Walkability and Inclusive Urbanism: Experiencing the City through Memory

This intensive workshop invited students from the MSc Architecture Design programme at the University of Leeds to explore how walkability is lived, experienced, and remembered, by observing their personal and collective engagement with the city. Through embodied walking practices, we focused on being present not simply as spectators, but as part of urban places and their memory in the making.

During this collaborative week, we had the chance to engage in Deep Listening with Dr Alex De Little (University of Leeds), who guided us through attentive listening exercises and a silent walk that immersed us in the sonic layers of the city. This session encouraged us to reflect on our own modalities of listening, recognising it as an integral part of our embodied engagement with the city and our experience of walkability.

Another insightful contribution came from Martin Hamilton and Ross Horsley from Leeds Civic Trust, who led a guided walk reflecting on urban projects such as the Inner Ring Road and the Merrion Centre, and how they reshaped the city’s mobility and everyday encounters while displacing some memory anchors and creating others. Along the way, we encountered the Civic Trust’s blue plaques as inscribed practices of care, quietly holding fragments of lived histories within the urban fabric.

The workshop culminated in three group themes, approaching Leeds as an open archive, whilst illuminating walkability through layered observations, personal memories and cultural references. Careful walking and listening opened space for an attentive and empathetic engagement with the city.