Urban Wild Mappings & (re)Imaginings

This is a series of participatory workshops and walkshops that invite local people to engage with overlooked and unruly green spaces. Blurring the lines between creative engagement and environmental consultation, these workings support communities to explore, sense and reimagine urban wilds through slow, embodied, and speculative mapping practices.

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Tailored for each place / theme, participants are invited to walk, draw, trace, and reflect through diverse mapping exercises — from sensory observation and layered storytelling to cartographic speculation. These methods aim to surface personal and collective experiences of place, while also highlighting the social, ecological and affective dimensions of urban wilds often ignored by more formal planning frameworks.

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I have designed and facilitated these walkshops in a variety of contexts, including:

• Shoreburs, as part of my Littered Bodies PhD research, where we used sensory mapping to explore more-than-human dis/belonging and the textures of a place shaped by waste and neglect.

• A community consultation for Southampton National Park City (SNPC), focused on reimagining the Itchen River and Riverside Park as a more inclusive, biodiverse and accessible public commons.

• A walkshop and engagement event, also with SNPC, supporting the transformation of a neglected park and greenway into a proposed Local Nature Reserve, using walking, reflection and collaborative mapping to elicit local knowledges, desires and tensions.

 

More than data-gathering opportunities, these walkshops function as relational and speculative practices - ones that ask how communities might co-constitute alternative futures for urban ecologies, grounded in care, complexity and plural ways of knowing.

 

They offer local organisations, authorities and policy makers a richer, more textured understanding of place, while giving residents alternative methods and tools to voice and visualise the futures they want to live in.