The question of how to deal with and build upon the everyday life and concerns of people within city development and urban planning is an urgent socio-political matter. Demographic tools are well developed but tools that merely entitle and prioritise professional knowledge and linear logic often produce predictable outcomes where the need is rather to process and reflect desires, concerns, dreams, individual and collective narratives. (Healey, 2007: 259, de Certeau, 1984, Hamdi, 2004:101). In this context the tradition to deal with experience in an open non-instrumental way, which one can find within practices of art, provided a productive platform (Kester, 2004). During the last months of the artistic research project Ingrepp (Interventions) the researchers rented a store, a Videostore, or Videobutik, in Backa, a suburb of Gothenburg. The store was an open space where the project team, together with people from the locality experimented with different methods to establish and develop dialogue around issues of city-development. Besides facilitating dialogues, the project had the ambition to mobilize and empower local initiatives. The physical space was crucial for the project - a space where people could meet—organised or by chance—discuss and do things together, but also to display and show things to each other. For instance the material produced in the series of workshops which were conducted such as Food for thought, Framtidstorget, Framtidstorget Skälltorpskolan, Matpalatset and Seed for thought. Further on various tools such as Unsworn Industries Parascope, The cardboard city were put to use. The experience indicates that there is substantial interest from people from the locality not only to deliberate but also to act upon important local urban issues, but that there is an uncertainty on how this can be done, that is, how to mobilize. It was also clear that in order to become able to intervene, a mandate needed to be constructed, formulated and branded: The store was not the place where you went if you wanted to have something fixed. It was the place you went if you wanted to share thoughts about issues of concern or share new ideas and to find ways of fixing that specific something together with others - inhabitants from the area or in some cases staff of local housing companies, the local administration or politicians. In addition, the Videostore also contained issues of power, democracy and responsibility. Ideally local democracy is a way of strengthening the interaction between the municipality and people. It is about the sharing of power, but can also be a way of reassigning responsibility from state to individuals, or of strengthening certain “loud” groups in favour of others on the margin (Dahlstedt, 2009). Therefore the purpose of the Videostore was to prototype processes as well as discuss issues of democracy, the possibilities and limitations of participation, the tensions and “passions” in the relationship between people and the local as well as central administration, city planners, architects and politicians (Mouffe, 2000:103).