The Missing Building Research (Eng)

This research explores how participatory design (PD), speculative design, and urban storytelling can be used to reimagine urban spaces and respond to the emotional, cultural, and functional needs of communities. In this context, I understand participatory design (PD) as a process that is grounded in the belief that environments are more meaningful and effective when those who inhabit them actively shape their design and management, rather than being treated as passive recipients (Luck, 2018). Speculative design, in this context, is understood not simply as a mode of future-making, but as a practice of hope (Thackara, 2013, as cited in Mitrović, Auger, Hanna, & Helgason, 2021) -

also aligned with bell hooks’ (1994) view of education as a practice of freedom, as a critical and imaginative practice that engages with complex societal and environmental challenges, not by solving them, but by opening up space for reflection and dialogue. Urban storytelling, within this framework, draws from Michel de Certeau’s (1984) metaphor of walking in the city as a form of speech, where everyday acts of moving through space inscribe meaning onto place.

This study examines how individuals conceptualise “missing buildings” within their cities and how these imagined spaces contribute to wider urban discourse. These “missing buildings” act as symbolic absences that reflect unmet needs, neglected identities, or imagined futures. By bridging local and international perspectives, the study promotes creative, accessible, and community-led methodologies that prioritise lived experience and collective meaning-making in the shaping of the built environment.

At a moment when global discourses aggressively debate who has the right to occupy, control, or belong in particular places, this research positions pedagogy as a critical practice, one that facilitates dialogue, challenges exclusionary narratives, and cultivates democratic approaches to urban place-making.

At a time when global debates increasingly question who has the right to occupy, shape, or belong, this research positions pedagogy as a critical practice: one that enables dialogue, challenges exclusionary narratives, and fosters more democratic approaches to urban place-making (hooks, 1994).

This research adopts an evocative and dialogical autoethnographic methodology to explore how personal experience intersects with wider cultural and spatial narratives. Evocative autoethnography, as developed by Ellis and Bochner (2016), emphasises emotional awareness, subjectivity, and storytelling as valid forms of knowledge. It allows for a deep engagement with the self as a site of inquiry, offering a way to examine belonging, identity, and place through lived experience. When I speak of a dialogical approach, I’m referring to a way of thinking and writing that allows me to be in conversation with my past selves: the child, the teen, the young adult, the architect, and the educator I am today. This is not only about reflection, but about listening closely to each of those voices and the places they belong to.

These layered narratives allow me to reflect on who I am and who I have been, and on how place, identity, and belonging are co-constructed across time, culture, and practice.

This work is theoretically and ethically grounded in bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy theory (hooks, 1994, 2003), which frames research as a practice of presence, critical reflection, and social change, in which cities are not only physical sites but lived, relational, and contested spaces. City-making becomes both pedagogical and political, shaped by the lived experiences of those who inhabit it (hooks, 1990, 2003; de Certeau, 1984; Pillow 2003).

The research will include 20 participants across six countries, each representing a city that has shaped a different stage of my life and practice. Each city will form a chapter in the thesis, where I will engage in internal dialogue between my current self and earlier versions of myself in that place (dialogical ethnography), while drawing on memory, embodied experience, and emotional resonance (evocative ethnography).

Beira, (in Mozambique), holds ancestral and intergenerational memory. Cambridge, (in Canada), marks my childhood. Sardoal, (in Portugal), my teenage years. Rotterdam, (in the Netherlands), my early architectural practice. And finally, Chester, (in the UK), reflects my current stage as an educator and researcher. These are not case study sites in the traditional sense, but symbolic and formative places that continue to shape my practice.

As part of the research, each city, we will have four participants: a child, a teen, an adult, and a professional (architect, planner, or urban designer). Together, they offer an intergenerational sample (gender balanced) of the community and symbolically reflect different stages of my own life, which I will explore through reflective dialogue in each chapter. While I wont be travelling to these cities during the research period, the participants voices will offer contemporary, situated perspectives that act as counterpoints to my own internal and historical reflections. Each participant will respond to the prompt “What is Beira/Cambridge/Sardoal/Rotterdam/Chester’s missing building?” by creating a small-scale model (physical or digital) and a short-written reflection describing the imagined space.

Although I have never lived in Beira, the city holds deep cultural meaning for me It is a place I have come to know through the stories of my father, his close friends, my uncles, and grandparents. This chapter engages with Beira as a homeplace of inherited belonging, constructed not through direct experience, but through affective ties and cultural continuity. Drawing on bell hooks’ theory of homeplace (1990), it considers how identity and belonging can emerge not solely through geographic rootedness, but through emotionally and culturally situated practices, like storytelling, language, food, and memory. In this sense, place is not only lived through physical presence, but also through the intergenerational transmission of meaning and connection. In this chapter, I will interview my father to co-construct a narrative of intergenerational perspective that speaks to the complexity of inherited belonging.

The project asks what kind of cities we are building, and for whom. It treats space not as neutral ground but as shaped by social relations, struggle, and memory. Drawing on bell hooks’ notion of hope as a site of possibility, it explores absence as a call to listen differently, to learn who belongs, who decides, and who is left out (hooks hierarchies of knowledge: hooks, 1994; 2003; 2010). In a time of rising borders and a politics of separation, imagining what is missing becomes a quiet act of resistance, a way to disrupt dominant narratives and take a step toward more just, more human city-making.

This research asks: How can participatory and speculative design, grounded in critical pedagogy and autoethnographic storytelling, challenge exclusionary urban narratives and reimagine city-making as a democratic, relational, and reflective practice?

I am interested in understanding how individuals conceptualise “missing buildings” in their cities, and how those “buildings” and the stories attached to them reveal values, memory, exclusion, and aspiration. here, absence becomes a place of resistance and possibility (hooks, 1994), prompting us to ask who holds power in shaping the built environment and whose needs are routinely left out.

The creation of “missing buildings” is not treated as data collection but as a pedagogical intervention, instead it is applied as an act of making that invites critical thinking, dialogue, and creative agency. This work is rooted in bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy, which frames learning as relational, situated, and transformative (hooks, 1994, 2003). Speculative design, here, becomes a method of critical pedagogy: a way to foster awareness, reflection, and action in how people perceive and shape their environments.

Through evocative and dialogical autoethnography, I question my own relationship to each city in the study, engaging with personal memory, identity, and emotional resonance. These reflective narratives form a dialogue across time - between past and present selves, between researcher and participant, between city and story.

Ultimately, I aim to understand how participatory design, informed by pedagogy and storytelling, can help us think critically about place and power. What emerges when city-making is reimagined not as top-down planning but as a shared cultural, political, and educational process?

The significance of this research lies in its interdisciplinary methodology and its commitment to co-constructed knowledge. It contributes to wider conversations around spatial justice, critical pedagogy, and participatory city-making, while centring the voices of participants and the contexts they speak from. The project is underpinned by an ethics of care, offering participants creative autonomy, protecting anonymity, and honouring the cultural, social, and emotional depth of their contributions.

This research is grounded in an interdisciplinary framework that brings together critical pedagogy, participatory and speculative design, arts-based research (ABR), and autoethnography. These approaches are not layered additively, but rather work in dialogue, shaping a methodology that is reflexive, creative, and deeply concerned with ethics, voice, and lived experience.

This project is influenced by a range of theorists. bell hooks (1990, 1994, 2003, 2010) provides the central ethical and pedagogical foundation. Paulo Freire (1970) informs the dialogical, co-constructive position. Ellis, Adams & Bochner (2011) support the integration of autoethnography as a vulnerable and politically conscious research mode. Leavy (2015), Barone & Eisner (2012), and Phillips & Bunda (2018) strengthen the case for arts-based, decolonial, and narrative methods that privilege emotional and relational dimensions of knowledge. Rendell (2006), de Certeau (1984), and Lefebvre (1996) shape my understanding of the city as a lived and contested space, always in flux and shaped by everyday practices and power relations.

The work of bell hooks provides the primary theoretical grounding. Her theory of engaged pedagogy (1994, 2003) positions education and research as relational, ethical, and transformative practices, challenging hierarchical models of knowledge and instead places value on dialogue, presence, and care. Her emphasis on teaching and learning as sites of social change underpins this study’s interest in city-making as a pedagogical act. Drawing on hooks’ notion of absence and homeplace (1990), the project approaches imagined “missing buildings” not only creative expressions but as critical reflections on exclusion, memory, and community need. In this context, absence becomes a space of possibility, and an invitation to ask who decides what is built, whose needs are met, and who is left out.

This research adopts an evocative and dialogical autoethnographic methodology, informed by the work of Bochner and Ellis (2016), who extend Bakhtin’s (1981) philosophy of dialogue beyond self and other to include a dynamic conversation between past and present selves. This approach enables a layered inquiry across life stages (child, teenager, young adult, professional, and educator), recognising identity as formed through time, memory, and embodied experience. Dialogical autoethnography, in this context, is not only relational but reflexive, foregrounding inner dialogue as a method for exploring how personal narratives are shaped by, and in turn shape, broader social and cultural contexts. Evocative autoethnography adds a sensorial, emotional depth, allowing lived experience to be conveyed in ways that resist abstraction and invite reader empathy. This methodological positioning is in linked with bell hooks’ (1994, 2003) theory of engaged pedagogy, which treats education as a practice of presence and transformation. Together, these frameworks position research as an ethical, situated, and co-constructed process, where knowing is not detached, but embodied and affective.

Arts-Based Research (ABR) also plays a central methodological role, offering a creative and participatory form of engagement. Inspired by ABR scholars such as Leavy (2009) and Barone & Eisner (2012), this project uses model-making and narrative reflection not as data collection tools, but as pedagogical interventions. These artefacts open space for imagination, encourage participants to think critically about their urban realities, and make visible desires, exclusions, and hopes that are often left out of formal planning processes. In this sense, speculative design is not just future-oriented, it becomes a practice of hope (Thackara, 2013, as cited in Mitrović et al., 2021), here also linked with hooks’ (2003) vision of education as a liberatory and imaginative act.

Finally, participatory design (Luck, 2018) provides the ethical and practical foundation for involving people in shaping their environments. It resists the notion of communities as passive recipients of design and instead positions them as co-creators of knowledge, meaning, and space. Rather than extracting information from participants, this project seeks to co-construct urban imaginaries through dialogical and creative exchange.

This study adopts a qualitative, arts-based approach rooted in participatory and speculative design, critical pedagogy, urban storytelling, and evocative and dialogical autoethnography. It explores how individuals imagine the spaces they feel are missing in their cities: what I refer to as “missing buildings”, and how these imagined spaces reveal deeper narratives around identity, belonging, memory, and power.

The research involves 20 participants across 5 cities: Beira (Mozambique), Cambridge (Canada), Sardoal (Portugal), Rotterdam (Netherlands), and Chester (UK). Each location includes 4 participants: a child (7<12), a teen (13<17), an adult (18<) not linked to the built environment, and a built environment professional (architect, urbanist, planner). By drawing on an intergenerational sample, the research captures a more inclusive voice of each place, one that also echoes the stages of my own life across these cities.

Participants are identified in two ways. The professional participants (architects, urbanists, or planners) are selected by me, drawing on my architectural experience and knowledge of established practices in each city. These professionals are recognised for their contribution to the built environment and are either leading well-established studios or are widely regarded within their local architectural contexts.

The remaining participants (children, teens, and adults) will be identified with the support of local gatekeepers. In this project, gatekeepers are trusted individuals embedded in educational, cultural, or design institutions within each community. Their involvement ensures that participant selection is relevant, inclusive, and contextually informed. This approach honours local knowledge and ensures a more democratic, inclusive selection process. Gatekeepers are essential collaborators in this research, helping to navigate local dynamics, helping with the translation, facilitate ethical recruitment, and support culturally sensitive engagement (Campbell et al., 2007).

Data will be gathered through creative, open-ended methods:

Each participant will respond to the prompt “What is (Beira/Cambridge/Sardoa/Rotterdam/Chester)’s missing building?” by creating a small-scale model and a written or audio reflection.
These models will be photographed and submitted digitally, along with a short narrative describing the space’s purpose, emotional relevance, and intended users.

All participants will receive a package with materials to design their "missing building". In this box materials include:

3 cardboard boxes (5x5x5cm; 7x7x7cm; 9x9x9cm),
scissors
2 pencils
rubber
2 sets of multipurpose glue
QR code with a video with instructions how to make a building out of the materials provided
1 A4 paper with some questions that will prompt the narrative about the participants "building"
1 A4 guide to take photos and how to send them

All participation will take place remotely, with gatekeepers assisting in translation and cultural mediation where necessary. Participants’ contributions will be shared back with them before final inclusion, as part of a wider commitment to care, accountability, and ethical representation.

Participants will be invited to review their own section before it is finalised, including the written interpretations I develop in response to their design and narrative. This is part of my commitment to reflexivity, care, and accountability. By sharing my interpretations and listening to any feedback, I aim hopefully ensuring that participants feel accurately and ethically represented, and that their contribution is not misread or abstracted from its intended meaning.

In addition, I will also act as a participant, using evocative and dialogical autoethnography to respond to the same creative prompts with the same resourses in each city. These reflections form part of the research, offering insight into how my own memories, emotions, and lived experiences inform and are shaped by each city. My position as both researcher and participant calls for ongoing critical reflection. I recognise the risks of recentring myself or simplifying complex dynamics and I will maintain a reflexive practice throughout the research (Pillow, 2003).

All materials (photos of the models and texts) will be submitted digitally. Young participants (children and teens) might require support from a trusted adult. The research is carried out online and designed to honour place-based knowledge and respect the ethical, emotional, and cultural conditions of each participant’s context.

Analysis will be conducted using qualitative thematic and narrative techniques, supported by close reading and visual interpretation. Patterns, metaphors, emotional registers, and spatial imaginaries will be analysed in relation to the research questions and will be interpreted in context rather than in isolation. My own autoethnographic contributions will be analysed using the same frameworks, maintaining methodological consistency and acknowledging the researcher’s subjectivity as a generative tool.

Thematic and narrative analysis will be used to interpret the materials, with attention to metaphor, spatial imaginaries, emotional tones, and critical themes (Riessman, 2008). My own responses will be analysed using the same frameworks. This research is not about collecting data, it is a pedagogical and political act (Pillow, 2003). It invites people to reflect on absence, challenge exclusion, and imagine a more just and human cities.