Public Space in European Social Housing: Research Exhibition Issue #3 Democratic Publicness

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.