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The final exhibition from the interdisciplinary research project Public Space in European Social Housing (PUSH) brings together our collected findings from the three-year research project, funded by the HERA programme Public Spaces: Culture and Integration in Europe. Social housing estates are often problematised as places of segregation and disintegration in European cities, yet they are also potentially a prime locus of interaction between people of different cultural origins and social backgrounds. PUSH investigates social housing, including cooperative housing and rental mass housing estates to better understand how social and cultural encounters happen and, ultimately, how such encounters can be better sustained. Guided by four analytical categories – heritage, informality, democracy, and policies/practices – we explore the publicness of spaces on five housing estates in Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy. Across the different cases and analytical categories, PUSH develops and tests a novel approach to studying and conceptualising public spaces as sites of publicness. We are interested in the dynamic interactions between people and the physical spaces they share: how do people and architecture mutually affect each other so that living with others that are different from oneself becomes possible? The exhibition was curated by and the catalogue edited by Anne Tietjen.

Die Großwohnbauten, die während des Baubooms der 1960er- und 1970er-Jahre die schweizerische Siedlungslandschaft grundlegend veränderten, sind im Laufe der Jahre zunehmend in Verruf geraten. Doch wie gestalten sich - jenseits der weit verbreiteten Klischees - die Lebenswirklichkeiten in diesem Baubestand? Die Autorin richtet den Blick auf die Nachbarschaften von Hochhaussiedlungen in der Schweiz. Anhand von Hausbiografien untersucht sie die sozialräumlichen Dynamiken und beleuchtet, wie Vielfalt und Differenz im Wohnumfeld erfahren und (re-)produziert werden. Dadurch eröffnet sie neue Perspektiven auf den Umgang mit diesem gebauten Erbe und Formen des Zusammenlebens in heterogener werdenden Settings., About living in high-rises built during the construction boom years, the potency of social marginalization and the resilience of neighborhoods.

The third PuSH exhibition took place online at the third transnational workshop in September 2020 in collaboration with local partners in Drammen, Norway. Deploying theories of democracy that accentuate different core aspects of political interactions, the Norwegian research team offered a springboard of four democratic performances that produce publicness in and around physical spaces: 1) articulating the mutual; 2) making claims; 3) deliberating, and 4) representing electorates. To contribute to the exhibition, each research team was asked to consider publicness and democracy in their cases. The five case studies explored contexts for publicness and democracy, democratic performances in sites of publicness, and how democratic publicness is being reshaped through urban renewal of physical spaces. Overall, this exhibition defined democratic publicness as socio-material interactions which have political content, including potential situations for political interaction, interactions resulting from democratic processes, and interactions sparked by democratic performances.

The second PUSH research exhibition took place at the second transnational project workshop in Naples, 27-29 January 2020. The exhibition was open to local partners, staff, students and invited guests. PUSH Research Exhibition Issue # 2 deals with publicness and informality. We proposed to engage the exhibition as a critical space where we confront and discuss ideas and analytical categories in a loosely structured and yet thought-provoking perspective. We didn’t want to have a preventive agreement about what informal publicness is. We’d rather explore publicness and informality through differences rising from different contexts, cultures and research perspectives involved in our project. This exhibition is an open conversation on differences and similarities, contradictions and critical dimensions on which we can all reflect and learn to develop a critical understanding of informal publicness. So, to contribute to the exhibition, we asked each research team just one (apparently simple) question: what do you understand as informal publicness in your cases?

The first PUSH Research Exhibition took place as a closed event at the first transnational project workshop in Copenhagen, 3-5 September 2019, where all academic partners and associated partners met for the first time. PUSH Research Exhibition Issue # 1 visualises the content and methodological structure of the project and thus establishes a platform for sharing and debating content and methods. It shows the five cases of social housing (by aerial photos, typical plans and sections, and fact sheets) and initial explorations of publicness on these estates guided by four analytical categories – democracy, heritage, policies/practices, and informality – each with its own colour code. A wallpaper format displayed all the material on one long wall enabling us to perceive and discuss potential connections across cases and categories. With the wallpaper format, the first exhibition also developed and tested an adaptable format for all future PUSH exhibitions. The format of the wallpaper can convey many different types of content including photos, architectural drawings, maps, statistical data, and text. The basic format is A3 paper prints which can be easily and inexpensively reproduced on any office printer and placed in many different spaces.

Exhibitions are a well-proven format for communicating architecture and for sparking dialogue and debate about architecture. The PUSH project builds on this tradition and works with exhibitions to articulate, share and question our ongoing research about public space in European social housing (PUSH), including cooperative housing and rental mass housing estate and, ultimately, to drive the project forward. This web site provides a peek into the toolbox of our work-in-progress in the format of an online exhibition that will evolve and expand over time. PUSH uses exhibitions not only as a tool for knowledge exchange but for collaborative transdisciplinary knowledge development. We are a multidisciplinary team of international researchers with different backgrounds (architects, landscape architects, urban planners, architectural historians, anthropologists, and sociologists) and collaborate with many associated project partners (from an art photographer to local housing associations and national and European NGO’s). Together we collect and make visual documentation, analysis and interpretations of how publicness is produced on social housing estates: photos, videos, drawings, analytical maps and diagrams. Throughout the project, we share and interrogate these findings in a series of physical exhibitions at transnational and local workshops to jointly drive the project forward. On this website, we share these physical exhibitions and the debates they stimulate in formats that again are easy to share on other platforms than our own. In this way, we hope to communicate and debate our research findings with multiple audiences, ranging from the housing estates’ local residents and stakeholders to planning practitioners, policymakers, NGOs and international researchers.