte Laa would become like the substandard houses in the historic part of the district: “Down there it is not like Vienna anymore. It is chaotic, filthy, just Turks and Muslims. Now they even come here. Do I have to go back to my village for a normal life?” In this renewed duality, the “familiar” space was described as the one inhabited by “Austrians” and migrants from former Yugoslavia. Monte Laa and Ivana’s village of origin were perceived to be part of “our” space, although endangered. The rest of Favoriten was described as mainly “Muslim” and “unfamiliar.”

In Ivanas’s case, these shifting differentiations went hand in hand with her everyday practices. In 2011, she had presented me to a Bosnian neighbor of the Muslim religion to conduct an interview with her. She introduced the woman to me as a good acquaintance; in fact, I met the two women together several times in the open spaces of the housing complex. However, in 2018, Ivana claimed never to have had any contact with this neighbor and brought her as a typical example of a disinterested Muslim neighbor. Instead, this time she presented me to her “good Austrian neighbor,” a single lady she would regularly meet with to go shopping.

This shift concerning the urban understanding formulated in 2011 underlines how fluid, supposedly “natural” differentiations between “us” and “them” might appear. Çağlar and Glick Schiller (2018) have emphasized that the localized understandings of who is a “migrant” or a “foreigner” seem to be “normal” for residents, yet they are unstable and embedded in the historical context. In Ivana’s case, in 2018, the conversation was dominated by the description of herself and her children as “non-Muslims.” It is worth highlighting that the right-wing populist FPÖ has specifically targeted many Austrian voters of Serbian migration backgrounds in election campaigns since 2015 (Die Presse 2016). Thereby, the xenophobic movement used supposedly unifying anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Significantly, Ivana’s shift was in line with changes I could observe in conversations with several residents of Monte Laa. The reinforced line of differentiation between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” urban areas in 2018 coincided with the narratives disseminated by national media since 2015, especially when reporting about Favoriten.

Ivana’s case stands as an excellent example of the significance of media discourses in relation to changing spatial experiences and practices of Monte Laa’s residents. When we met again for an interview in Ivana’s apartment in 2018, she was waiting for me together with her neighbor, a good friend of hers. She is of a similar age and originates from the same non-EU country in former Yugoslavia. During the conversation, both women described the district extensively, whereby they always seemed to know which national newspaper had reported about any discussed negative development. During the discussion, the media’s coverage itself seemed to be even more important for the two neighbors than the effective happenings in their urban surroundings.

Yet, the articles were not only being read in newspapers. In some cases, Ivana and her neighbor had become aware of mainstream media coverage through social media and online forums. In July 2018, the tabloid newspaper Österreich published an article with the significant title Chechens against Afghans. The mass beating in Vienna was gang war on its OE24.at (2018) online platform. The article describes alleged street fights among different groups of migrants in Favoriten. The author quotes the following words of a lawyer involved in the legal proceedings resulting from the incidents: “They [Chechnyan immigrants of Muslim religion] often cannot relate to our values […] Theirs is a different culture, concerned with honor, pride and religious radicalization […]”.

Significantly, this exact quote was reiterated to me by Ivana when I met her by chance on the street some days after the events. She had read the article after a neighbor posted it in a Facebook group for residents of Monte Laa. The neighbor again had shared a posting of a local politician of the FPÖ, which was linking to the article on OE24.at. This example can exemplify the multiplicity of local actors involved in spreading the image of a “wild,” “foreign” Favoriten district.

Paula: common sense and changing spatial practices in Monte Laa

Paula is in her early 50 s and lives alone without children. She grew up in Favoriten and had always lived in municipal housing estates before moving to Monte Laa in 2007.

When I first met Paula in 2011, she was a dedicated user of the public transport system. She used to go to work every morning, taking a bus and then a tramline. On the way home, she used to stop in the shopping street in the central part of Favoriten. For her, coming home to Monte Laa was coming back to “an oasis of peace with a strong community feeling among people from all different cultures and countries.” She enjoyed this situation very much during the week and occasionally used to weekend at a townhouse in Lower Austria.

In Paula’s daily practice, Monte Laa was integrated into the district’s larger urban surrounding. Different functions of her daily routines were dislocated in this larger urban area, perceived to be “ours” by Paula. Only certain municipal estates appeared as “foreign” strongholds in this picture. In 2011, Paula was very engaged in a self-organized local association of residents that provided activities for children, as well as an online forum, etc. The association was as also founded to promote the thriving coexistence of different groups of residents. In 2018, 7 years later, Paula still knew many individuals of different backgrounds from her estate. Her engagement in the local association had, however, waned. She had, as she pointed out, “drawn back.” As Paula is very self-critical, in the interview, she was self-conscious about her personal change and unsatisfied with this development. Yet, she could not determine the reasons for such a shift at first glance. Only after a longer conversation, she opened up about the period that made her withdraw from many neighborhood activities.

About 3 years before our second conversation, a group of men she called “Arabs” and “refugees” had started to regularly meet and drink in a park near Monte Laa. Paula had to cross the park twice daily on her way to and from work. She started to feel afraid and insecure, although, as she critically underlined, nothing had ever happened. Paula explained her different perceptions in referencing local media: “If you look at the newspaper, every day there is a rape by an Afghan, etc. Maybe I simply got scared because of the news.”

First, she started to perceive her daily path to work as “foreign” and “dangerous.” Later she avoided the central shopping street of the district and, finally, stopped taking public transport because “I am sorry to say it, but you are the only Austrian there. You feel like you’re on a lonely trip to the Orient.” During this development, she withdrew from most activities in the local association. “Everything got too much for me here,” she underlined.

Most importantly, since 2011, the scale of the space perceived as “hers” in her daily life had changed significantly. While some years ago, Paula described some isolated estates as “other,” now the entire district was a “migrant,” “wild,” and “oriental,” as well as the park lying nearby. At the same time, Paula perceived much less of the surrounding urban space as familiar; in her description the “familiar” space had moved away from the neighborhood and even from the city. Paula was commuting to work by car and leaving the city for her family’s town house nearly every weekend. She did most of her shopping outside Vienna on the way back from the country house. Other than in 2011, in 2018, almost the entire description of her daily life was related to her car drives. In describing her spatial practices, she finally took her car keys and put them on the kitchen table, saying: “You see these keys […] this is my life.”

In this new spatial framework, Paula continuously related the apartment to places outside the city and disconnected more from the surrounding district. Unsurprisingly, Paula finally admitted to frequently thinking of moving away from Monte Laa for a house outside the city.

Lefebvre’s understanding of inhabiting as a potentially multiscalar practice (Stanek 2011: 130–31) raises the question of how such practices unfold on multiple scales at conjunctural moments. Through Paula’s case, one can see how the changing scalarity of everyday spatial practices is intrinsically linked to dominant commonsensical urban imaginaries (Soja 2000: 324). Between 2011 and 2018, Favoriten had turned into a symbol for a “migrant” Muslim space in Vienna. In this article, Paula’s changing residential practices are framed in the context of these fluctuating commonsensical images.

Similar shifts could be recognized in several interviews, although in varying intensity. The feeling of living in a neighborhood that is more and more surrounded by a “foreign,” “migrant” district, as well as the wish to leave “their” city for “our” suburbia or countryside, was even expressed by individuals with a pronounced anti-racist positioning.

Similarly to Ivana, in Paula’s account, the so-called 2015 “refugee crisis” was a conjunctural moment that triggered a strong change in spatial perception and practice. According to Paula and many other interviewed residents, the impact of media coverage concerning the so-called refugee crisis contributed significantly to important shifts in spatial perception and practice.

The changing understanding of “familiar” and “unfamiliar” spaces is, however, not a linear development leading to the substitution of certain commonsensical understandings by others; it can be seen as a shift in balance in the context of the type of common sense that Gramsci describes as incoherent, disjoint, and therefore as a disputed field (Gramsci 1975: 1396). Paula’s arguments regarding the “oriental” and “foreign” character of certain urban areas had also been present in her 2011 description of the neighborhood, yet at that time they took second place. In 2018, on the contrary, such labels had pushed their way into the foreground.

Throughout interviews, this shift was so strong that in 2018 without any difficulty I could find a common sense among the interviewed residents of Monte Laa concerning the reorganization of the imaginative geographies along the line between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” spaces. Here, it is important to emphasize that I had accessed the field through a self-organized local association of residents. The association was particularly interested in promoting residents of different origins living together. Not all my contact persons were active members of this group. Yet, at least in 2011, they were in contact with members of the association and not completely averse to the ideas of the initiative. The association had made Monte Laa a much-cited positive example because it stood for the constructive coexistence of different ethnic groups. Despite that, in 2018, the idea of a split among “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” residents and urban spaces had gained great significance among those neighbors.

Maria: the transnational dimension of the changing common sense in Monte Laa

Maria moved to Vienna from southern Poland in the early 2000s. In the city, she got to know her husband, who also originates from Poland. Both studied in Vienna and found employment according to their professional education. For many years, they lived in inner-city neighborhoods in rooms or very small apartments with short-term rental contacts. Around 2010, they moved into a subsidized apartment in Monte Laa in which to start a family.

For Maria, living in Monte Laa had a transnational dimension. When I first met her and her husband in 2011, they regularly drove to one of the neighboring countries on weekends. They were always traveling with friends also originating from countries that joined the EU in 2004 or later. Maria also chose to live in Monte Laa because of its specific position in this transnational European region: “Vienna has such a good position that you feel international. Right here, you are practically on top of the highway, and you feel it: 30 min and I am in Hungary, in Slovakia, or in the Czech Republic. My God, even Slovenia is not so far away.”

The neighborhood thus acquired a particular kind of centrality in relation to Central and Southeast European spaces through its relative positioning within the everyday practices and imaginaries of some Central and Southeast European migrants (both from EU member states and non-EU member states). For Maria, Vienna and, more specifically, Monte Laa were both positioned at the heart of a vast, transnational area that she and her friends considered to be “theirs.” Nevertheless, Maria used to avoid going to the central part of Favoriten where she underlined that she felt uneasy.

When I met Maria and her husband again in 2018, their daily life had significantly changed, as well as their understanding of Monte Laa’s relational position. She underlined that “Vienna has unfortunately lost a lot of its great advantages.” According to Maria, this happened because of the rapid growth of the city and because of the many “migrants,” especially “refugees from Muslim countries […].” Now she did avoid not only the inner parts of Favoriten but also some areas directly linked to Monte Laa, such as the adjacent Laaer Berg recreation area.

According to Maria, 2 years before my second fieldwork stay, a young woman jogging was alleged to have been sexually abused by a young man originating from Afghanistan. In fact, a case of rape occurred in 2016; however, a perpetrator of Romanian citizenship was arrested and condemned for the crime (Kurier 2017). As Maria loves to jog, this incident made her consider moving away for a while. In addition, Maria underlined that during the so-called refugee crisis, relatives living in Poland had continuously called to check in on her, asking if she was still alive and well, at a time when Vienna was being depicted as a dangerous place in Polish media.

By 2018, Maria’s life rhythm had dramatically changed since becoming a mother of two children. This also transformed the transnational dimension of her routines. She no longer traveled on pleasure trips around Central and Southeast Europe but regularly drove to her mother’s place in Poland for childcare. In this picture, Vienna held a different position than it had in 2011. Geographically, Maria still saw Vienna as central to a transnational European space, but emotionally, she felt the city as more and more “foreign.” In her words, it was “somehow not Vienna anymore, but a city with all the disadvantages of Paris.” Thereby she was pointing to the presence of “migrants,” especially those of Muslim backgrounds.

Said (2000) speaks about imaginative geographies that draw borders between “familiar” and “unfamiliar” spaces in the city. As with all common sensical images, this differentiation is not stable but constantly changing and disputed (Crehan 2011) and is an object of political struggle. Such a struggle unfolds, in specific conjunctural moments, that are embedded in a multiscalar context (Çağlar and Glick Schiller 2018).

In such a context, Monte Laa can be seen as related to emotional debates on migration in Europe, especially from 2015 onwards. In the context of the so-called refugee crisis, most countries in Central and Southeast Europe adopted an anti-immigrant position. At the same time, Austria’s role was more contradictory, at least until the 2017 parliamentary elections, which resulted in a center-right-wing coalition. At a municipal level, Vienna opted for explicitly welcoming refugees in the city, at least publicly.

Such tensions and contradictions underline the transnational dimension of housing in Central and Southeast Europe. Residential practices in Viennese subsidized estates and entailed spatial understandings develop in a multiscalar context; therefore, various national, regional, and transnational actors influence commonsensical understandings and socio-spatial relations.

An interviewed resident of Hungarian origin, for instance, described the changes in her broader Viennese residential environment by quoting János Lázár, at that time Minister of the Hungarian Prime Minister’s Office. Since 2015, Hungary has pursued a strictly anti-immigrant policy. In 2018, Lázár posted a video showing himself walking through Favoriten, which he described as a multicultural nightmare in the middle of Europe (Mayer 2018). Lázár underlined that white Christian Austrians had left the district, while “immigrants” had taken control.

In the evermore emotional debates about migration in Austria since 2015, Favoriten has acquired a prominent role as the symbolic representation of a newly “Muslim space” in Austria. The publication of a much-discussed book by a schoolteacher working in Favoriten stands as an example (Wiesinger 2018). The book’s title can be translated as Culture Wars in the Classroom: A Teacher’s Report on How Islam is Changing Schools. In line with this rhetoric, the leader of the FPÖ, Heinz Christian Strache, had chosen the district marked as a symbolic starting place for his municipal electoral campaign under the aggressive anti-Muslim slogan “Battle for Vienna” (Oe24 2015).

In this broader context, Maria’s story shows how changing commonsensical understandings of migrants linked to a broader conjunctural moment, locally characterized by population growth and immigration, intersects with the changing rhythms of personal daily life. Thereby, for Maria, Vienna and Monte Laa’s immediate surroundings shifted from being the center of a space perceived as “ours” in the broader Central and Southeast European sphere to an area potentially “foreign” to the same region. As such, Vienna occupied a highly contradictory position in Maria’s understanding.

Maria described the city as detached from Austria and, therefore, as a haven for her as a migrant from Poland. At the same time, the city was depicted as increasingly threatening due to the increasing number of Muslim residents: “When I talk to acquaintances from Austria, even in the office: it is their preference to move away from Vienna. The trend is that Muslims come to Vienna to have certain standards […] Money, work, and social benefits, but the others realize, things are going downhill in Vienna. But I can have a better living standard in the countryside. But from my perspective, as a foreigner, I don’t want to move to the countryside, because I would feel isolated […] here in Vienna I can have contact with other foreigners. So, I would rather prefer to move away from Vienna, even to Poland, to keep certain standards. Or to Switzerland.”

In this statement, the double distinction between Austrians and “migrants” just as between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” migrants is reflected in a contradictory way. In Maria’s case, this tension is also expressed in her spatial understanding. There is a changing differentiation into “own” and “foreign” spaces on multiple scales.

Alexander: challenging the changing common sense in Monte Laa

Since commonsensical understandings continuously change, they are always contradictory (Gramsci 1975: 1396). In my fieldwork in Monte Laa, the duality between “Muslims” and “non-Muslims” that would dominate the conversations in 2018 had been present even in 2011; similarly, the arguments encountered during my first fieldwork period had not disappeared in 2018. This also holds for the idea of a shared residential community surpassing the religious lines of differentiation.

In both research periods, a self-organized residents association was my most important source of interlocutors in the area. Residents had established the association to foster an engaged living together of neighbors of different origins. This aim is reflected in the very heterogeneous composition of its most engaged members.

When I first got to know Monte Laa in 2011, the association had a very active and central role in the neighborhood’s daily life. The group was responsible for organizing festivities, language courses, playgroups for children, etc. During a second interview series in 2018, the association’s activities had nearly come to standstill. Although many of the formerly engaged residents were still in contact with each other, several lines of conflict had emerged among them and between them and other residents of the neighborhood.

This development cannot be reduced to the conjunctural shifts described so far in the article. At the same time, it cannot be seen as a direct result of changing funding schemes in local policies. Fundings were always very little and linked to specific activities such as organizing neighborhood festivities. There are several other determinants, such as personal conflicts, the changed life situation of key actors, or the fact that some very committed neighbors had moved away. However, many interviews showed that the reinforced religious lines of differentiation among residents had been a relevant factor for changes in neighborhood life.

Alexander, who migrated to Vienna from a non-EU member state in Southeast Europe, can stand as an example. Alexander was one of the main organizers of the community activities. For this reason, he was subjected to years of racist verbal attacks by some residents who denounced the events of the residents’ association as foreign and disturbing. This took place especially in neighborhood groups on digital platforms.

In 2011, Alexander was — beside many other neighborhood relations — integrated into a broad network of residents originating from different countries of former Yugoslavia. Much stronger than 7 years before, in 2018, several of these neighbors shared a strongly “non-Muslim” identity; unlike in 2011, some did not even want to participate in activities with Alexander anymore. One neighbor went so far as to describe him to me as a “naive” friend of “Muslim” neighbors. At the same time, Alexander reproached neighbors who propagated xenophobic ideas in underlining that they had come to Austria as refugees themselves and that people with exactly this “naive” position had helped them start a new life in Vienna.

Hence, in 2018, individuals like Alexander did not want to change their position concerning the lines of differentiation among neighbors. However, these residents seemed to be more and more isolated. In 2011, Alexander had, for example, organized a lot of activities with Paula. As described earlier, Paula stopped participating in the neighborhood activities because of experiences that she linked to the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. In 2018, Alexander and Paula were in contact as before, and in principle, she seemed to be still open to the ideas of the neighborhood association; however, the fear of a surrounding increasingly perceived to be “foreign” and “Muslim” had become predominant. Accordingly, in 2018, she did not want to take an active part in the group anymore. The commonsensical differentiation among familiar and foreign residents had transformed, as well as related spatial practices, the non-reflexive everyday experiences of space (Lefebvre 1991:33). The trans-group production of the everyday space in the form of joint festivities, language courses, etc. no longer took place.

At the same time, persons like Alexander, who were still fighting against the impact of racist stigmatization on neighborhood relations, had changed their way of positioning themselves toward their neighbors. The association was formed as a result of discussions in an online forum that had already been set up by residents. Among the founders of the association, there were several IT professionals. In 2018, some continued expressing their position on online platforms, but they no longer organized big festivities. Their positions were hence formulated in digital space but no longer realized in the off-line neighborhood.

Most importantly, formerly involved residents had stopped investing time into neighborhood activities. Alexander, for example, had started to invest a lot of his time into a sports club and its activities. However, he was inviting further interested neighbors to these activities having an “anti-racist” background; the latter were taking part in adjacent districts, perceived as “wild” and “dangerous” by many persons in Monte Laa. In so doing, some Monte Laa residents continued to reproduce alternative differentiations between an “us” and a “them” and closely related spatial understandings.

This concurrent contestation of dominant understandings underlines how, despite the dominance of religious lines of differentiation in 2018, the potential of change lied exactly in the weakened but still existing alternative ideas. Common sense as a theoretical framework, first, offers the possibility to include such contradictions into the analysis structurally; yet finally, as with every aspect in Gramsci’s texts, it should also be seen as a framework to imagine a political struggle.

Conclusions

This article underlined that working with the notion of common sense offers an excellent way to discuss how lines of differentiation change in specific localities. Moreover, the notion of common sense entails the possibility to link these shifts to changing spatial understandings and practices.

In reference to Gramsci’s work, common sense was framed as an interplay of dissimilar elements of thought originating in very different periods; such interplay is always a disputed field and thus constantly changing. This dynamic understanding was discussed in looking at the lines of differentiation among “migrant” and “non-migrant” residents of subsidized estates in the Viennese neighborhood of Monte Laa.

In this context, the notion of common sense was discussed from a temporal as well as from a spatial perspective. Temporally, the article compared fieldwork conducted in the same neighborhood with the same residents in 2011 and 2018. In bringing four case examples, it was emphasized how the lines of differentiation at the local level changed in relation to the broader, historical conjuncture. The so-called refugee crisis in 2015 emerged as a moment of conjunctural rupture. Between 2011 and 2018, one could observe how the line of differentiation among residents shifted from the one between “Austrians” and “non-Austrians” to one between “Muslim” and “non-Muslim” residents.

As a consequence, the self-positioning of residents in relation to their neighbors had frequently changed. Some neighbors might have been “familiar” in 2011 but “unfamiliar” and “foreign” in 2018 or vice versa. Similarly, the connotation of the extended residential space had shifted for interviewed persons. The “familiar” space of Monte Laa was by many residents experienced as increasingly threatened by the surrounding district, described to be “migrant,” “wild,” and “Muslim.”

Such alterations changed not only the imaginative geography or space of representation but also the concrete practice of dwelling in the subsidized estates, the spatial practice in the Lefebvrian sense (Lefebvre 1991). The changing relation between “our” space and “theirs” implicated that much of the persons’ daily life was transferred away from the neighborhood and its urban surrounding, into locations outside the city and, in some cases, even in other EU countries. We can, hence, speak about a repositioning of the neighborhood in the everyday practices and commonsensical imaginaries both at the urban level and in a transnational Central and Southeast European space.

The article showed that one of the strengths of common sense as an analytical notion lies in its function as a direct link between broader hegemonic ideologies and personal understandings and practices. This strength opens the possibility of building on ethnographic material and the notion’s deep theoretical relationship to several other concepts to bridge different bodies of literature. This article has tried to do so by referring to literature that focuses less on the structure of socio-spatial relations than on the dynamic process of their production. In this spirit, I linked the notion of common sense to a conjunctural understanding of location as well as to a multiscalar perspective on spatial production. In so doing, I was able to underline that the shift of commonsensical understandings does not just redefine persons as “migrants” or “non-migrants” and emphasize how socio-spatial relations are also renegotiated symbolically, in practice, and on multiple scales.