Switzerland’s postwar welfare society built large scale housing estates in urban environments to mitigate the population growth and increased immigration both from rural areas to the cities, and from outside Switzerland. Owned and managed by municipalities, housing cooperatives and private investors (e.g. pension funds, insurance companies), these housing estates provided affordable and comfortable homes for workers families and the new (lower) middle-class, who started to earn regular and better salaries due to economic growth in these decades. Until today they represent a large share of Swiss cities’ affordable apartments and house residents with heterogeneous social backgrounds. Calling on an anthropology of policy in order to tease out publicness of spaces in large-scale housing estates means looking at how the ways of living together on site are produced, performed and negotiated as processes of governance and power. In the PUSH project our analytical lens anchors in an understanding that policies and practices form place and space over time in a dynamic and performative manner. Policies in this sense are seen as instruments that create or consolidate social, semantic and physical spaces. They structure action by connecting people, institutions and concepts into specific relationships. Vice versa, policies are being transformed, consolidated or questioned through the practices of different actors. As we are interested in “Publicness and Policies & Practices at Telli and Tscharnergut” we focus on how “people make sense of things, i.e. what policy means to them” (Shore, Wright et al. 2011). In what way does the diverse actors’ frame of reference affect their everyday lives, how do different people engage with different policies and what do they make of it? How have these policies evolved over time and which practices engage with them? From our theoretical positioning, we use the idea of publicness not as a designated “container”- public space, but rather as a situational spatial setting within the context of site-specific policies and practices, may they be formal or rather informal. Hence, publicness emerges where the interplay of policies and practices shapes space in Telli and Tscharnergut. These policies can manifest themselves at a formal national and city level, at the property/estate level, at the level of house rules, but also at the less formal level of unwritten policies in management and social work practices. Employing methods such as document analysis, expert and resident interviews, and media analysis, we filtered out which policies related to housing and neighborhood life have been at play in Tscharnergut, Bern and Telli, Aarau since the initial planning. In the context of increased economic and population growth and migration to cities during the years 1960s–1970s in Switzerland, social welfare has been further developed – highly influencing the creation of the policies at stake in the housing estates. On this basis, we have identified six policies relevant for the analysis of Telli and Tscharnergut. All of them have an impact on the social and the spatial dimension on site. These policies a re aimed at promoting:

1) social mix
2) family orientation
3) neighborhood participation
4) affordable housing
5) community building and
6) heritage preservation

Each of the policies is connected to local practices and narratives embedded in the multiple shared and collective spaces of the housing estates. We are “reading” these spaces in Telli and Tscharnergut through the lens of policies and practices to explore the tangible and intangible sites of publicness. By doing this, we aim to reflect upon the interdependency of built and lived space over the course of time and the changing meanings and relevancies of what is considered ’public space’. Our exhibition contribution is structured as follows: The identified policies apply to both Swiss cases and are described in a cross-case introduction. For each policy, the practices that engage with it and create sites of publicness in this interplay will only be addressed in depth on a case-specific basis, either for Telli or Tscharnergut.