Mapping Home in the City: A Participatory Approach to Vienna’s Cartography

Mapping Home in the City: A Participatory Approach to Vienna’s Cartography

What makes a city feel like home? This workshop moves beyond the idea that home lives only within four walls, exploring instead how we create belonging and security in urban space — and how that process is shaped by structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class that determine whose right to feel at home is recognised and whose is not.

People resist. They build communities, care for each other, and forge homes in ways that go beyond anything we were taught. Drawing on participatory cartography and Kevin Lynch’s concept of mental maps, this workshop invites you to draw your own map of home in Vienna: the walls you encounter, and the doors that stay open.

The session closes with a collective sharing circle, where participants are welcome to present their maps and reflect together on the spaces and practices that make us feel safe, rooted, connected, and how we can grow them.

Facilitated by Leti Nada (she/they), a social anthropology student and community organiser based in Vienna. Inside and outside academia, Leti researches and practices ways of making home in the city through collective care and action.