SMU- research starts with the city of Rome connecting the research in different urban spaces and connecting them to different “cases” to related phenomena in the City of Rome to other European and extra European cities.

The project network looks at European Union Countries, such as Greece or Spain, together with those working towards European Membership, such as Turkey, with a widespread phenomenon known as “gececondu“,or to countries like Albania or Yugoslavia, where the transition of goods and lands from a Socialist to a Capitalist model has not yet been applied and countries in Eastern Europe such as Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, which are in a full economic and social transformation as the result of their integration within the European Community. Each of these „cases“ of informal settlements and self-transformation, self organisation are enbeded in different historical and political situations and tell different stories:

SMU- research wishes to identify common approaches for understanding these phenomena. The project will build a network of researcher, artist and  activists to share and compare similar phenomena as well as the correlations between different European realities.