It was a pleasure to collaborate with Eastside Partnership on facilitating a collaborative mapping workshop exploring how young people use and think about public spaces in East Belfast.

We were introduced to a highly engaged and articulate group of young teenagers from the Bloomfield area, who were already making full use of the public spaces accessible to them in creative and social ways. Our participative methodology gave them the opportunity to communicate their thoughts and feelings through photography, drawing, writing and collage.

The collaborative art works and photography they produced were exhibited at the Eastside Visitor Centre, as part of the CS Lewis Festival. They provided a prompt for other residents, of different ages and backgrounds, to reflect on their own uses of and feelings about public space in East Belfast.