They were certainly not the owners of the land, but they were forging a new concept of public property. If we stop a minute to think of this kind of social production, it seems very strange and difficult to explain how individual practices, even if they follow a common pattern, may produce a new idea of public property, and why it may enable people to create a new sense of their own identity. Shared habits have been used in recent sociological works as an explanation of collective behaviors. However, all shared habits do not lead to the construction of a shared identity, as any commuter, or any television watcher, certainly knows. One could be skeptical about the role of shared habits of landscape as a source of development of common abstract ideals.
Some authors adopt an almost opposite mode of interpretation.
Thus a shared culture comes first and may help understand how some people may engage in common practices and adopt the same kinds of interpretation of their outcomes. She sees actual practices of design as contributing to the appropriation of one or the other culture by their practitioners. Certainly she considers that cultures follow a course of development, and she suggests that this course is steered by processes of interaction between ideas and practices. Thus we can feel invited to look at culture as an ongoing creation and re-modeling of collective rules for action, ways of thinking and systems of value, and to regard collective identity as the subjective side of culture. We shall most certainly not answer these questions today.