Women and men against Camorra: urban (un)safety, cross-gender collaborations, and collective courage in a mafia-affected city

Research on responses to gendered urban (un)safety and its spatial implications has largely focused on either individual coping strategies or planning and design interventions. Less attention has been paid to how subjects across gender groups may collaboratively respond to their distinctive experiences of insecurity and create shared safety through collective action. This article addresses this gap through a qualitative case study of Ercolano, a Southern Italian city historically shaped by mafia territorial control. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observation, and documentary materials, it examines how self-identifying women and men collectively confronted gender-differentiated fears associated with mafia violence and criminal territorial governance. These dynamics are interpreted through the feminist-informed concept of collective courage. The findings identify three interrelated, recursive socio-spatial practices through which collective courage emerged and shaped the production of space in Ercolano: recognising shared yet unequal urban vulnerabilities; establishing localised, gender-aware forms of mutual support; and anchoring enhanced feelings of communal safety in specific sites. Based on this analysis, the article further develops and geographises the theorising of collective courage, making two key contributions to debates in human geography, urban studies, and feminist theory. First, it conceptualises how collective courage is (re-)produced and becomes operative, and how its entanglements with socio-material environments enable collective action and spatial transformation. Second, it sheds light on how shared urban safety can be generated through grassroots cross-gender mobilisations that restructure both gender power relations and spatial arrangements.