An emerging practice
The Ecosystemic Flâneur
Wandering as a practice of attention, collective inquiry, and place-making.
Why wander?
The flâneur walks a city without hurrying, letting the place reveal itself. The Ecosystemic Flâneur takes that old habit of attention and makes it shared: a group wanders together, notices together, and then makes sense of what it found together.
The practice grows out of years of community work, facilitation and place-making. It treats a neighbourhood as an ecosystem of people, places, stories and relationships, and asks what becomes possible when we slow down enough to see it.
This is an evolving methodological and research practice. It brings together several fields of inquiry and practice; it is not presented as an established or validated academic theory.
Areas of inquiry and practice
Urban wandering and attentive observation
Walking slowly through a place, noticing what usually goes unseen: thresholds, traces of use, informal gathering spots, and the stories people attach to them.
Collective intelligence and collective wisdom
Exploring how a group that observes together can see more than any one of its members, and how individual noticing becomes shared understanding.
Art of Hosting and participatory facilitation
Drawing on hosting practices such as circle, World Café and Open Space to hold conversations in which many voices can be heard.
Place-making and community-led processes
Asking how attention to a place can become a starting point for people to shape it together, with the community at the centre.
Complexity, emergence and self-organisation
Treating a neighbourhood as a living system, where patterns emerge from many small relationships rather than from a single plan.
Workshops for Conferences
These are adaptable formats rather than fixed programmes. Each can be tailored to a conference theme, venue, group size and time slot, from a single session to a longer track.
The Urban Wandering Lab
A guided exploration of a place through observation, curiosity and shared reflection. Participants wander in small groups with a few open prompts, then gather to compare what they noticed.
World Café: Making Space for Collective Wisdom
A facilitated conversation designed to surface diverse perspectives and shared insights. Small tables, carefully chosen questions and several rounds that connect ideas across the room.
Wandering, Place and Community
An experiential workshop exploring how attention to place can open new forms of participation and belonging. It combines a short walk with a hosted conversation about the place just experienced.
Collective Inquiry in Complex Times
A participatory format for interdisciplinary dialogue, listening, and exploring questions without reducing them to simplistic binaries. Suited to panels and tracks that want to think together rather than debate.
Experience and Practice
- More than two decades of developing the wandering approach and participatory work, with more than 20 local authorities and 10 institutions and organisations, in Israel and in Europe.
- A city-wide place-making and local-identity process in Eilat (2018–2021), with Ben-Gurion University's Eilat campus and local partners, and community and place-making processes in Be'er Sheva, Kiryat Gat and Kiryat Malachi.
- Work with companies and public bodies, including Shikun & Binui, Amidar, Intel Israel, the Ministry of Welfare and the Ministry of Education.
- Teaching and training at Shenkar, HIT, Gordon College and Ben-Gurion University's Eilat campus.
- International collaboration in the European Union's Erasmus+ CURE and DEMO projects.
- Hosting World Café conversations for large groups with Ministry of Education frameworks, leading companies, European Union programmes and many local authorities in Israel.
- Participatory place-making projects at Dizengoff Center and in the Neve Sharet neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Pardes Hanna, Ashkelon and Eilat.
- Working with Art of Hosting practices, including circle, World Café, Open Space, storytelling, graphic facilitation and Theory U.
- Building participatory digital community maps with neighbourhoods, which link places, people and local initiatives.
Invite a workshop / Explore a collaboration
If you are organising a conference, a research meeting or a gathering about cities, communities or participation, we would be glad to explore together which format could fit.