‘It was like walking inside myself’: youngwomen’s practices of domestication in the gendered city

The recent Covid-19 pandemic has irrupted into youth’s lives and their relations to the city abruptly. Young people, in particular, make use of public space to forge relationships with peers for them significant: in this sense the city is a key 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 on the one hand, and the expression of “their” desires on the other. Accordingly, young people domesticate the city. Paying attention to the familiarity bonds that emerge against commercialization and commodification of public spaces, in this contribution we draw from a research project which investigated representations of young people in Cagliari, Sardinia. For this contribution we look in-depth at a photovoice conducted in the first half of 2021 with a feminist collective, whose activists were high school final-year students. The agency that these young women explicate in telling the episodes of gender-based micro-violence in the city, at the intersection between patriarchy and adult-centrism, articulates along a playful, but also minded, relationship with public space, one that is attentive, responsive, transformative, and well aware of their positioning. 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 imposed by the pandemic has reproposed in its urgency.