In 2021, I founded the National Museum’s Research Center for Social Urban Modelling (SUMO). SUMO is an interdisciplinary research collective that works with socially sustainable urban development in a cultural historical perspective.
Throughout human cultural history, complex social and technological systems have been created in cities across the world, which contain unique resources and capacities that are conducive for making socially sustainable urban development. Such resources may arise, for example, from the social organization of infrastructure systems, the collective management of public spaces, vernacular technological design, and informal housing aesthetics.
Through a range of participatory projects, SUMO investigates and probes these resources and capacities in order to develop what we call ‘social urban models’: Material, knowledge-based and organisational models that may serve as basis for imagening and making socially sustainable urban development now and in the future.
SUMO SPACE houses the SUMO collective that consists of researchers, artists, practitioners, activists and urban residents. It is located in Building Six in the beautiful Brede Værk, which is a protected industrial complex north of Copenhagen. SUMO SPACE is an open and co-creative laboratory for working on new experimental formats and models for socially sustainable urban development that can both be exhibited, tinkered with and serve as basis for concrete initiatives and proposals to be implemented in cities worldwide.