Urban design and place‑making are frequently positioned as vehicles for delivering inclusive, liveable cities, yet planning and design research often struggles to account for how places are actually shaped through everyday, informal use. This paper advances a central argument: urban place is produced not only through formal design intentions, but through ongoing, often unplanned practices that appropriate and reinterpret designed space. Recognising these practices is essential for strengthening place‑based planning.

The paper draws on doctoral research examining everyday use of urban greenspaces. It employs unstructured observations combined with mapping to document how students occupy, adapt, and use designed greenspaces in ways that frequently sit outside intended programmes or regulatory frameworks. On this basis, the paper introduces the concept of guerrilla use as an analytic term to describe informal, user‑led spatial practices that quietly subvert, extend, or repurpose urban design without explicit permission or formal recognition.

The findings demonstrate that guerrilla use plays a significant role in shaping comfort, attachment, and sense of place, revealing experiential dynamics that are largely invisible within conventional planning and urban design evaluation tools. By showing how everyday practices interact with micro‑scale design conditions, the paper challenges dominant place‑making approaches that prioritise visual coherence or predefined uses over lived experience.

The paper’s contribution lies in conceptualising guerrilla use as a critical lens for urban design and place‑making research, bridging experiential evidence and spatial analysis. It argues that recognising informal use can enhance planning’s capacity to support more responsive, inclusive, and genuinely place‑based urban design.

Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) are an increasingly prominent part of the urban governance landscape in contemporary England, having proliferated in cities and towns since their introduction in 2005.

However, the nature and implications of their role in urban planning agendas are not well researched in the academic debates, with most literature focusing on the longer-established North American context.

A particular knowledge gap is the growing direct role of BIDs in place-making - the creation and stewardship of new spaces within urban environments. This paper explores this phenomenon through a study of three BIDs in the city of Birmingham - Colmore CBD, Jewellery Quarter, Southside – which are centrally located and directly involved in delivering significant place-making initiatives in recent years.

Drawing upon document analysis, grey literature, and interviews with key stakeholders, the paper examines the motivations and rationale behind the BIDs’ adoption of an accelerated place-making role. It also considers the dynamics of their relationship with the city council and other public authorities with regard to the design and implementation of new spaces; and it explores the nature of the new spaces/places themselves, questioning whose interests are being served in such complex, diverse city districts.

We conclude by drawing on these insights to reflect on the wider meaning of this trend – a positive process delivering substantive and welcome environmental benefits in a climate of public sector austerity, or a more problematic development that raises questions about the nature and durability of the governance transformations taking place in our central cities?

Child friendly city scholarship has been largely shaped by Global North experiences and frameworks, where formal public spaces and structured processes determine children’s participation in the public sphere. In contrast, children in many cities of the Global South experience urban life very differently. Informal streets, limited play spaces, unequal access to resources and exposure to environmental risks such as heat, flooding and pollution shape their everyday lives. At the same time, framing cities through a simple Global North - Global South divide can risk treating children’s experiences within these contexts as homogenous, overlooking how micro-geographies and local inequalities within cities shape urban encounters and consequently children’s wellbeing. And yet such nuances remain under-explored in the child friendly city discourse. This presentation draws on child-centred co-design projects in Dhaka (Bangladesh), Campo Grande (Brazil), Cardiff (Wales) and Poznań (Poland) to bring diverse contexts into critical dialogue. Using creative participatory methods- mapping, drawing, walk along interviews, and model-making, the research foregrounds children’s perceptions, spatial practices and future imaginaries. Framed through the concepts of ‘just city’ and ‘infrastructures of care’, the presentation argues for a context-sensitive, relational and justice-oriented approach to child-friendly urbanism. It moves beyond universalised Global North models to recognise informality, inequality, and climate vulnerability as central to children’s lived realities, and rethinks child-friendly urbanism as a pathway to support children’s wellbeing in rapidly urbanising contexts.

Working with artists and creative producers is now an established feature of both public and private development, mediating between creative practice, community participation, and the creation of site-specific work. This paper considers how artists can surface local narratives, overlooked histories, and community identities that are often absent from conventional consultation processes.

In doing so, artists can offer planners situated, nuanced knowledge to inform local area plans, embedding aesthetic, cultural, and experiential considerations into development processes.

The paper/presentation argues that artist-led engagement, which invites audiences to act not only as viewers but also as contributors, can strengthen community engagement throughout the planning process. It demonstrates the value that artists and creative producers bring to design teams, communities, and sites through place-responsive and co-designed practices that generate emotional, sensory, and embodied experiences, shaping how individuals perceive, inhabit, and form attachments to place.

The boundary between art and community engagement — whether understood as social, situational, or relational — is increasingly fluid. Within planning contexts, artists and creative practitioners can produce work that acquires new meanings, functions, and relationships through durational and collective experiences with communities and their stories. Through co-creation and co-design, public art can generate engaging narratives and support authentic, transparent, and purposeful involvement in the public realm.