Pedal Power: Open City and The Bike Project
About this episode
The episode explores the intersection of cycling, mobility, and belonging for refugee women in London through a participatory arts initiative.
Community, refugees, and urban life: what’s cycling got to do with it? We explore refugee women’s experiences in London through the ESRC Open City initiative and a participatory film with The Bike Project. In this episode of The Migration Oxford Podcast, we explore how mobility, belonging, and everyday urban life intersect in London, and how newcomers reshape the city through movement. Our focus is a participatory, arts-based collaboration with The Bike Project, an NGO that provides refugees with free bicycles. At its core, the initiative asks how movement - both physical and social - can create pathways to belonging, access, and agency for those newly arrived. The Bike Project’s work is simple yet transformative: bicycles enable refugees to travel independently, connect with services, and build confidence navigating London. But beyond practical utility, cycling becomes an embodied way of claiming space, of becoming visible in the city, and of weaving new rhythms into urban life. Our discussion explores this duality - bikes as both tools of mobility and symbols of presence in urban spaces that are at once open and exclusionary. We welcome Dr Eda Yazici, Senior Researcher at the…
People in this episode
Guests: Dr Eda Yazici, Professor Michael Keith
Topics covered
- refugee experiences
- cycling
- urban life
- mobility
- belonging
- participatory arts
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: University of Bristol, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), The Bike Project, ESRC Open City
Places: London
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