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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how socio-cultural collectives across the Balkans engage urban space through participatory and activist practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it explores interventions and documentation through which residents contest governance and imagine alternative urban futures.

Paper long abstract

Urban development and large-scale planning projects increasingly reshape cities across the Balkans, often through processes of eviction, spatial control, and institutional neglect. Alongside these transformations, socio-cultural collectives engage urban space in ways that challenge dominant models of development and governance. This paper examines how such groups intervene in the city through participatory, activist, and collaborative practices that seek to create alternative forms of urban life. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Space Tetova in North Macedonia, and similar regional initiatives, the paper explores practices such as collective documentation (films, zines, radio shows), temporary interventions in public space, artistic occupations, and everyday strategies of negotiating visibility and access to urban infrastructure. Rather than framing these practices only as resistance, the paper shows how they function as prefigurative experiments that actively produce new social relations, forms of care, and modes of collective organization. The analysis is informed by dialogical and applied anthropological approaches that emphasize collaboration, reflexivity, and engagement in the field. By focusing on how research and activism intersect in these contexts, the paper demonstrates how anthropology can participate in shaping urban processes while generating knowledge together with communities.