Large-scale postwar housing estates are traditionally considered peripheral, not only to European cities but also as loci for cultural encounters and social integration. These estates are icons of postwar welfare society, form part of collective middle-class memory, and today are home to millions of Europeans.

This session reevaluates these estates from the perspective of “publicness.” Publicness is here understood as an interaction between people and places, highlighting both autonomous communities and specific spatial settings. Many of the estates were originally designed as spatial entities to foster collectivity among residents—in shared spaces, laundries, parks, playgrounds, etc. However, publicness happens both in places designed as public spaces and in more informal ways. Rather than searching for “public spaces”—which are too often seen as stable containers for desirable social activities—we aim to study the relational and situational interactions between materialities and ways of living together that take place in middle-class large-scale housing complexes.

Publicness can be studied from various perspectives: informal use, heritage, democracy, governance, and communication about collective concerns. Conceptualizing publicness as future-oriented socio-material processes, we explore agency in the performance of publicness in specific sites—the agency not only of people and social structures, but also of physical materials and spatial figures. The papers explore new ways of reconsidering, analyzing, and conceptualizing the lived heritage futures of these middle-class large housing complexes. Of special interest are studies of publicness related to COVID-19 and how we live together in specific spatial contexts, as well as relationships between public and private, privacy and surveillance, etc.