Walking (in)Visibilities of Contested Spaces in Pristina, Kosovo

The city of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, is a complex and layered urban environment molded by the country's turbulent history. The urban landscape bears the scars of conflict and displacement (Boussauw, 2011). In the post-conflict years, Pristina's urban spaces have undergone major transformations. Public spaces have been reconfigured to create a more walkable and livable city. The reconfiguration focused on recalibrating the public image of who has the right to claim the city and whose history and memory counts, rendering various stories visible. Yet, walking these spaces with those with lived experience of deep transformations unravels layers of micro-histories where slow memory confronts the traumatic pasts interplay and reproduce the image of space for those who follow the invisible footpaths in everyday life. Alternative memories matter (Palmberger, 2019), and the embodied walkability experiences of places where ghosts of past memories were emplaced (Stevenson, 2014) in these contested spaces allow once-brushed-away voices to resurface. Walking, therefore, has the power to collectively contest, reorder, and disorder memories (Edensor, 2005), revealing complexities of power, gender, and the struggle for inclusion in shaping the future of the post-conflict city.

This workshop builds on years of work by activists, academics, and communities in the city of Pristina, who have been relentlessly working to influence existing efforts for the post-conflict healing process to become inclusive for all unvoiced stories. It aims to ensure the continuation of these efforts by embracing walkability as a lens and method to subvert invisibility processes. Working with the concept of Slow Memory (Wüstenberg, 2023), participants will cultivate practices of presence in contexts of uneven change, unearthing suppressed or forgotten memories that are entangled with the footpaths connecting individual experiences to collective memory. This workshop offers a platform for experimentation in interdisciplinary research and recentering walkability in memory policy and social development agendas that address post-conflict recovery, healing, and reconstruction.

Developing this method and making it available for all ensures the sustainability and durability of these efforts. Therefore, this workshop aims to attract all who are interested in methods of voicing the other: students, scholars, practitioners, and community activists. It aims to include diverse complementary fields of studies that dig into the matter — architecture, urban studies, (human) geography, political science, memory studies, and more — for an in-depth exploration of walkability through the intersections of space, memory, history, trauma, and gender within the dynamic center of Pristina. Participants will investigate walkability against a backdrop of latent violence and slow urban transformation, adopting methods that intentionally decelerate research to capture deep-rooted, often (in)visible narratives embedded within the city.