Urban Identity in Long-Term Transition: Reclaiming Public Space and Social Infrastructure in Post-Conflict Prishtina

Abstract

Urban identity in long-term transition conceptualizes a condition in which belonging resists stabilization and persists as a permanently unfinished configuration shaped by rupture, memory, and adaptation. This research examines how that condition materializes in post-conflict Prishtina, a bipolar city defined by the coexistence of planned and improvised orders, where everyday life unfolds within overlapping layers of absence, fragmentation, and avoidance. Emerging from the intertwined legacies of socialism, conflict, and neoliberal urbanization, Prishtina exemplifies how social and spatial orders are continually reassembled under the pressures of transition. It understands public space not as an inert setting but as a lived and produced space, where meanings are negotiated, rhythms fractured and renewed, and collective presence continuously reconstituted.

Attuned to the temporalities of urban life, the study draws on rhythmanalysis to explore how Prishtina’s rhythm has long been marked by interruption, shaped by recurring cycles of construction and erasure, planning and abandonment, hope and disillusionment. It follows how inhabitants transform divided and residual environments through gestures of inhabiting, remembering, and repairing. Within a city where the idea of the public has often been fragile, constrained, or displaced into private domains, these gestures trace the slow re-emergence of collective agency. In such acts of endurance, the urban becomes both archive and horizon, a field where memory, loss, and renewal coexist in fragile balance.

Through close engagement with local practices, the research examines how the production of space under prolonged instability exposes the capacity of citizens to sustain continuity within discontinuity and to articulate belonging within conditions of flux. By linking embodied experience with the politics of spatial justice, the project examines how public space and social infrastructures mediate identity in contexts of unresolved transition. It develops urban identity in long-term transition as both an analytical framework and a lived reality, arguing that cities shaped by rupture regenerate meaning not through restoration or closure but through the continuous work of inhabiting, caring, and reimagining the shared urban condition.