Workshop participants looking at plants in tall grass along a pavement, Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, workshop, Global Humanities Summer School, University of Cambridge, 2026 — Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, workshop, Cambridge, 2026Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, atölye, Cambridge, 2026

Workshop participants studying plants along a cycle path verge, Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, workshop, University of Cambridge, 2026 — Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, workshop, Cambridge, 2026Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, atölye, Cambridge, 2026

Workshop participants around a table covered with a shared site map of plant samples, Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, workshop, University of Cambridge, 2026 — Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, workshop, Cambridge, 2026Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, atölye, Cambridge, 2026

Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, method diagram, 2026Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies, yöntem diyagramı, 2026

Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies

Workshop, Global Humanities Summer School, Global Plant Lives

2026

Two-day workshop, University of Cambridge, 2026

A two-day workshop at the “Global Plant Lives” summer school of the Global Humanities Network, University of Cambridge, July 2026. The workshop brought together postgraduate students who work on plants and ecology across different disciplines, and focused on urban micro-ecologies. Participants closely examined spontaneous plant life growing along an ordinary pavement edge in Cambridge and produced creative mappings of the site.

On the first day the groups gathered photographs, sketches and notes at the site. On the second day, in the studio, they turned this material into finished pieces and built them into one large map of the site.

Each group kept one lens, one way of looking at the site, for both days:

Plant colonization. The routes by which plants reached the site.
Plant work. The effects of plants on the surfaces around them.
Conditions. The factors that allow plants to live in one spot and not in another.
Temporal traces. The marks of time and change in the plants.

Each piece was joined by a drawn line to the spot on the site it came from, one colour per lens. Several colours meeting at one spot marked a find shared by more than one group.

Photographs: Nic Marchant

Creative Field Mapping of Urban Plant Ecologies

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