Pedal Power: Open City and The Bike Project

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 University of Bristol, and Professor Michael Keith, Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the PEAK Urban project. Together, they reflect on how collaborative, arts-based approaches can reveal the lived realities of migration and the permeability of the city itself. The project invited refugee women connected with The Bike Project to co-produce short and long-form films documenting their experiences of arrival and adaptation. These films move beyond representation to highlight how everyday mobilities shape inclusion, resilience, and visibility in the city. Our conversation situates these narratives within wider debates about mobility at multiple scales. From the global journeys of displacement to the intimate routes traced through neighbourhoods and cycle lanes, mobility both enables and constrains urban life. Arts-based collaborations, as this project demonstrates, can shed new light on how these scales intersect and how cities might be reimagined as more open and welcoming. Listeners can view the films co-created through this initiative online at Cycling Visibilities. Together with the discussion, they offer a powerful insight into the experiences of refugee women cycling through London - making themselves visible, claiming urban space, and reshaping the city in the process.