1. Introduction

1The recent Covid-19 pandemics has irrupted into everyone lives abruptly, reconfiguring a previous given for granted relationship with public space: we were used to the idea that the city could be crossed and used by everyone, provided that certain rules were observed. Restrictions on movements have hit all generations but it is safe to say that one of the most vulnerable groups has resulted to be young people. It is in fact young people who use public space in particular, in order to forge relationships with significant peers, and in this sense the city can be considered an important source of identity in their journey towards adulthood. The city can be thought of as a space of their own, in a continuous process of co-construction of ‘their’ city – the space they inhabit – on the one hand, and ‘their’ desires on the other. In other words, young people domesticate the city as in Mandich and Cuzzocrea (2016): they make it their own through micro practices that are built in everyday routines. These embedded practices produce space in the complexity of everyday cultures. This approach is useful to understand what kind of transitions to adulthood can be done in the city – our privileged starting point for the analysis, and one that is particularly relevant to investigate in relation to pandemic times. Additionally, it is also one that is apt to evaluate public space itself as enabling (or constraining) processes of these kinds. In this article we will reflect on narratives of young members of a feminist collective. These express and reflect on forms of gender-based male micro-violence in the city such as cat-calling, and other forms of aggression, at the intersection between patriarchy and adult-centrism. While these forms of micro violence are not necessarily problematized, indeed, in the empirical material analysed here we observe the emergence of a reflection of young women on their right to inhabit the city, through mechanisms of both appropriation and distance from symbolic meanings identified, and a thoughtful consideration of the practices that accompany them.

2. Theoretical approach

3The materiality of the city is, indeed, an important factor in hindering or empowering cities’ practices of appropriation. However, materiality (a building, a street) has meanings (Löw, 2013): the meanings incorporated in its production, conferred by public and policy discourses (as in de Certeau’s readable city, 1980), and the meanings that are assigned to it by its inhabitants. The city is, in this perspective, a lived environment. As Koch and Latham (2021, 345) emphasise:

Spaces become public not only because laws or discourses recognise them as such, but through all sorts of corporeal, largely routinized practices. In public space, people are walking, working, driving, sitting, cycling, resting, and riding transport. Some people are at work, others at leisure. Materialities are constitutive of the types of public action and address, as well as the collective actors that come to form relationships within a space, and often in ways that are unanticipated.

4With these ideas in mind, we reclaim in this article the concept of domestication as it has been used in previous research on the practice of public urban space by families with children (Mandich, Cuzzocrea, 2016). The concept, similarly to Berker (2011) and as developed by Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) in media and technology studies, allows us to understand the practices of including public space into the domestic and private sphere of individuals. The interest of the concept lies in the possibility to understand urban practices in public spaces (such as public gardens, and squares facing children’ school) as disentangling different moments of the relation with space (acquisition, objectification, incorporation, and conversion).

5The term acquisition describes the access and control over space as a consequence of established and regular practices (Kärrholm, 2007). For instance, we regularly visit a square or walk a street every day. At this point, space enters the domestic sphere (objectification). It then becomes “incorporated” when it intertwines into temporal structures in the form of routines, habits, and meanings. These meanings may differ from those intended by the planners or organisers of the space or even from those meanings that the actor had in mind when he/she first practised it. At this point, we exit the domestic sphere, bringing into the public space the uses and meanings we developed (conversion).

6Overall, the domestication approach allowed us to see how places are refigured (in Löw’s terms) through everyday practices using urban space in the interplay between public discourses and everyday practices.

7Moreover, it shows, as Knoblauch and Löw (2017) well emphasise, the spatiality of sociality. Domesticating a public space requires mobilising a wide set of resources as material resources, skills, cultural values, and social competences. Not every process of domestication is successful, neither is the city a familiar and secure place for everyone. At times, exclusion is not due to material issues but to the fact that the social and affective nature of the place is not perceived as sufficiently welcoming of cultures and individualities. In revisiting these findings, the importance of «defining atmospheres as an external effect, instantiated in perception, of social goods and human beings in their situated spatial order/ing» (Löw, 2013, 25) is even more central. The meanings emerging from the practices of domestication of public space, in the interplay with materialities and public discourses, produce a specific affective atmosphere that may foster inclusion for some and exclusion for others. In introducing the research that analyses young women’s narratives of the same city where previous research was conducted, Cagliari, it is important to emphasise that exclusion can result as from «the atmospheric potency of spaces», to use Löw’s powerful expression (2008, 25). Moreover, as our bodies are typically the vehicles through which we communicate, make it essential to study the role of our senses and physicality to fully comprehend interactions within a space (Grüning, Tuma, 2017). In this paper, thus, we wish to push further our approach in order to underline the interlinkage between space, communication, interaction, emotions and the gendered issues that emerged within.

3. Methods

9Work was developed in three steps: a preparatory phase, in which we constructed the structure of the photovoice paying attention to the interest of the participants, and thus decided to focus on the connection between urban spaces and feelings, particularly from a gender perspective. A second phase in which participants were given two weeks to select photos for the discussion; a third phase in which a photovoice, facilitated by the researcher and conducted using visual material as a common thread between the different issues emerged. As stated, for this paper we decided to concentrate on a specific photovoice, which lasted for three hours, in which a great deal of the discussion centred on forms of gender-based male micro-violence, at the intersection between patriarchy and adult-centrism. The method of photovoice is used in youth studies to study how youth relate with violence (Christensen, 2019), and on forms of agency in urban contexts (Delgado, 2015). In Italy-based studies with young people, we get inspiration from research on identity and generational context (Frisina, 2013).

10It is important to emphasise how a participatory and visual approach, linked to feminist methodologies, allows for a particularly vivid access point, which through the images collected for the photovoice, manages to restore a bodily and positioned perspective, not only bringing out issues but also facilitating accounts of specific episodes of aggression and forms of reaction and resistance, ultimately making possible to examine the different ways in which these accounts are related to other episodes (Wang, 2006). The vividness of the image as a starting point for reflection and the collective discussion allows research practices to be experienced as tools capable of strengthening self-determination.

11Objects of our analysis are both the transcript of the photovoice (1), the field notes taken by the researcher who conducted it and who is also a co-author of this article (2), and wider considerations about the positionality of the young women who participated in the focus (3).

12The group with whom we conducted the photovoice object of this paper originated in a Cagliari high school. However, it then started to grow around an Instagram page opened by eight female students to “take out of their classroom” a series of topics on which they confronted each other daily at school. The Instagram page, with limited number of followers but excellent engagement, demonstrated the interest they have been able to attract above all among peers and in citizen activism, then led the group of young women to give themselves the organisational form of the collective, leading to forms of participation in some mobilizations in the city (specifically, against gender-based violence and in the fight for civil rights).

13The choice to carry out a photovoice project with a collective of girls who not only know each other but also share close relationships of friendship and sisterhood contributes to and adds value to the collected material. The depth of the themes addressed can indeed be reached thanks to a certain degree of pre-existing proximity and trust. Furthermore, their particular sensitivity (both personal and political) has allowed for the development of discussions on highly sensitive and challenging topics such as male violence, sometimes with depth and other times with irony. Moreover, their proximity is entirely in line with the photovoice methodology, as it not only facilitates the participatory dimension of the research but also allows its outcomes to be shared from a community perspective. Similar photovoice projects were subsequently carried out in school context and helped us define the relations with specific space in the city (Cuzzocrea et al., 2023). However, this paper concentrates on one photovoice. This approach was adopted to provide a stronger contextual foundation and greater depth to the analyses for a single case study, that of the collective, with its specificities and significance. Naturally, our analysis and cultural interpretation are also partially enriched by insights and thoughts that emerged from those photovoice projects, as well as from other phases of the research work.

14The entire research process with the collective unfolded during the first half of 2021 (February to June). The actual time devoted to carry out the photovoice project (creation of visual material and subsequent focus group) lasted for a month (between April and May). The research relationship with the girls continued afterward as well, in more informal settings. Throughout this period, ethnographic field notes were taken, enriching the material, and contributing to the analyses.

4. Analysis

15The collective that participated in our research is made of eight young women who were attending their final year at school when the photovoice was conducted in the first half of 2021. They shared a lot of common knowledge not only on matters related to the school – they are mates in the same class – but also on some common passions around theatre, associationism, political collective and a same group of friends. The photovoice, therefore, has been conducted within a homogeneous group not only in its characteristics but also strongly cohesive in relational terms: it is easy to see the bounds and complicity among the students. Moreover, they had already developed a political sensibility on topics they had tackled together, which facilitated the discussion in focus. To some extent, we can even say that they “anticipated” some of the issues that we, as researchers, thought to develop. From a fieldnote:

At the end of the photovoice, while we were exchanging last words and they were getting ready to leave, […] G. says to me «You know, when you wrote that message [she refers to the first contact on Instagram] I read and thought “cool…but”. It wasn’t clear to me how the city, how urban space could have something to do with us, with feminism etc. Then, thinking about it, [I had] a lot of ideas, I started to see and put together lots of things». On the one hand, I was very pleased that participating in this research could give them something, on the other, I was surprised: it looked so natural for them to engage in this discussion that I had thought they were long-explored themes for them (Ethnographic note).

16Episodes of micro-violence in public space emerge amongst the most salient and problematic issues, especially in terms of continuous exposure of young women to forms of cat-calling and other “minor” forms of abuse. These are seldomly problematized by those who see it and are objects of this kind of attention. Nonetheless, they in turn affect habits of use of the city and its perceptions, at least in some areas or at specific times. In the picture below, we show a photo that was shown in the photo voice, representing the bus stop button in a bus:

18By photographing the bus-stop button, M. introduces with a synecdoche an episode that sheds light on a critical issue in the relationship between young women and the urban spaces they inhabit: the prevalence and the diffusion of gender-based violence, and the tactics that girls use to respond to it. Differently from can be seen as a generic attitude, M. is very much aware of the oddness of this. Through small strategies such as altering their route, claiming, or pretending confidence, and being aware of their surroundings, young women can resist the male privilege that exists in the use of the city in their everyday lives (Beebeejaun, 2017). By doing so, they nurture an ability to move around in urban spaces and confirm their right to be there.

19However, this possibility is constantly undermined by the repeated and cumulative impact of the aggressions they face. The daily experience of these young women in inhabiting urban space is plenty of episodes of “street harassment”. By this expression, following Holly Kearl (2014, 5) we mean:

unwanted interactions in public spaces between strangers that are motivated by a person’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, or gender expression, and make the harasser feel annoyed, angry, humiliated, or scared. It ranges from verbal harassment to flashing, following, groping, and rape.

20Familiarity with these episodes of violence affects the individual in everyday life through different temporal horizons (Das, 2007). However, there are different degrees of acceptance or tolerance. Not necessarily do these episodes “trace a line” and end up constituting a biographical turning point or otherwise a rupture whereby one can distinguish between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ of the aggression. In this process of ‘normalisation’, they do not act as “critical points” – i.e., they are not events that are reported as having particular biographical significance (Thomson, Holland, 2015). More commonly, violence may exist as a temporally extended and constantly present threat (Gottzén, 2023). For example, T. recounts she cannot stand the catcalling in the morning from urban cleaning workers, a situation she has found herself in many times: «not that it’s worse than other situations, but like this, in the morning, just waking up, it reminds you that you’ll have a crappy day and that we live in a crappy world».

21The above excerpt also highlights the difficulty of these tactics in navigating the city: G. does not find herself having to choose between a route that makes her uncomfortable (in this specific case, the bus where some kids harassed her) and a longer and more inconvenient, but safer, alternative route. The choice is between a situation of concrete aggression – according to the perception of that moment – versus a situation that has not yet manifested itself but that might potentially develop into something even more difficult to manage. In this context, the young women put into action everyday attempts to domesticate the urban space. This only remains partial because it is carried out in a situation of continuous exposure to potential aggressions. Yet this also leaves room for small acts of revenge and growing confidence with the lived contexts. For instance, G. recounts how she responded to an insult directed at her as she was getting off the bus:

• 4 This translates “dimmi [pure]”, an expression which invites further contact.

While I was almost getting off the bus, one of them [teenagers] shouted “slut” at me, and maybe they expected me to be offended, but I turned around and said, «[yes], go ahead4». Then they apologised to me. They apologised to me! Because they didn’t expect that. […] I must remember it next time: «Slut? [yes], go ahead!». I think it was the most brilliant replay I could give that day; it was really satisfying for me […].

22The emotional strain and the sense of being wasting mental and physical energy in the effort in facing situations of hostility are constantly felt, and small strategies are being developed to pause that tension at least temporarily. T., for example, talking again on her way of using public transport, reports of how she is always in search of identifying women (or at least, young men), who may give her the protection she needs.

23At the same time, this continuous feeling of exposure to eventual male aggression and the sense of danger that young women experience has the implication of limiting their use of the city. In fact, the geography of the city as experienced by young women is comprised within much smaller boundaries than in the perception of their male counterparts. The urban space is crossed by different layers of this kind of experience: on the basis of what areas are used and therefore domesticated; on the basis of the familiarity built with such space, which also involves the ability to implement, more or less effective “ready-to-think” alternative strategies and routes; but also in relation to the times of the days, with the same spaces experienced as insecure at night or in unusual moments even during the day, based on peoples’ presence. This is well reflected in an ethnographic note:

At the end of the photovoice, G. takes the time to tell me how helpful our collaboration [through the focus] has been for her. N. agrees, saying that the experience has allowed her to reflect deeply, even putting herself in question. She shared how uncomfortable she had felt going to a semi-peripheral neighbourhood where the photovoice was held, near public housing. The faces of the people in the neighbourhood, their postures, the way they moved and looked around, even though, as she admitted, «no one paid attention to me, nor did anything towards me», made her feel intimidated, on the assumption that she was being followed on the sidewalk and in potential danger any moment. «And I know this is a problem because it doesn’t happen in Bonaria, and I know how discriminatory it is because it’s unpleasant to feel uncomfortable just because you’re in a neighbourhood with a certain reputation» (Ethnographic note).

24The almost daily experience of exposure to impossible-to-locate forms of violence and aggression becomes a filter through which the urban environment is interpreted. The evaluation of what surrounds the young women travels through an attitude of suspicion which brings them to a continuous assessment of who they met, to prevent aggressive behaviour or harassment. The political awareness and relational sensitivity of the women participating in the photovoice allows them to question themselves on this aspect, as they did in the exchange of remarks reported above. Gender-based violence, especially in its verbal forms of daily aggression in public space, follows a configuration of class and territorial stigma. For instance, postures, attitudes, and language in working-class neighbourhoods are perceived as more dangerous than in affluent ones (as in the case of Bonaria, the neighbourhood mentioned in the excerpt).

26Gender hostility expressed by urban space is not only manifested in the rhythmic repetition of verbal or physical aggression episodes, but it also permeates the imaginaries of public space, leaving traces and signs that reinforce feelings of hostility, as it emerges in the comment of the picture below:

I saw something that really caught my attention – the word ‘whore’ written on this hydraulic thing, which I’m not even sure what it is. It struck me as ridiculous, because you could see how angry someone must have been to take it out on an innocent object like that. I imagined it as a woman’s body – so vulnerable, broken, and hurt by someone who then wrote “whore” on it, as if saying «I’ve done everything I could to hurt you, and now I’m leaving you like this». It made me realize how much anger and violence towards women is still present in our society.

27The excerpt allows us to understand how the materiality of streets can constitute what can be defined as an “atmosphere of unwelcome” (Vera-Gray, 2019; Fontaine, 2022). Here, the concept of affective atmosphere helps us understand the way in which bodies are involved in fluctuations of feelings and sensations. Bodies are connected to their wider milieu, in intensive rhythms, sounds and events (Thompson, 2017). The concept of affective atmosphere highlights how the connection between bodies, experiences, emotions, and materiality takes on a spatial form in their continuous reverberation (Anderson, 2009). Accordingly, the repetitive nature of physical and verbal aggressions in public places means that for young women, public streets may evoke feelings and emotions that are linked to memories – some of which personal, some others shared with peers – of episodes in which they have been «complimented, insulted, harassed, intimidated, confused, annoyed, terrified» (Vera-Gray, 2019, 10). These feelings are thus incorporated into daily routines. The way in which being in the street evokes through writing, a noise, or maybe an image of an unpleasant and unwanted feeling suggests that aggressions are not only acts of domination over young women. They may also act as elements of subjectivation, limiting certain activities in certain public areas, determining possibilities of movement, and in the last instance undermining the sense of self-determination that even “active” subjects such as those who participated in our research may otherwise display.

28Although expressed in a substantially ‘playful’ manner, possibly due to the relaxed atmosphere that characterised the encounter, the exercise of imagination that M. gives shape to in imagining the author of the writing on the hydraulic installation, suggests an existing familiarity with a gender-based violence that we may see as widespread and pervasive, in both the urban and peri-urban areas. This in turn suggests that the atmosphere of hostility related to embodied day-to-day spatial practices (Brickell, Maddrell, 2016) constitutes a continuum within which various types and degrees of male violence are normalised. The parallel between the hydraulic building and the body of a wounded, humiliated, and insulted woman symbolically shows how the continuum of rape culture that feminist movements denounce in rooted in language, stereotypes, and even “jokes” that are usually underestimated and downplayed (Anitha, Lewis, 2018). All this is strongly experienced in the daily lives of these young women, and consciously evoked and incorporated in their feeling and perceptions of the city, as this excerpt shows:

I got off the bus in Piazza Repubblica one day, it was 4 pm and I was wearing a light dress because it was hot, I hear barking and I think okay, it must be a dog, but then I realised they were barking at me. I turn around and see a young boy. Unfortunately, I have this flaw that if I see a person, even a stranger, being harassed when I’m out and about, I’m the first to react, even in an exaggerated way, but if I am the one being harassed, verbally or often physically, like being groped, I tend to freeze. This boy kept barking at my face, and I just stood there frozen. In the meantime, a man aged like my father came around, put his hand on my shoulder, and asked me, «Has something happened?». He started talking to the boy, telling him to stop, and that I was scared and frozen, telling him to go away, somewhere else. This made me feel safe and helped me realise that not everyone has bad intentions. I should stop looking at people with suspicion, assuming that everyone wants to cause harm to me. There are also good people around.

29This excerpt is not only useful to highlight, once again, the pervasiveness and unpredictability of harassment in urban spaces, but also the hope to find support, for instance in the form of an alliance, or otherwise some kind of help in certain circumstances. The fact that someone has passed by and took her part is important for her not only for the contribution to deal with the potential danger of aggression more easily, or to break the paralysis given by fear and humiliation, but also to allow her to imagine the space that she daily crosses in a different light. Even in experiences of male violence that cross public space, affected by the atmosphere of hostility that arises from it, N. feels the need for an alternative thought that opposes an idea of care and solidarity to the risk of aggression. The emphasis placed on the mechanisms of re-appropriation and taming of public space not only supports the individual and collective agency of the participants to the research, but also allows not to reify gender stereotypes that implicitly support the relationship between women, fear in public space, and the desire for safety, subjectivizing women as “naturally” vulnerable (Starkweather, 2007). Just as gender-based violence creates an atmosphere that affects bodies in urban space, shaping their possibilities for movement, feelings and atmospheres, similar mechanisms can apply in relation to care (Ringrose, Renold, 2014) and forms of resistance, whether on an organised scale or in everyday routines.

5. Conclusions

30In this article we reflect, within the theoretical frame of domestication and refiguration of the city, on the relationship with the city of a group belonging to a feminist collective in Cagliari, Sardinia, in a late phase of the pandemics. In the analytical part of the paper, we have revisited and contextualised those passages in the focus group (part of photovoice projects) that speak about this, and the images brought to the discussion by the young women who took part in the research, in light of the relationships shaping public space (Löw, 2016). This method allows the understanding of the systematic nature of male violence and the different individual and collective tactics and strategies to interface with the public space. Here, it happens through bringing out the dimension of the gender emergency from the voice of the participants, highlighting how it is instrumental in showing the systematic nature of such power dynamics and in avoiding the “bottlenecks” of securitarian discourses, with its simplifications and infantilizations.

31As suggested by the title, the relationship of young participants with the city undergoes a process of enhanced reflexivity with the urban environment and spatial positioning. However, this process is strongly embedded and embodied in relation to power dynamics linked to gender and sexuality: urban space often proves to be hostile to women, and the gendered dimension of public space becomes the challenging context where to move in. One’s perception of space is filtered through a gendered body, just as gazes and relationships are gendered: in response to this, agency potential develops, along with a plurality of tactics and practices of resistance, to better align, wherever possible, to one’s desires. Experimenting with photovoice allows us to disentangle a youthful, but not ingenuous, relationship with the city that reiterates the need for proximity and a feeling of human compassion that social distancing due to the pandemic has reproposed in its urgency.

32While harassment and male violence in public spaces are certainly not a pandemic-era ‘invention’, the pandemic atmosphere emerges with relevance in the background of the theme investigated. The photovoice project was carried out in 2021, during a period of gradual relaxation of restrictions and, we could say, a process of ‘rehabilitation’ and reacquaintance with the city and being in public spaces with others. Furthermore, it is possible to observe how certain pandemic measures can be problematic from a gender perspective: while broad discussion on politics of lockdown has arisen (e.g. Cook, Borges, 2022; Peroni, 2022), our empirical data – see in particular the extract related to the bus stop – provides useful insights to reconsider the challenges implied by curfews. In sum, the agency that these young women explicate is attentive, responsive, transformative, and aware of their positioning in the city. The affective atmosphere that characterises the city during the pandemic further elicits their reflexivity. In the words of one participant, the experience of the pandemic made her acquire a new gaze on the city, an unplanned introspective journey that was in fact like “walking inside [herself]”.