Experimental storying for intergenerational and intersectional equity in the 15-minute city

This project aims to create enriched understandings of the 15-minute city that challenge mobility poverty across all ages and backgrounds and translate them into inclusive urban policies. Whilst highlighting the obstacles to traversing the 15-minute city that are experienced by young people, it challenges the tendency to focus on the needs of specific groups when mobility is relational. Rather than viewing youth as an age group, we adopt an approach that centres on producing knowledge across generations: a transgenerational methodology. This relies less on isolated age categories and more on socio-culturally produced generations, allowing a more comprehensive investigation of mobility poverty and inclusivity. At the same time, there are groups of urban citizens who are highly marginalised in relation to both accessibility and influence. In reaching such groups, including young people, we take an intersectional approach, based on the junctures of compound factors such as race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, ethnicity. We co-produce knowledge alongside community and advocacy groups, which represent people with a learning disability and autism; Roma and traveller people; young people in care and carers; with municipal partners representing youth, older people and families. The project uses innovative mobile and sensory methods to experiment with stories of mobilities. Researching across four cities in Europe: Brighton, Bucharest, Copenhagen, London, we co-produce new understandings of the lived experience of moving in the 15-minute city across generations and highly marginalised communities. We firstly carry out transgenerational walking interviews in the city within our partner communities, with discussions broadly framed by the key elements of the 15-minute city: density, proximity, diversity and digitalisation. Digitalisation, for example, can produce acute marginalisation in populations such as Roma and traveller communities in which access to the internet is limited; and in people with a learning disability who are more likely to face language and culture barriers. Discussions and videos from the transgenerational walks are recorded and analysed. Then, collaborating with illustrators, we side-step the barriers associated with language and craft these understandings into visual ‘comic’ stories, which are then used in telling a set of shared stories and modelled into an interactive board game to be ‘played’ across communities and countries. In facilitated workshops, we collaboratively disassemble and reassemble the stories to create the board game to generate these shared understandings. The aim is to experiment around the complexities that determine mobilities, by testing out real-life scenarios collected through the storying approach. In foregrounding marginal stories alongside those that may be less marginal, we reveal possibilities for change that are inclusive of all urban populations. The visual outputs are then used to engage policymakers in Roundtable deliberations. These aim to translate our findings into 15-minute city policies, opening them up to the needs of marginalised and diverse communities. Overall, in meeting our goal, we have the following objectives: (i) to co-produce new understandings of the situated and lived experiences of moving in the 15-minute city across generations, including youth, and highly marginalised communities, in diverse cities in Europe; (ii) to craft stories from these findings within communities and then remake them collaboratively and transnationally into shared stories; and (iii) to engage policy-makers and practitioners with these shared stories and help translate them into strategies for the mobility inclusion of all generations, including youth and highly marginalised communities, across 15-minute cities in Europe and beyond.