Through movement, we explored how spatial codes and social norms shape our feelings, bodies, and presence in the city.
by Elahe Karimnia
On a pleasant day in June 2026, a group of women gathered in Bristol city centre to participate in Be-longing in Making Places, a movement-based workshop exploring belonging, visibility, and inclusion in urban space. Building on an earlier workshop held during International Women’s Day at Bristol City Hall, this second stage moved beyond identifying and imagining places on paper to experiencing the city, its spatial codes, norms, materialities and opportunities through movement.
The aim of this workshop was to explore belongings and solidarities that emerge from embodied experiences and imaginaries of making places.
The workshop forms part of my ongoing interdisciplinary research (between planning, architecture, dance and theatre) investigating how embodied and creative methods can contribute to understanding cities and imagining more inclusive urban futures. Facilitated by Professor and practitioner-researcher Vicky Hunter, the workshop brought together ten participants of different ages, backgrounds, positions, and mobility abilities, united by their lived experiences as women navigating Bristol.
The workshop was grounded in simple but important questions: what can movement reveal about urban life that conventional planning and design methods often overlook? What kind of belongings and solidarities emerge from embodied experiences and imaginaries of making places?
Dancing the City
Urban spaces are not simply designed and used as public space; their publicness is continually reproduced through spatial practices, encounters, negotiations, and appropriations. Through choreographic thinking and movement practices, participants used their bodies as tools for investigating the city, responding individually and collectively to a series of prompts across five locations: Queen Square, Assembly Rooms Lane, Pero’s Bridge, Millennium Square, and Hannover Quay.
Moving through the city revealed both visible and invisible barriers to inclusion. Some were tangible, including temporary restrictions created by events such as the Bristol Garden Comedy Festival in Queen Square and the Festival of Sound around Lloyd’s Amphitheatre. Others were intangible, including concerns surrounding a potential far-right protest near College Green, as well as social norms that codify, regulate, or constrain presence and behaviour in public space.
Together, these experiences highlighted how accessibility, belonging, and inclusion are shaped not only by design, but also by social expectations, perceptions, and the politics of everyday urban life.
Reclaiming Public Space
Through a set of activities, participants shifted their attention away from the expectations associated with the space and towards collective play and movement. This temporary change in focus disrupted habitual ways of occupying public space and, for some, lessened the pressure of being under the male gaze. Moving together fostered trust, connection, and new relationships both with one another and with the space itself.
Participants also appropriated elements of the urban environment, including street art, urban furniture, architectural elements, and urban edges. Through temporary interventions undertaken in pairs, participants challenged the tendency of architecture to prescribe how bodies should move, sit, gather, or behave. Rather than fitting bodies into existing structures, the workshop explored how bodies might temporarily reconfigure the meaning and use of space. At Pero’s Bridge, a site characterised by movement and transition, participants slowed down and paused, attending to qualities and spatial relationships often overlooked in the rhythms of everyday life. The exercise revealed how pace and attention influence our experience of place and demonstrated the value of slowing down as a form of urban inquiry.
Millennium Square offered a different experience. Participants were drawn towards features that encouraged sensory engagement and playfulness, and opportunities for interaction. Yet some resisted the openness and visibility of the main square, seeking instead quieter and less exposed green spaces nearby. These differing responses highlighted the diversity of ways people experience public space and the importance of recognising multiple forms of comfort, visibility, and participation.
Mapping Experiences, Imagining Futures
As a sense of collectiveness developed throughout the day, participants were invited to work in pairs to create short videos exploring visibility, seeing, and being seen in the city. Initial discomfort quickly transformed into laughter, spontaneity, and the sharing of culturally specific spatial practices.
Participants also engaged in a collective act of mapping, documenting spaces, textures, memories, encounters, and emotions. The map evolved throughout the workshop as participants responded to one another’s drawings and reflections, producing a layered representation of their experiences of Bristol. Rather than recording a fixed reality, the mapping process revealed how places are continually made and remade through urban encounters that become past experiences and future imagination.
Throughout the day unexpected encounters and new territories emerged as participants felt the freedom of spatial expressions and the power of spatial imaginaries. Their playful interventions in the city encouraged passers-by such children joining part of the mapping activity, reinforced the relational nature of public space.
What We Learned
Several themes emerged through participants’ reflections.
Moving together allows re-inscribing the city through new perspectives and relationships. Familiar routes became sites of curiosity, while everyday spaces became places of joy, care, and possibility. The significance of visibility and entitlement in public space was captured. Moving slowly through the city, free from responsibilities and everyday pressures, felt almost rebellious; reclaiming time and imagining alternative relationships with urban space.
These reflections suggest that belonging can be a matter of physical access to participate in a society, or to a political community that includes rights and responsibilities; yet the matter for us as planners and designers is about creating conditions for active participation in space (agency) that can be negotiated through spatial practices. Understanding such participations requires approaches that move beyond conventional forms of observation and consultation.
Toward Inclusive Urban Futures
As planners and designers, we often prioritise measurable outcomes and technical solutions. Yet embodied knowledge remains largely overlooked within urban planning and design practice. Movement-based methods offer alternative ways of understanding how cities are experienced, revealing dimensions of urban life that are difficult to capture through traditional forms of engagement. Drawing on feminist approaches to spatial practice, this workshop emphasised attentiveness, patience, experimentation, and joy as legitimate forms of urban inquiry.
The workshop demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary collaboration between choreography, architecture, planning, and urban research in understanding the lived realities of cities. By foregrounding embodied experiences, such approaches can help challenge dominant assumptions about who public spaces are designed for and how more inclusive futures might be imagined.
This workshop contributes to Dancing the Impossible City, a broader research project exploring how embodied and creative practices can deepen understandings of publicness, belonging, and urban futures.
The project was supported by UWE Bristol. Special thanks are due to Reem Elnady, whose care-full collaboration throughout the development, facilitation, and documentation of the workshop was invaluable.