“I also see public culture as socially constructed on the micro-level. It is produced by the many social encounters that make up daily life in the streets, shops, and parks – the spaces in which we experience public life in cities. The right to be in these spaces, to use them in certain ways, to invest them with a sense of ourselves and our communities - to claim them as ours and to be claimed in turn by them – make up a constantly changing public culture.”

- Sharon Zukin, 1995

Focusing on the socially sustainable development in Södertälje through the co-presence of the isolated moments, isolated people and isolated places which co-exist in the city, this project intends to initiate an experimental attempt as an urban design project. The project also comes with an essay discussing around the concept of co-presence and how public culture and space could be formed, based on Ann Legeby’s essay Patterns of Co-presence: Spatial configuration and social segregation and other related texts, as a reflective investigation with the design.

Since Södertälje is known by its multiple foreign backgrounds and culture characters, the project takes “church” as the starting point to question what is the ritual pattern in a person’s daily life and explore the possibility of sharing the moments, in order to create a more socially sustainable life. It aims at the center area around the Södertälje train station which is the main traffic node for the residents and both of the river sides as the main site.