‘You Can Be Lonely in a Crowd’

Abstract

Safety for women in cities does not flow directly from institutional or infrastructural factors but has to be strategically produced. This paper explores women’s negotiations with risk and danger in creating ‘space’ for themselves in public. It examines particularly how class and religious identities have an impact on women’s access to public space. The paper also seeks to examine the everyday worlds of women accessing public space and to interrogate the binaries of safety–violence, risk–rationality and respectability–non-respectability, and to challenge the assumptions on which they are based.