Book launch: We Co-create Our City - Gellerup
Join us for the launch of ‘We Co-create Our City — Gellerup’ and a conversation between sociologist Aydin Soei and the book’s authors Aysha Amin, Alexander Muchenberger and Pernille Maria Bärnheim, and of course drinks and good vibes.
The book We Co-create Our City - Gellerup is the culmination of a three-year educational project, in which youth from Gellerup through critical architectural investigations and hands-on assignments developed their own visions for the area and presented them to politicians, professionals, and the general public.
For decades, Gellerup and other affordable housing areas have been framed in a political narrative as "ghettos" and "parallel societies" and subjected to legislative parameters in the so-called Ghetto Law, which in 2025 was ruled as constituting direct discrimination by the Court of Justice of the European Union. Large sections of the housing areas have been demolished or extensively transformed, and residents have been forcibly relocated from their homes.
In Gellerup the youth have primarily experienced architecture and urban planning as exclusionary, alienating practices associated with simplified narratives driving the physical and residential transformation of their childhood landscapes. We Co-create Our City - Gellerup offered the youth spaces of critical reflection and practice-based learning through architectural explorations running parallel to the transformation processes, nurturing a critical language for what was happening around them while also appointing value to the expertise they have about their own neighbourhood.
The book serves as a defense and reminder of the significant relation between sociality and the built environment, identifying underused potentials in planning and architectural processes to support agency and citizenship, while also addressing key challenges such as a lack of diversity in design education and practice, and the need to rethink formats and structures of so-called inclusive participatory processes.
We Co-create Our City - Gellerup presents the project’s background, methodology, and findings in three parts: an examination of the so-called Ghetto Law and the history and consequences of the area’s Physical Development Plan; a documentation of the young participants’ work and processes; and a concluding reflection, including interviews with the participants.
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Aydin Soei is an award-winning sociologist who has spent more than two decades exploring one of society’s most complex and widely debated issues: social vulnerability, integration, and social mobility. His work has had a significant impact on public debate and on our understanding of how young people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods navigate opportunities, limitations, and identity.
He has introduced the concept of counter-citizenship and conducted research into how social structures, educational systems, and cultural norms shape young people’s life trajectories.
He has authored five books on young people at risk of engaging in crime, social inheritance, and parenthood. His work includes the Tingbjerg Study and the Nordvest Study.
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16:30 - Doors open and welcome
16:45 - Conversation between sociologist Aydin Soei and the book's authors Aysha Amin, Alexander Muchenberger and Pernille Maria Bärnheim with q&a from the audience
17:30-19 - Drinks, socialising and book browsing
The book will be available at a special discounted rate
We Co-create Our City - Gellerup is supported by Slots- og Kulturstyrelsen and Realdania, and the book is published by Danish Architectural Press.
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