About
Cecilie Sachs Olsen is professor of Art and Society with a PhD in cultural geography from Queen Mary University of London. She previously held a position as a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow and lecturer at the centre for the GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London. Her work is practice-based and revolves around developing creative methods for urban research and exploring how artistic practice can be used as a framework to analyse and re-imagine urban development, space and politics.
Cecilie has led the development of Drama Labs as a part of the JPI Urban Europe project CONTRA - CONflicts in TRAnsformation (2022). Drama Labs develops theatre-based methods for better accommodating productive conflict in transformation processes towards more sustainable cities. She is also WP leader in the Erasmus+ project ACT UP! Active Citizenship through Theatre for Urban Politics, which develops new educational methods to promote active citizenship in response to the climate crisis.
Cecilie was the chief curator of Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019, which used fiction, art and performance to explore ‘the architecture of degrowth’ - alternative social and spatial structures that question the supremacy of economic growth as the basis of contemporary societies. She is also the co-founder of the urban performance collective, zURBS and the artist duo SACHS/WESTERDAHL. Cecilie has led a series of urban research and art projects around Europe and recently published a monograph about her work titled ‘Socially Engaged Art and the Neoliberal City’ (Routledge, 2019).
Fields of study
Academic disciplines
Urbanism and physical planning
Subject areas
Utopias Climate Relational aesthetics Performance Theory Participation Urban Studies Socially engaged art Creative methods Multispieces urbanism
Research projects
Ongoing research projects
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ACT UP! Active Citizenship through Theatre for Urban Politics
ACT UP! delivers an innovative theatre-based educational methodology for promoting active citizenship among student in urban climate politics.
Completed research projects
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CONTRA – Conflicts in transformations
CONTRA explores how institutionalising productive conflict can increase the transformative capacity needed in the transition towards more sustainable cities.
Publications and research
Scientific publications
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
(2025).
Sustainability discourses and the question of democracy.
Skjerven, Astrid; Løvbak Berg, Lisbeth; Nielsen, Liv Merete; Stuedahl, Dagny (Ed.).
Mediating sustainability in the consumer society. p. 31-50.
Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003392705-4
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
(2024).
Drama in Drammen: Promoting Active Citizenship through Applied Theatre.
DRAMA : Nordisk dramapedagogisk tidsskrift.
Vol. 61.
https://doi.org/10.18261/drama.61.1.5
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
(2024).
The arts of attention and Oslo Architecture Triennale.
Nordic Journal of Art & Research (A & R).
Vol. 13.
https://doi.org/10.7577/ar.5284
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
; van Hulst, Merlijn
(2023).
Reimagining Urban Living Labs: enter the Urban Drama Lab.
21 p.
Urban Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231187771
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie (2023). From architectures of capital to architectures of care: the arts of dreaming otherwise in the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Haarstad, Håvard; Grandin, Jakob Olof; Kjærås, Kristin Edith Abrahamsen; Johnson, Eleanor (Ed.). Haste: The slow politics of climate urgency. p. 27-38. UCL Press.
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
; Juhlin, Christina
(2022).
Architecture and Urban Studies - An Awkward Kinship.
Nordic Journal of Urban Studies.
Vol. 2.
https://doi.org/10.18261/njus.2.2.1
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
(2022).
Co‐Creation Beyond Humans: The Arts of Multispecies Placemaking.
10 p.
Urban Planning.
Vol. 7.
https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v7i3.5288
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie (2022). Towards an urban attention ecology. LaBelle, Brandon (Ed.). Ecologies of Attention: Artistic research from the Art Academy, Bergen. . Universitetet i Bergen.
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie (2022). Towards an urban attention ecology. LaBelle, Brandon (Ed.). Radical Sympathy. p. 12-23. Errant Bodies Press.
Sachs Olsen, Cecilie
(2022).
Imagining Transformation: Applied Theater and the Making of Collaborative Future Scenarios.
GeoHumanities.
https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2021.2005467
