BODIES, SELVES AND SPACESGENDERED EXPERIENCES OF MILANESE URBAN SETTINGS

Research consistently demonstrates that urban environments are neither neutral nor equally accessible to everyone, as they originate in uneven power relations and so are structured around exclusionary practices that disproportionately affect women’s sense of safety, mobility, and belonging (Kern, 2020). Although feminist scholarship has long shown that women’s fear of public space is socially produced and that gender-based violence predominantly occurs during the day, in familiar and populated environments, or behind closed doors, women continue to report heightened vulnerability primarily in unfamiliar public spaces and at night (Bastomski & Smith, 2017; Condon, Lieber & Maillochon, 2007). Addressing this discrepancy between women’s socially structured fears in public space and the actual circumstances under which gender-based violence occurs, this dissertation investigates how women experience public spaces in Milan, Italy, with a comparative focus on the areas surrounding Stazione Centrale and Stazione Garibaldi. Grounded in intersectional feminist theory and informed by multidisciplinary perspectives, the study adopts a participatory feminist methodology aimed at producing situated knowledges able to challenge dominant gender-space paradigms. Data collection involved one year of ethnographic observations, semi-structured in-depth interviews with 38 participants, and focus groups structured around participatory methods such as collective walks, photovoice, photo-elicitation, community and emotional mapping. The dissertation shows that women’s urban lives are shaped less by isolated episodes of violence than by ordinary, socially sedimented forms of anticipatory labour and embodied adjustment, including changes in routes, pace, timing, dress, and companionship. It further shows how discomfort and belonging are coproduced through infrastructures, temporal rhythms, surveillance regimes, moral economies, and embodied negotiations in highly securitised urban environments. Conceptually, the dissertation develops two principal formulations (bodies as portals and the self in motion) while treating fear as a transversal relational orientation that binds bodies, infrastructures, rhythms, and moral economies. Methodologically, it demonstrates both the value and the frictions of participatory feminist research. Its practical-political contribution lies in rethinking urban safety beyond surveillance and control, towards care-centred approaches attentive to reciprocity, legibility, presence, and shared responsibility. In this research, “women” refers to all those who identify as women, were socialised as women, or were assigned female at birth.