Joyce David
Joyce David is a researcher at the Chair of Cycling, Department of Geography at Ghent University. Her work explores how children’s perspectives can challenge and enrich dominant understandings of mobility, and what conditions are needed to enable their independent and everyday movement through urban space.
Her research critically examines how adults speak about children and cycling, and how recurring assumptions in policy, media, and safety discourses shape what is considered “normal” or “safe” mobility. At the same time, she works directly with children using participatory methods (such as wearable video) to capture how they experience streets, navigate environments, and respond to everyday mobility situations in real time.
By bringing these perspectives together, her work reveals blind spots in current mobility systems and highlights how child-centered approaches can address broader structural issues.
She argues that if urban environments work for children, they ultimately work better for everyone; positioning children as a critical lens through which to rethink mobility, accessibility, and the right to the street.
Intervention
Despite growing attention to active mobility, cycling research and planning remain largely shaped by adult-centric interpretations of safety, accessibility, and infrastructure. Children, although frequent and vulnerable road users, are rarely included in ways that capture their lived, embodied experiences of urban space.
This workshop introduces participatory video as a method to access children’s everyday cycling experiences from a first-person perspective. Using lightweight wearable cameras, children document a routine trip through their neighbourhood, generating rich visual material that reveals micro-interactions, sensory cues, affective responses, and situated encounters with infrastructure. For instance, moments of hesitation at intersections, subtle swerving to avoid obstacles, or shifts in attention when navigating complex traffic situations illustrate how safety and accessibility are continuously negotiated in practice. These insights challenge dominant representations of cycling environments based on aggregated data or expert-driven assessments.
Rather than presenting findings in a conventional format, this session invites participants to engage directly with selected video clips. Through guided, small-group discussions, participants will collaboratively interpret what is seen, felt, and implied in the footage. The workshop explores how different disciplinary lenses shape interpretations of safety, risk, accessibility, and agency, and asks: what becomes visible (or remains overlooked) when we attempt to “read” the street from a child’s perspective?
Participants will gain analytical prompts and practical insights for interpreting experiential mobility data, which can be applied in their own research or practice.
By foregrounding questions of interpretation and positionality, the workshop opens up a broader discussion on how knowledge about cycling spaces is produced, whose perspectives are legitimised, and how alternative forms of experiential evidence can inform more inclusive and just mobility planning.