“Konn gen tire”: Situated Violence, Lived Space, and Children's Spatial Knowledge in Delmas (Port-au-Prince)

Abstract

Armed violence in Port-au-Prince is reshaping the everyday geographies of children and adolescents. Drawing on interviews with seven participants aged 10 to 17 in the Maïs Gâté area (Delmas, Port-au-Prince), this article examines how violence becomes embedded in children's lived space as an orienting modality that produces thresholds, authorized routes, forbidden zones, and constraints on mobility. The findings are organized around three axes. The first maps a lived cartography of danger through which participants precisely name risk areas and internal boundaries within the neighborhood. The second analyzes play under restriction, where the desire for a space of one's own collides with expulsion by older youths and with adult surveillance. The third examines infrastructural microviolences (mud, waste, darkness, noise) that children identify as degrading conditions of their environment. The article argues that children's spatial knowledge captures a dimension of urban violence that adult and institutional diagnoses tend to overlook: the dispossession of the right to inhabit the city as a child.