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.