How do we design a city that is not something to be fixed and containing lives, but something to be rehearsed? This paper proposes the concept of the impossible city as a feminist urban ontology; one that refuses singular narratives of inclusivity and instead attends to negotiated and differential conditions of belonging. Drawing on an ongoing participatory interdisciplinary research project in Bristol, the paper explores how women navigate, unsettle, and reimagine urban space through collective movement and encounter.

Bristol, in the Southwest of England, is approached as an impossible city where progressive imaginaries coexist with deep spatial inequalities, racialised exclusions, and uneven infrastructures of visibility. Rather than treating inclusivity as a policy goal or promised project, the research examines it as a situated and relational practice shaped by embodied negotiation. It is common that often privileged professionals take and occupy the standpoint of marginalised groups, to ‘make places of belonging’. The project is informed by feminist theories of differential belonging (Rowe), asking how people consciously move between positions, alliances, and places without fixing identity or belonging to a single location.

The paper advances choreography as epistemology as a way of exploring urban grammars, Bristol’ reciprocity of bodies’ navigations and encounters. Empirical material is generated through feminist epistemologies including participatory mapping and choreographic workshops with women in Bristol. These practices surface encounters where memories and belongings are unsettled, allowing participants to imagine alternative relations to place and to one another.

The paper argues how belonging is unmade and remade through embodied encounters, which inform strategies for relational understanding of place-making. Exploring relationships and reciprocity between bodies (buildings, people, non-humans) and systems this research aims to reach to spatial possibilities obscured by representational or policy-driven approaches.