The Missing Building is a feminist, participatory research project that asks people: What building is missing from your city or neighbourhood?
The Missing Building is an international study across five places connected to different stages of my own life: Chester (England), Rotterdam (the Netherlands), Sardoal (Portugal), Cambridge (Canada) and Beira (Mozambique). The study includes four participants in each location: a child, a young person, an adult from outside the built environment, and an architect or built-environment professional. Together, the 20 contributions offer different perspectives on what people feel is missing, needed or imagined in the places where they live.
Each participant receives a Creative Box and uses the materials provided to make a conceptual model of their Missing Building. They photograph the model and share a short written or recorded story explaining what they have made, why it is missing and why it matters to them.
The research is grounded in feminist ideas of situated knowledge. It recognises that people understand the places where they live through their own experiences, memories, relationships and everyday lives. TMB values this knowledge and asks whose voices are heard when decisions are made about cities, whose knowledge is recognised, and who gets to take part in shaping the places where they live.
The participants’ models, photographs and stories are analysed through arts-based narrative inquiry. I also use critical feminist autoethnographic reflection to consider my own relationship with each of the five places and how my own experiences shape the way I understand the contributions.
TMB uses imagination to make knowledge about place visible. By asking people to imagine what is missing, the research opens up conversations about belonging, care, access, participation and what our cities could become. It is also a pedagogy of hope: an invitation to imagine places differently and to consider what might change if more people had a voice in how cities are made.