Neighbourhood Yurt is a project that maps existing neighbourhood dialogues in the multilingual and multicultural suburb of Hervanta, in Tampere, Finland. The project combines a yurt that travels around Hervanta with community art and co-created research with the dwellers.

In the project, we examine four related questions:

• What are the most pressing needs for spaces of making neighbours and inclusion among different people?

• How is it possible to address difficult feelings and worries and yet promote trust and social bonds between people?

• What kind of mundane social practices and processes support peaceful relations?

• How do functional forms of neighbourhood dialogue spread and strengthen in the community?

The research aims to locate and support dialogical practices between neighbours who have various cultural, linguistic, religious and social traditions. The research team aims to do this by going where people move: in courtyards, public spaces and parks. We aim to understand social movements between people, their pace of life and the connections and separations between dwellers.

A combination of research with arts offers people different channels for expressing and elaborating on neighbourhood relations. Neighbourhood Yurt’s working methods are experimental: they expose research both to arts and the researched community and take it out of the university institution. The yurt in itself is both a piece of art and a space for creating dialogue, experimentation and exploration.