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Exhibition Issue # 1
Anchor 1
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.
Anchor 2
Exhibition Issue # 2
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 # 1 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?
Exhibition Issue # 3
Anchor 3
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 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.
Anchor 4
Exhibition Issue #4
The fourth PuSH exhibition took place on-site at the Tscharnergut community centre in Bern in August 2021. The research teams were invited to analyse the publicness of spatial situations in their cases with regards to the conditions and material structures that are (re-) produced through policies and practices – looking closely at regulations, norms, and prevailing paradigms in planning, as well as them being (re-)produced and transformed by uses, appropriations, imaginations of spaces in everyday life of large-scale modernist housing estates.
Three questions guided the work:
1) Which policies, regulations, and norms – with
regards to the publicness of shared spaces – have been crucial in the initial planning and management of your cases, locally and/ or at a larger scale, and (how) did they change over time?
2) Which spatial expressions of these policies,
regulations and norms can you find in everyday
socio-material practices on-site – from using and appropriating, (re)producing, changing, negotiating or contesting to managing and materially transforming ‘public spaces’?
3) How and where is the publicness of shared
spaces constituted at the interplay of policies and practices in your case?
Anchor 5
Final Issue
The final exhibition of the PuSH project brought together our collected findings in the five European cases across the four analytical categories: heritage, informality, democracy, and policies/practices. While the previous exhibitions focused on one of the analytical categories and stimulated focused thematic discussions, this exhibition reorganised all material by case to open new perspectives on publicness in social housing spaces across all categories and all cases. Instead of presenting final results, we wanted to offer a public space once more to question and discuss our research results together with a wider audience.
The final exhibition took place in the framework of the final PuSH conference at CAFx Copenhagen from 21 April to 1 May 2022.
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