Co-creating Our City – Gellerup

Co-creating Our City – Gellerup is a course in architecture and urban planning for 15–18-year-olds in Gellerup. The project introduces new ways to achieve social sustainability by expanding the subject’s encounters with reality. 

It does this by understanding who possesses the expertise and what opportunities for learning and critical reflection can emerge from transformtion processes. Young people at Gellerup have primarily experienced architecture and urban planning as exclusionary, alienating practices and simplistic narratives, such as the physical and social transformations of the municipality’s Master Plan, Helhedsplanen.

The project uses complex methods to reinterpret existing architectural methods, such as field studies with a visual anthropologist, model experiments with an architect and a designer, meetings with clients, the organisation of a local exhibition with a curator and individual public project presentations. These methods are not just tools, but a means to foster a close dialogue with the teenagers, who are seen as experts on their neighbourhood. This collaborative approach reveals dreams and hidden realities, just as it creates an understanding of architecture’s broad, rich, complex language and social significance.

Institute

Architecture and Technology

External partners

Aysha Amin and Alexander Muchenberger (Galleri Andromeda 8220), Josephine Michau (Copenhagen Architecture Festival CAFx), Agency for Culture and Palaces and Realdania (Communication and funding partners)