I’m standing in the center of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, surrounded by hordes of tourists making their way to the city’s famed castle at the top of the road. Gift shops with discounts on tweed beckon from nearly every storefront, and bagpipes are echoing from somewhere not far away. Yet I barely notice any of it. I’m listening, rapt, to the story of Maggie Dickson, a wronged woman of history, who in the early 18th century was falsely convicted of infanticide and hanged on this exact spot. Despite all odds, Dickson survived this public execution and went on to live for decades.
This isn’t a ghost tour, though Dickson’s story could certainly have been made to sound very eerie indeed. It’s something grounded firmly in the truth: a walking tour focused on the overlooked stories of many historical women of Edinburgh, women who had long been rendered invisible. Gayle, my tour guide, arguably knows more about feelings of invisibility than most. Like so many others, she herself had experienced periods of homelessness following struggles with mental health and a series of abusive relationships. After years of struggle and sleeping in hostels and women’s shelters, she’s found not just employment, but a platform: leading tours for Invisible Cities, a quietly revolutionary social enterprise that is reframing how we understand homelessness, tourism, and the stories cities choose to tell.
.jpg)
Founded in 2016, Invisible Cities trains people who have experienced homelessness to lead narrative-rich walking tours of their own cities, rooted in their own perspectives. Today, the organization operates in six cities across the United Kingdom—Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, York, Cardiff, and Aberdeen, with ambitious plans to expand to a total of 10 cities by the end of 2026, their 10th anniversary year. The model is deceptively simple: tourism as a vehicle for employment, storytelling as a means of connection, and cities seen through the eyes of people who have lived at their margins.
Like Gayle, who designed the “Women of Edinburgh” tour, each of Invisible Cities’ guides creates their own itinerary, weaving personal insights with local history and culture. The result is an experience that feels powerfully intimate. When you walk through a city with someone who has slept on its streets, navigated its social services, and rebuilt a life within its borders, the place itself comes into sharper focus, and you see it in a new and richer context.
Invisible Cities is the brainchild of Zakia Moulaoui Guery, whose own winding path led her from her native France to Scotland, where she settled in her early 20s, working as a teacher in Edinburgh before transitioning to producing large-scale events. One event in particular left a lasting impression: the Homeless World Cup, an annual international soccer tournament that supports people who have lived through homelessness.
Moulaoui Guery’s time with the Homeless World Cup—she worked as its director of international partner development for several years—took her around the world, from Paris to Mexico, Poland, and Chile, and beyond, and she witnessed firsthand how participation in the tournament transformed players’ confidence and sense of identity. “It sparked the idea that you can do something creative while supporting people,” she says. “It’s not about meeting immediate needs—you’re not providing food or shelter—but about giving people a sense of purpose.” Yet she also kept returning to a nagging question: how could that same kind of meaningful connection with people challenged with homelessness happen outside of an annual, structured event? How could everyday people, from locals to tourists, access those stories in a way that felt natural and respectful?
In 2014, Moulaoui Guery received a wrenching cancer diagnosis, pausing her career in events. “It made me realize how important travel was to me,” she says. “The first thing I thought was, does that mean I can’t travel anymore? And the doctors said, ‘Absolutely not, you have to rest and heal.’” Her experience with serious illness threw everything into sharp relief. “Like it does for a lot of people, it made me want to do my own thing and grow my own organization and no longer work for something else,” she continues. “It made me a little bit braver in that way.”
After successfully completing treatment, she asked herself what it was she truly loved. The answer was clear: travel, storytelling, and authentic human connection. She joined an incubator program to develop a spark of an idea, and by the summer of 2016, officially launched Invisible Cities.
From the outset, she designed Invisible Cities to work in close partnership with local homelessness organizations, which support guides with training, mentoring, and ongoing care. The assistance those organizations provide is essential, she explains. “Our guides may still be navigating health issues, mental health challenges, family situations, or housing instability. We always lead with partnership.”
A major turning point came after a BBC television feature spotlighted the work of Invisible Cities. By chance, someone at the Royal Foundation saw the segment and reached out. The foundation’s mission—to change the narrative around homelessness—aligned seamlessly with Invisible Cities’ ethos, and in March 2025, as part of the Aberdeen launch, Prince William joined a tour led by one of the guides and stood side-by-side with Moulaoui Guery for meetings with partner organizations and potential sponsors. “He asked a lot of questions,” Moulaoui Guery says, “but always came back to, ‘So how are we going to support what’s happening?’ He takes that responsibility very seriously. The team around him takes it very seriously. It was just, ‘We will support you. Don t worry about the rest. We’ll do it.’”
Despite the high-profile recognition, the heart of Invisible Cities remains deeply personal. Guides choose the stories they want to tell and the routes they want to walk. For Gayle, my guide in Edinburgh, a tour about women was a natural fit. She first came to Invisible Cities through Sparkle Sisters, an event organized for homeless women that offered free bra fittings, haircuts, clothing, and toiletries. Moulaoui Guery was one of the participants, and spoke briefly about her own organization. “I was fascinated and wanted to get involved,” Gayle says. After interviewing and participating in a training program, she began writing her own tour about the women of Edinburgh. She’s been a guide now for three years, and like her colleagues, has found not only employment and independent living, but a way to give voice to untold female-centric stories. “It is completely different to anything I’ve done before,” she says. “It brings me independence and self-confidence.” Gayle was able to transition to living independently, but Moulaoui Guery is quick to point out that recruiting female guides remains a challenge.
Though the organization’s impact is in some ways measurable—mostly through the employment and transferable skills they’ve provided to their dozens of guides and trainees—its effects are also harder to quantify. The tours attract travelers who are increasingly interested in conscious tourism, sustainability, and experiences that give back. They’re younger, bolder travelers, willing to try something new. And given the demographics of travelers to the UK, they largely tend to be American. They want something a bit out of the box; something that leaves an impact on where they’re traveling to and on themselves, too. And increasingly, “they want their money to serve a good cause,” Moulaoui Guery notes. It’s certainly a completely different experience from sitting on a tour bus, looking out the window, trying to tick off as many sights as possible.
Currently, Moulaoui Guery is busy working on the organization’s expansion goals: the cities of Sheffield, Bournemouth, Lambeth in England, Newport in Wales, and Belfast in Northern Ireland are all in the works. “I told Prince William 10 cities in 10 years,” she laughs. “So now I have to do it.”
Walking away from the frenzy of the Royal Mile after my tour, I thought about how easily cities become flattened by tourism, reduced to landmarks and legends, or consumed without any real context at all. Invisible Cities resists that by insisting that the local people we pass by have stories to tell. More often than not, they’re stories worth hearing.