Rethinking 'publicness' in public housing

In many European societies, economic and social restructuring processes have brought about a changing policy approach towards the provision of public housing. Whereas in the post-war period, public housing became an important redistribution strategy and an instrument of a large-scale inclusion of the welfare state, nowadays, social housing estates are stigmatized and have gained a fall-back position in the housing market. New projects are therefore preferably ‘invisibly present’ in the urban fabric and increasingly float on the current trend of ‘hybrid’ public-private forms of investments. In this paper I argue that in the context of a colluded state/market paradigm, the ‘publicness’, as representing the interest of the general public, in public housing is challenged. By drawing on commons theory, this paper seeks how the meaning of ‘the public’ can be revisited and become part of the ‘public sphere’ again in the planning, architecture and organisation of social housing estates.