Learning in the Open: A Journey of Reimagining Space in Oxford

Over the past months, my work with Fusion Arts has taken me into the quiet, unused corners of Oxford, empty rooms, forgotten offices, in-between places that sit dormant within a city full of possibility. At first glance these spaces are simply “vacant.” But the more time I spend in them, the more I see them as invitations: invitations to imagine what could flourish here, who could benefit and how we might collectively breathe new life into areas that have been overlooked for too long.

We are just beginning to explore how to activate spaces in Oxford for community, cultural, and artistic use. Along the way, we are experimenting with transforming empty rooms into studios, workspaces, and creative hubs. But this work is also an ongoing process of questioning - power, governance, and the systems that influence who can access space and who is excluded.

Meanwhile spaces are often described in functional terms: temporary use, short leases, flexible occupation. But to us at Fusion Arts, they are something more radical. They offer a chance to test new ways of organising space outside the rigid structures that dominate property, planning, and cultural governance - structures that often exclude the very communities that make a city a home.

Working with meanwhile spaces is not just about filling a gap. It is about rethinking how we value space, what creativity needs to grow and how a city might look if cultural life had room to breathe on its own terms.

The questions that arise are:

• How do we shift power in tangible ways, not just symbolic ones?

• What does shared governance look like in practice, not as a buzzword but as a lived commitment?

• And how do we create a collective space when the systems around us: legal, financial, bureaucratic, often push us toward hierarchy?

We don’t have clear answers yet. But perhaps answers aren’t the point. The point is to hold the questions openly with the people who are shaping these spaces alongside Fusion Arts: the artists setting up their studios, the organisers creating programmes, the communities imagining what these rooms could become.

Oxford is a city steeped in colonial histories, inherited power structures and systems that can feel immovable. Its architecture, institutions and decision-making frameworks carry narratives that are centuries old. To try to build something community-rooted here: something porous, experimental and inclusive, means working inside and against those systems at the same time.

Transforming meanwhile spaces becomes an act of navigation:

• finding cracks in the structure where creativity can grow,

• inviting people into rooms they’ve historically been kept from,

• making decisions collectively in a landscape designed for top-down control.

Sometimes the work feels hopeful. Sometimes it feels frustrating. Often it feels both at once.