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).
Field of study
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.
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TRUST: Transforming Relations in Urban Sustainability Transitions
TRUST delivers new knowledge and innovative theatre-based tools for participatory processes to better accommodate diverse personal narratives and situated experiences in urban sustainability transitions.
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.
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Nordic Liveable Cities: Imaginaries, Practices and Prospects
This NordForsk-funded network and workshop series critically examines urban ‘liveability’ and ‘liveable cities’ as these are constituted and contested in Nordic contexts.
Publications and research
Scientific publications
Machin, Amanda;
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
; Sophia, Hatzisavvidou,; Carl, Death,; Paula, Diehl,; Oliver, Marchart,; Florian, Malzacher,
(2026).
The turn to the imagination: transformation, politics and limits.
Contemporary Political Theory.
Vol. 25.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-026-00796-x
Førde, Anniken; Reiertsen, Tone Kristin;
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
; Solvang, Ingeborg; Wilson, Helen F.
(2025).
The Ladder of Multispecies Participation: Moving Towards a More Convivial Urban Planning.
Nordic Journal of Urban Studies.
Vol. 6.
https://doi.org/10.18261/njus.6.1.1
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
; Janas, Krzysztof; Roeck, Lisa De; Koole, Barbara; Janssen, Cato; Hulst, Merlijn van;
Loades, Celine Motzfeldt
(2025).
Estrangement, embodiment and entanglement: Putting agonistic planning into practice through Urban Drama Labs.
Urban Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980251361315
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
(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
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
(2024).
Sustainability discourses and the question of democracy.
Skjerven, Astrid; Berg, Lisbeth Løvbak; Nielsen, Liv Merete; Stuedahl, Dagny (Ed.).
Mediating sustainability in the consumer society. p. 31-50.
Routledge.
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003392705-4
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
(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
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
; Hulst, Merlijn van
(2023).
Reimagining Urban Living Labs: enter the Urban Drama Lab.
Urban Studies.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231187771
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
(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.
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/5024310
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
(2022).
Towards an urban attention ecology.
LaBelle, Brandon (Ed.).
Radical Sympathy. p. 12-23.
Errant Bodies Press.
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/4650624
Olsen, Cecilie Sachs
(2022).
Towards an urban attention ecology.
LaBelle, Brandon (Ed.).
Ecologies of Attention: Artistic research from the Art Academy, Bergen..
Universitetet i Bergen.
https://hdl.handle.net/11250/4999708
