Guided by four analytical categories – heritage, informality, democracy, and policies/practices – we explore the publicness of spaces on five social housing estates in Norway, Denmark, Switzerland and Italy. Across the different cases and analytical categories, PUSH will develop and test 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?