Feminist Neighborhood Analysis: Karditsa

Walking through the city together allows hidden experiences to surface. It creates space for voices that are often unheard and for everyday realities to become visible.

Building on our ongoing work in public space, we went to Karditsa, where we designed and facilitated an exploratory walk through a gender perspective, together with students from the Department of One Health at the University of Thessaly.

Exploratory walks are a participatory research practice that centres lived experience. Moving through the city at walking pace, participants reflect on how they navigate public space during the day and at night, which routes they choose, and which places they avoid. Using shared urban quality indicators such as security, accessibility, vitality, infrastructure, and gender representation, participants collectively map how the city feels, not only how it functions.

The walk took place around the university facilities, including the dormitories and the library, places that students use daily and often at night. These familiar routes became sites of collective reflection.

Together, participants identified concrete spatial issues that affected their sense of safety and autonomy, including the lack of adequate lighting, the strong feeling of insecurity it produced, and unreliable public transport connections between the university area and the city centre.

After the walk, we brought together participants’ notes, observations, and suggestions, alongside our own reflections, to create a collective map of the area. The map took the form of a report that documented experiences, highlighted priorities, and made gendered spatial inequalities visible.

The report was shared with participants and collaborators. It was further enriched through feedback and forwarded to local authorities as a tool to support concrete action in the areas studied.