The Transvaluation conference calls for “alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of creation and invention, of ‘making and thinking’”. This presentation will offer such an initiative (in fact, a failed one) for discussion: the Centre for Public Culture, one of many proposals submitted to the on-going process of establishing new transdisciplinary research centres at the University of Gothenburg. As a complement, I also present a few of the assumptions – my own personal ones – behind the transdisciplinary framework of our application.