What if the way we experience the city is not the same for everyone? And what if these differences are not accidental, but shaped by deeper structures of power, access, and visibility?

In Greece, the mentorship workshops of the Youth Placemaking Balkans project set out to explore exactly this. Through a journey that moved from lived experience to collective exploration and, ultimately, to systems thinking, participants were invited to rethink public space through a feminist lens, using placemaking as a tool to question, test, and reshape everyday environments.

At the core of this process was a deliberate effort to bring together different forms of knowledge. Alongside strong collaborations with local partners – Genderhood, Urbana, and Astylab – the workshops also welcomed Dr. Nourhan Bassam (The Gendered City), bringing in perspectives from outside the Greek context. This combination helped build a shared language around gender and public space, while strengthening a growing network of practitioners, youth workers, and active citizens.

Beginning with How the City Is Lived

The journey started in Thessaloniki, not with theory, but with experience.

Through a Treasure Hunt, participants explored the area between the university campus and the Iraklis sports grounds, engaging with the city in an active and reflective way. Tasks related to safety, accessibility, visibility, and movement revealed how public space is navigated differently depending on one’s identity. In this way, the activity functioned as an entry point into placemaking, where observing, experiencing, and reflecting on space became the first step towards transforming it.

Moments such as navigating space after dark or symbolically renaming streets after female athletes sparked discussions around whose presence is recognised in the city, and whose remains invisible.

What emerged was a subtle but important shift: participants began to understand that public space is not neutral. It reflects social norms, including gendered ones, and shapes how people feel, move, and participate within it.

At the same time, the process highlighted a key challenge: engaging youth consistently is not straightforward. Limited time, competing commitments, and everyday pressures make sustained participation difficult, an insight that is critical for any future youth-led process.

Learning to See and Shape Space Together

The HerPlace workshops in Athens built on this foundation, creating space for participants to move from observation to co-creation.

Co-organised with Genderhood, Urbana, and Astylab, the workshops focused on empowering femininities and on youth participation in shaping inclusive public spaces. Through participatory mapping, role-playing, and collective design exercises, participants worked with real urban situations, using placemaking methods to collectively identify challenges and co-design more inclusive public spaces

Discussions around harassment, safety, and representation brought forward lived experiences that are often absent from planning processes. What became clear is that participation is not only about being present, but about whose experiences are acknowledged and whose voices influence decisions.

By stepping into different roles, from public authorities to civil society, participants began to understand how urban outcomes are shaped by power dynamics. This process helped them move from simply identifying problems to collectively negotiating solutions.

The introduction of digital tools, such as Astylab’s Polis platform, further expanded this understanding. Participation was no longer seen as a one-time event but as an ongoing process unfolding across both physical and digital spaces, making it more accessible and continuous.

Stepping Back: Understanding the Systems Behind the City

The final step of this journey came with the workshop led by Dr. Nourhan Bassam, which invited participants to shift perspective, from the scale of the space to the scale of the system. This shift expanded their understanding of placemaking, from site-specific interventions to a practice that can also engage with policies, systems, and long-term change.

Drawing on feminist urbanism and systems thinking, participants explored how inequalities are embedded in policies, infrastructures, and everyday practices. For many, this was the first time encountering such an approach, making it both challenging and eye-opening.

This moment marked a clear transition. The question was no longer only “How can we improve this space?”, but rather:

“What are the systems that produce these conditions, and how can they change?”

Through mapping and redesigning systems using feminist principles such as care, equity, and intersectionality, participants developed a deeper understanding of how exclusion operates and how it can be addressed beyond surface-level interventions.

What Remains

Across all workshops, the feminist lens was not treated as a separate topic, but as a way of seeing and working.

Participants came away with a stronger awareness of how gender shapes everyday experiences in public space, alongside practical tools to recognise and challenge exclusionary spatial conditions. At the same time, they developed a deeper understanding of participation as a question of power and inclusion, which allowed them to move from thinking about isolated actions to engaging with placemaking as a continuous and systemic practice.

At the same time, the process made visible ongoing challenges, particularly the need to engage a broader diversity of participants beyond already active communities, and to better support the transition from ideas to real-world implementation.

Continuing the Shift

Rather than a series of isolated workshops, this process created a continuous learning journey. By starting from lived experience, moving through collective exploration, and arriving at systemic thinking, participants were able to connect the personal with the political, and the local with the structural.

In doing so, they did not just rethink public space; they began to understand their own role in shaping it as active placemakers, capable of transforming it through both everyday actions and collective processes.