The Relational Landscape explores how people and places shape one another, and what we can discover by mapping the relationships between them.

Places are more than their physical features. They are continually constituted through memory, movement, work, stories, encounters, history and relationships with people and the wider community of life. The same landscape can therefore become profoundly different places for different people.

Through walking, observation, conversation and participatory ethnography, the project invites people to encounter familiar places differently. Drawing on psychogeography, participants might follow unexpected routes, respond to sounds and smells, revisit memories, notice boundaries and thresholds, or simply allow a place to influence where they go and what they notice.

These experiences become ethnographic maps recording not only geographical features, but the stories, perceptions, encounters and relationships that give a place meaning.

By bringing these perspectives together, the project creates a richer understanding of each place as a unique configuration of relationships, asking:

What can we learn about a place when we map not what is there, but how it is lived?