Just like many other large-scale housing areas from the 1960s to 1980s in Europe, Farum Midtpunkt is subject to polarising viewpoints on heritage; on the one hand, it is
criticised for being a historical failure whose architecture has caused segregation and social problems, and on the other hand, it is being included in the architectural canon where it figures as a valuable document of Danish brutalism. What both of these positions share is that they leave little room for the local and diverse ways of life over time. Our research draws from heritage work that starts from the local – from the multiplicity of memories and concerns of residents and other local actors. Such perspectives, we believe, can empower disregarded residents and contribute to more just histories and futures. We are interested in how residents, employees, and visitors have practiced, understood, and altered the communal and public spaces ‘on the ground’, paying special attention to the negotiation of publicness and privacy in a long-term perspective. We ask: how has publicness been imagined, contested, and enacted in specific sites from the 1970s to today? Using microhistory as a research strategy we 112 chose to zoom into a particular spatial typology; the corridors within each of the building blocks. The micro-historical strategy allowed us to create a better understanding of these corridors as living heritage – as sites that have facilitated conflict and cohesion, and a multiplicity of different modes of privacy and publicness over time. We chose the corridors because they are one of the most contested spatial figures in the present – some residents experience them as spaces of danger, others  mourn these corridors as a memory of the good old days with communal activities. They were also an important part of the original design concept and were celebrated during Farum Midtpunkt’s initial years. With this micro-history, we aim to (1) add temporal depth and nuance to the understanding of the social capacities (or lack thereof) of Farum Midtpunkt, and (2) explore how the notion of publicness can expand and contribute to existing debates about Farum Midtpunkt as a form of heritage and its futures. Our diachronic studies involved archive research, oral histories, guided polyphonic tours and on-the-ground studies of the interplay between the material and the social.