An Uneven Geography of Accessibility: Adolescent Girls Navigating Public Spaces in Prishtina

Abstract

This study explores how adolescent girls in Prishtina experience public space, focusing on the emotional and spatial dynamics of fear, safety, and exclusion. Grounded in feminist geography and emotional geographies, the research investigates how gendered power relations shape everyday mobility through anticipatory fear of violence.

Drawing on nine participatory focus groups with high school girls aged 14 to 18, the study employed digital mapping and spatial evaluation exercises to document how girls perceive, navigate, and make meaning of public environments marked by threat. Findings reveal an uneven geography of accessibility in which male-dominated spaces such as parks, underpasses, and bus stops—are experienced as sites of constraint, prompting behavioral adaptations that limit girls’ spatial autonomy. Verbal and physical harassment, stalking, and symbolic intimidation were identified as common occurrences across urban space, rendering fear a rational and routine condition of adolescent girls’ movement. The analysis shows that safety is not defined by physical infrastructure alone but emerges through an interplay of environmental cues, gendered social relations, and embodied emotional knowledge.

By mapping these affective geographies, the study challenges neutral conceptions of public space and contributes to feminist debates on structural violence, safety work, and spatial justice. It concludes that girls’ navigation of Prishtina is shaped less by isolated incidents than by a collectively produced emotional cartography of risk one that demands feminist urban interventions grounded in the lived realities of those most excluded.