Making Room: Women Reclaiming Urban Space in Prishtina

Sammanfattning

Making Room is a feminist urban research and design project situated in Prishtina, Kosovo, that began from a simple observation: when urban infrastructures fail to accommodate marginalized communities, does exclusion become embedded in the city itself. The project explores how women navigate, interpret, and negotiate urban space through situated experiences of mobility, safety, visibility, and belonging.In response, the methodology centers on producing situated knowledge through participatory mapping and open-ended interviews with women from different social, ethnic, religious, and generational backgrounds. Participants mapped their everyday routes, avoided spaces, social infrastructures, and perceptions of the city, revealing accessibility without usability, mobility influenced by fear, and intersectional inequality.The findings are translated into a proposal that reclaims abandoned urban spaces in Prishtina, focusing on plateaus as sites of intervention. Through incremental occupation, these spaces evolve from small-scale acts of presence into collective infrastructures for care, gathering, and mobilization, ultimately functioning as spatial evidence and political tools for broader institutional change.Making Room refuses the idea of design as resolution; instead, it positions spatial occupation as feminist practice, where design operates as an enabling structure for collective spatial agency and the designer acts as mediator rather than sole author.