Project: Public Space in European Social Housing

Acronym	PuSH
Duration	01/06/2016 - 28/02/2020
Project Topic	Across Europe, millions of citizens live in social housing estates. These estates are often contested, yet their shared spaces are long-term space of exchange and encounter between people of various cultural and social backgrounds, ethnicities, ages and gender. We hypothise these multiple spaces constitute a unique potential resource for European integration. Understanding space as relational dynamics between its materialities, uses and discourses (Lefebvre 1991) brings us to the concept of publicness. Publicness is thus sparked into being at the intersection between people and space. It allows us to better understand how these interactions also happens in not-intended ways, rets of unspoken valuations by various groups, sustains or suppresses certain modes of action and affect the formulation of policies. PuSH studies these aspects of publicness through four interrelated analytical categories: (non)planning, democracy, cultural heritage and policy-making. The highly crossdisciplinary team bridging design and the humanities work closely together using multiple methods in on- site based case studies of the five carefully selected social housing estates representing the most significant building typologies from the 1970s and 1980s throughout Europe. The prominent group of Associate Partners mirrors all levels from citizens to transnational policy-making and will contribute locally and jointly advice on maximining the impacts of the results. The main results of PuSH are 1) a novel tailored theory and 2) methodology for understanding and studying publicness in social housing estates, the gained 3) specific insights from the five case studies on how these dynamic interactions between space and people actually occur on ground. This knowledge will both inform 4) policymaking, 5) design of future public spaces and not least the 6) extensive ongoing transformations. In total, PuSH will examine and reveal how public spaces all over Europe’s social housing estates constitute a unique resource for European integration.
Website	visit project website
Network	HERA-JRP-PS
Call	HERA Joint Research Programme “Public Spaces: Culture and Intergration in Europe”

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	The University of Copenhagen	Coordinator	Denmark
2	‘Federico II’ University	Partner	Italy
3	Norwegian University of Life Sciences	Partner	Norway
4	ETH Zürich	Partner	Switzerland