Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how city spaces of Prishtina, Kosovo's capital, are used and given meaning in the uncertainties of everyday life, given a development structured by the intertwined forces of international political control, transnational migration and an expanding and demanding global capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

This paper attempts to ethnographically explore how city spaces of Prishtina, Kosovo's capital, are used and given meaning by residents in the situatedness and uncertainty of their everyday lives, given the changes marking the city in the last decade.

In 2008, nearly ten years as a UN protectorate after the war with Serbia, Kosovo was declared an independent state. To celebrate and commemorate this historic, yet controversial, event a new kind of monument was erected near the popular Yugoslav shopping mall - huge yellow block letters forming the word NEWBORN, in English. This greatly differs from the imposing statue of the Albanian medieval hero Skanderbeu in the center of Prishtina, mounted on his horse as if in retrieval of the city, and the land, that was once lost to the Ottoman empire. More importantly, it signifies a retrieval from recent Serbian rule. Nearby, rises the modernistic Yugoslav monument of Brotherhood and Unity, stretching its symbolic fingers as it stands on the fringe of the old renown bazaar, demolished during the Socialist era.

Bearing such diverse politicized insignia of its history, Prishtina has nonetheless developed with little or no state regulation in terms of urban planning. There is instead an ongoing frenzy of building projects in all directions, a development structured by the intertwined forces of international political control, local and transnational migration and an expanding and demanding global capitalism. The question then is how the diverging practices of everyday life unfold in this city at this point of its political history.