The MobileWorlds Festival took place in September and October 2025, in Bergen (Norway), Online, and in Porto (Portugal). The festival brought together planning practice, arts, research, and a broad public of all ages, bringing the ideas of third cultures “out into the world”. With this post we are happy to share below some impressions and themes that emerged.
We heard from Marina Magerøy about sustainable mobility planning in Bergen, with several concrete examples, and had an honest discussion about the advances made, as well as the challenges involved. We discussed cultures of sustainability, and transport as contexts for encountering various cultures, different projects attempting to discourage private car use in the city, the controversies regarding e-scooters in the city, and much more.
We witnessed a beautiful performance by Roseane dos Reis, highlighting the challenges and contradictions at play when people need to adjust to new contexts of daily life after moving between countries. In our interview with her, we discussed the struggles of shifting identities, especially once a child is born and questions of what is to be passed on and what is to be adjusted become foregrounded. We also touched on how cultural identities help shape the ways we move through our daily lives, what transport we use, but also how we experience that movement and the encounter with the other, and with other common practices – such as chattiness or empathy – in such spaces.
We discussed with Filipa Corais about sustainable mobility planning in Braga, Portugal, including the role of schools and children as crucial for allowing shifts away from car use. In the interview, we touched on whether or not cars should be “demonized”, parking “culture” in Portugal, on the inter-connectedness between land use planning traditions and transportation, and much more. Many in the audience shared personal stories of how and why they felt they could be mobile, especially in Porto, in specific ways (and not others).
We heard several inspiring insights and anecdotes from Rita GT‘s work as an artist working across continents – in Angola, Germany, Brazil, the USA, Nigeria, and more – from how it can be to carry a pram down New York subway stairs due to broken elevators without anyone stopping to help, to performing as a white Portuguese woman in a car-free, water-transport focused and intensely populated centre of Lagos in Nigeria.
Online, we began with Jo Blake‘s performance of the classic fairytale of Frau Holle, which you can watch here, setting the scene for a creative perspective on mobilities, based the journeys we tend to see a story’s heroes go through.
We heard another kind of “hero” stories from Ajay Bailey, who shared in particular about his work on Buses in Bengaluru, based on the EQUIMOB project and related book publication, making extremely tangible and relatable what a culture of mobility can be, and look like in various context, the challenges of translation of such cultures, the variation in cultures even within one city, and much more.
We were challenged to take a radically different look at the stories that shape our imaginaries of the world, by trying to view plants as agents in those stories, with the help of Mariko O. Thomas. What does this have to do with mobilities you ask? Well, think about how we perceive the mobility of plants, what it means in terms of our understanding of immobility versus lack of agency, for example. A truly inspiring talk and activity!
With Maggie O’Neill, we learned about walking methods, and went on a walk ourselves, exploring what cultures we witnessed around us, and what shifted in our understanding if we walked consciously to places we enjoy, reflecting on what we like and do not like, and more.
Bringing together insights from planning practice and from local artists brought two very different approaches to thinking about mobility and transport together. This provided a very inspired perspective for debate and for thinking otherwise about daily mobility! To process a lot of these insights and bring them to ourselves and to the messages we would like to take with us, we held the Breaking Boxes workshops, and the Zine-making workshops. Both workshops were experienced as clearly powerful by participants, as can be seen in some of the images shared below, and testimonials shared on Instagram and elsewhere (gradually, partly still to be shared).
Crucially, all this was accompanied by a beautiful photo exhibition, with photos from Porto by Clara Roberti in collaboration with Beatriz Lacerda, and from Bergen by Ingvild Festervoll Melien. We’ll be making a separate post about the exhibition shortly.
To wrap up the Festival editions, I performed a poem for each edition, which we will also share on this website separately soon. Being very much amateur poetry, the idea here was to inspire participants to take courage to make some form of art, however imperfect, to capture and share their insights and emotions on what resonates for them about mobility – and other themes.
Throughout all Festival editions it was beautiful to see how the audiences engaged in the topics, and participated actively in debates and activities, allowing the unexpected to happen and engaging with it. A big thanks to all participants! And of course another big thank you to Wendy Tan for the constant collaboration and the support team, Dipanjan Nag, Ole Kolnes, Silvia Spolaor, Beatriz Lacerda, and Olivia Lewis without whom it would have been much harder and much less fun to carry out all these events!
Finally, we also held three “Unbox the Festival” editions, which anyone can act on at any time, organize locally, or just take a day and allow these ideas to inspire you wherever you are.
You can find more impressions about the various Festival editions on our Instagram, Bluesky, and Linkedin, and we’ll gradually be sharing more.
If you are interested in organizing a MobileWorlds Festival yourself wherever you are, do get in touch, and/or use the Festival Toolkit and act on it! Feel free to tweak and adjust to your own context whichever way it makes sense – third cultures, after all, are extremely context dependent and variable. What counts is exploring the idea of third cultures of mobility, bringing together planning and arts, and simply thinking outside the box.
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