Managing the Self: The ‘invisible work’ of British Muslim women in maintaining safety in public spaces

Abstract

This paper explores the socio-spatial dynamics of safety for Muslim women who wear the hijab in Western urban public spaces. Integrating critical interdisciplinary studies, it extends debates on urban planning to include the ‘invisible work’ of identity management. We demonstrate how Muslim women tactically negotiate their identity and safety, adapting their appearance and behaviour in response to their environment and status, both as minorities and women. Taking East London as its case study, and drawing on interviews with twenty-two Muslim women, our findings indicate that spatial interventions like clear sight lines and community spaces intended to enhance safety and inclusivity cannot sufficiently address the ingrained political, cultural and social biases that generate insecurity. While recognizing the limits on the outcomes of planning, we build on calls for a more phenomenological approach to planning for public space. We argue that integrating cultural diversity and fostering inclusion demands a broader understanding of ‘safety’: one that recognizes the complex ways in which minority communities experience urban spaces. To achieve this, we focus on the importance of planners being more sensitive to intersectionality to engage more fully with power dynamics that inform a sense of safety in public space.

Introduction

“And our bodies, learning the habit of careful deportment in public places, speak to us steadily and clearly, saying, you are not free.”

Griffin, 2015: 77

The growing presence and juxtaposition of diversity in Western countries presents policymakers with the challenge of catering to increasingly complex needs (Raco, 2018). While some call for an inclusion-oriented radical reframing of the state-citizen relationship (Clarke and Newman, 2012), others view diversity as an organic and essential feature of contemporary urban life (Delanty, 2012). In urban public spaces, the pursuit of safety – understood as a socially constructed and politically contested terrain (see section 2.3 below) – in the context of such growing diversity has emerged as an established topic of discussion over the last two decades. Existing literature highlights the importance of safe, accessible public spaces for people’s wellbeing (Navarrete-Hernandez et al., 2021), outlining benefits ranging from improved mental health and heightened feelings of belonging to social inclusion and physical health improvements (Anderson et al., 2017; Cattell et al., 2008; Giddings et al., 2011). Despite the proven advantages of such spaces and increasing interest in advocating for them, concerns around unequal access to safety in urban spaces for certain groups, particularly women and minority groups, continue to present a challenge for planners (Cattell et al., 2008; Soraganvi, 2017). Recent examples of how planners might build a sense of safety into public space include Pereira and Malcata Rebelo (2024), who take a phenomenological approach to unpack women’s experiences and produce a checklist for planners and other urban professionals when designing public space, and Talen (2019) who talks to planning practice more generally when she critiques historical approaches to neighbourhood planning as being overly focused on the provision of fixed forms and insufficiently attuned to the ways in which people generate and maintain a sense of place.

While Pereira and Malcata Rebelo (2024) understandably seek to support planners in delivering ‘solutions’ through the built form, such approaches still do not address underlying structural problems, such as male violence against women or racism. Indeed, regarding the latter, Holman et al. (2023) show that residents’ sense of safety in public space is more significantly linked to the presence of ethnic minority persons in shared public space rather than to its design. This is because public spaces do not exist in a vacuum. As Lee and Yeoh (2004) argue, “places are actively forged as products of inclusion and exclusion” and by “power struggles” across a range of actors and scales (p. 2296). Therefore, while there is a history of planning interventions seeking social mix (Casey, 2016) these must not lose sight of the ‘bigger’ social context in which they seek to intervene. Planning cannot solve all the wrongs of the society in which it operates.

While recognizing limits on the outcomes of planning, we push further the potential of a phenomenological approach while underscoring the importance of planners being sensitive to intersectionality (Dubey et al., 2025), where this can produce a more critical planning practice, encouraging planners to advocate for changes beyond built form interventions. We develop our case by drawing on the experiences of a group of Muslim women who wear the hijab and who are therefore readily identifiable in public spaces as persons of faith. While our participants all identified as Muslim women who wear the hijab, we acknowledge that Muslim women are not a homogenous group. Their experiences are shaped by diverse intersecting factors including ethnicity, class, migration history, age, and religious interpretation (Cooke, 2007; Dwyer, 1999a). Our research design and analysis are attentive to these differences and do not seek to generalize across all Muslim-identifying women.

For Muslim communities across the Western world, 9/11 marked a significant turning point in the politicization of public spaces. The hijab (head-covering) and the niqab (face-covering) have since come to symbolize more than a religious status for the women who wear them. Instead, the image of the veiled Muslim woman has “become interchangeable with essentialist notions of ethnicity, traditionalism, and religion” (Mirza, 2013: 100), as well as featuring heavily in literature exploring the everyday embodiment of Islamophobia amongst Muslim women (e.g., Gorman and Culcasi, 2021; McGinty, 2020). Taking a closer look at clothing practices and identity, geographers from the feminist and emotional traditions have explored the role of certain clothing practices in shaping/affecting Muslim women’s experiences of public/private spaces (Afshar, 2008; Dwyer, 1999a, 1999b; Hopkins, 2006; Johnson, 2017). Further still, Bibi (2022) analyses how, marked by religious differences, Muslim women’s experiences of public spaces can be understood through what Du Bois (1903) terms ‘Double Consciousness’. By dividing the self into two, Muslim women perceive how they are viewed, and through this perception dictate how they interact with the world.

This paper critically extends the discourse on Muslim women’s experiences in public spaces by emphasizing the imperative for a deeper understanding of safety and inclusion in policy and planning. We argue that current studies have not fully addressed the intricate dynamics of identity management in public spaces, a crucial aspect of safety and security for Muslim women, both beyond and within their communities. In this paper, we use ‘identity management’ to describe a set of embodied, situational practices through which Muslim women regulate their self-presentation in response to perceived risk and surveillance – practices that are simultaneously protective, constrained, and productive of particular Muslim femininities. Our study’s innovation lies in unravelling the vital, yet often overlooked, ‘invisible work’ of identity management that Muslim women who wear the hijab engage in as they seek to enhance their safety in public spaces. Importantly, we recognise the hijab as a highly visible and politicised symbol, frequently racialised in both policy and public discourse (Gokariksel and Secor, 2009; Mohammed, 2013). As our participants moved through various public and institutional spaces in London, the form and visibility of their veiling practices significantly shaped how they were perceived and treated, underscoring how urban safety and visibility are embedded within broader racialised and gendered structures of power. As such, our research contributes significantly to understanding the utility of planning and designing for multicultural cities. It highlights the unique ways in which Muslim women negotiate and manage their identities as a strategic response to not only inadequacies in safety and security provisions in public environments, but also to the multi-faceted challenges they face as Muslim women. This exploration adds depth to the existing body of knowledge, calling for policymakers and urban planners to work more closely with the fine grain of intersectionality when seeking to create more inclusive, secure, and responsive urban spaces for minority communities.

Literature review

This study of Muslim women’s negotiations of safety, identity and the self in public spaces draws upon three distinct but overlapping fields in literature: the conceptualization of safety in public spaces, urban design for safety, and the otherization of visibly racial/religious bodies in urban space.

Urban design & experiences of safety

To understand the relationship between urban design and experiences of safety, it is necessary to interrogate what is meant by ‘safety’ and who it is for. Fundamentally, safety can be conceived as a state of being in which any risk of emotional, physical or other danger, loss or injury is absent. Thus, safety is often contrasted with fear, which is replete with uncertainty and threat. Questioning the underlying logics of public safety, Sjöberg and Nygren (2021) ask what or who constitutes the imagined ‘threat’ and how this informs the policing and production of urban space. Indeed, they argue that safety is a political technology through which urban design and policing strategies are justified, often by mobilizing racial, ethnic, and class-based fears. However, as England and Simon (2010) argue, safety is not a neutral or universally accessible condition. As a socially constructed and politically contested terrain it is filled with power relations and other sources of social, economic and cultural imbalances. Taken together, these debates demonstrate that experiences of safety in public space cannot be reduced to design features alone, but are shaped through wider relations of power, visibility, and social difference, which are unequally experienced across gendered and racialized bodies.

Urban design and gender

One of the most persistent axes through which power and inequality shape experiences of safety in public space is gender. Existing efforts to explore and address gendered experiences of safety in urban spaces have led researchers to ask diverse questions including what kinds of spaces are more likely to evoke fear among women (Fisher and Nasar, 1992; Min et al., 2022) and how do women alter their use of urban spaces to minimize the risk of physical assault/danger (Valentine, 1989)? These studies reveal significant gender disparities in perceived safety, resulting in a constrained and fear-mediated use of urban spaces (Ferraro, 1996; Fujita et al., 2004; Jiang et al., 2017). A liberal turn in city development over recent decades has seen gender mainstreaming in planning policy, reflected in initiatives to create safer cities for women (Lacey et al., 2013), including design interventions in key spots identified as unsafe and exclusionary such as better-lit routes, human scale lighting, wider sightlines, and balancing ecological interests with safety measures for women during the night-time (ARUP & London Legacy Development Corporation, 2022).

However, a focus on gender as the single axis of oppression has been criticised for falling short of transforming women’s everyday experiences of exclusion and safety, especially in the context of increasingly multicultural cities (Lacey et al., 2013; Vertovec, 2007). Indeed, the growing presence of socio-cultural diversity in Western countries has shaped new ‘social imaginaries’ (Raco, 2018; Vertovec, 2007), prompting people, governments and policymakers to rethink how women understand their social existence and relationships with others. As Taylor (2004: 23) puts it, these social imaginaries involve “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others... the expectations that are normally met and the deeper normative images that underlie these expectations.”

Intersectionality: Muslim women in urban spaces

In this context, intersectionality has been widely espoused as a framework to reorient urban safety discourse by exposing how multiple, intersecting systems of power – such as racism, sexism, classism, and xenophobia – mutually constitute exclusion in urban space (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Rather than simply adding nuance to a gendered lens, intersectionality challenges the adequacy of single axis approaches and demands that analysis and policy recognise how oppression is experienced differently across complex social positions. This builds upon prior efforts to extend gender mainstreaming in planning to address diversity (Lacey et al., 2013) offering a more critical framework rooted in structural transformation.

Crenshaw’s (1989, 1991) foundational work on intersectionality is frequently misrepresented as primarily concerned with identity. In fact, it presents a radical reframing of how power operates – insisting on accounting for interlocking systems of oppression as they are experienced simultaneously. This structural reading of intersectionality moves beyond adding nuance to models of identity, and instead demands that research and policy be fundamentally reoriented to expose and challenge the multiple, overlapping forces that structure social and spatial exclusion.

In the urban context, Valentine (2007) has critiqued the widespread appropriation of intersectionality as a language of cultural identity, arguing instead that intersectionality must be grounded in an analysis of the spatial and institutional arrangements that produce exclusion. She highlights how urban spaces are not merely backdrops to identity but are actively involved in ordering whose presence is normalized and whose is marginalized. Spatial orderings – whether produced through design, surveillance, or tacit norms of belonging – re-inscribe dominant relations of power and generate moments of fear, alienation and/or violence for those cast as ‘other’.

In multicultural cities, where social imaginaries are fluid and sometimes contradictory, these spatial dynamics become particularly acute. As Raco (2018) and Delanty (2012) argue, imaginaries of diversity are shaped by both empirical conditions and symbolic interpretations of difference, which influence how space is governed, experienced, and contested. In some contexts, planners and policymakers have responded by designing in elements that encourage multicultural cohesion through interventions such as community spaces and inclusive participatory processes (Casey, 2016). In others, multiculturalism has become almost ubiquitous with some cities seeing themselves as mixed societies of people from diverse cultures and ethnicities, living out their everyday lives in a melting pot of races, creeds and identities (Raco, 2018).

Muslim women, particularly those who wear the hijab, often find themselves at the intersection of these structural forces. Their experiences are often shaped by broader patterns of Islamophobia and racialization, as well as gendered expectations within their own communities. Pioneering work by Dwyer (1999a; 1999b), Ahmed (2003) and Hopkins (2006) showed how veiled Muslim women must negotiate competing pressures to represent respectable Muslim femininity within their communities while managing their visibility as ‘othered’ subjects in majority white spaces. These scholars documented how religious dress becomes a flashpoint for conflicting social demands, leading to complex spatial strategies of self-presentation and avoidance. More recent work by Bibi (2022) and Muftee (2023) has extended these insights to newer contexts and generations, reaffirming the continuing salience of these negotiations in contemporary urban life.

Research has also documented the spatialized effects of anti-Muslim racism and structural violence. Listerborn (2016) highlights how urban planning discourses often fail to capture the racialized and gendered geographies of fear experienced by Muslim women, such as those attacked while wearing the hijab in Malmö in 2008–09. Similarly, Shaker et al. (2022) and Johnson and Miles (2014) demonstrate how Muslim women alter their behaviour and routes in response to social readings of danger, suspicion, or community surveillance.

Taken together, these studies expose the need to move beyond accounts of Muslim women’s safety that frame them either as passive victims or as culturally constrained actors. Instead, as Dwyer, Hopkins, Bibi, and Muftee each demonstrate, Muslim women actively engage in identity management as a form of spatial negotiation. These practices cannot be understood solely through cultural explanations. They must be located within intersecting systems of power – spatial, racial, gendered, and religious – that shape the constraints and possibilities of public life.

Safety, then, is not simply the absence of harm. For Muslim women, it is also about managing honour, modesty, and social respectability within their communities. As Dwyer (1999a, 1999b) and Muftee (2023) demonstrate, Muslim women engage in complex forms of social navigation, simultaneously responding to racialized surveillance in majority-white spaces and communal expectations of propriety and respectability. Van Es (2019) and Werbner (2007) similarly show how the hijab becomes a symbol through which broader moral, religious, and national narratives are projected and contested. Here, Du Bois’s (1903) concept of ‘double consciousness’ is useful not as a general theory of identity, but as a way of understanding how participants navigate being simultaneously subject and object, insider and outsider, in public space, continually monitoring how they are seen while attempting to maintain a sense of self. Muslim women’s strategies of dress, speech, comportment, and movement are thus not only forms of identity expression, but also critical tactics for negotiating both safety and belonging. Their ‘invisible work’ – that is, the background labour of risk assessment, spatial calculation, and self-monitoring – functions as a form of urban expertise born of exclusion.

Building on this body of literature, our paper investigates how veiled Muslim women in contemporary urban contexts negotiate these intersecting systems of power. We argue that their practices of identity management are not simply reactive, but are actively contributing to the social production of urban space in ways that planning discourses have yet to fully acknowledge. By centring these experiences, we aim to challenge narrow constructions of safety and advocate for more inclusive, structurally aware approaches to urban design and policy.

Methodology

This paper explores how Muslim women experience safety in public spaces, and how these perceptions inform a complex and dynamic process of identity management. We investigate three central research questions: In what ways do perceptions of safety shift for Muslim women in public spaces? Within these spaces, what elements - beyond the physical design of the urban environment - shape these perceptions? And how do Muslim women who wear the hijab engage in identity management as a means of negotiating safety and security in public contexts?

Research design

To address these questions, we conducted twenty-two in-depth, semi-structured interviews with hijab-wearing Muslim women living in East London. Participants ranged, primarily, from their early 20s to late 30s and represented a mix of life stages. ¹ They were recruited through open outreach and snowball sampling at local mosques, community centres, and women’s organisations in Ilford and Mile End, areas with large, diverse Muslim populations. We included women from various ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Bengali, Pakistani, Somali) without restricting by migration status. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and thematically analysed in NVivo, using codes developed both inductively (from the data) and deductively (from existing literature and frameworks).

Twelve participants also chose to undertake walking interviews in their neighbourhoods. Led by participants, these walks complemented the sit-down interviews by enabling reflection on specific spatial encounters, memories, and bodily experiences. Walking interviews were selected for their capacity to elicit embodied narratives and participant-led spatial engagement. As Kinney (2017) and King and Woodroffe (2019) argue, such interviews foster a relational, spatialised engagement that highlights the affective and material geographies of urban life. This dual-format approach aligned with our aim to centre both personal and contextual dynamics in perceptions and negotiations of safety.

Building trust with participants required time and sensitivity. Interviews were conducted by the lead author (a Pakistani Muslim who does not wear the hijab) and a trained research assistant (a Pakistani Muslim who does). Differences in ethnicity (as most participants were not Pakistani) and geographic embeddedness (since we did not live in the study sites) influenced initial perceptions. The interplay of similarity and difference – especially around wearing the hijab – produced complex dynamics of affinity and distance. These encounters underscored the need to view “Muslim women” not as a homogenous group but as individuals shaped by intersecting axes of race, class, migration, gender expression, and religious interpretation. Our research design embraced this complexity, guided by an explicitly feminist and decolonial commitment to reflexivity and situated knowledge (England, 1994). Trust was also a factor in the take-up of the walking interviews. While some participants expressed practical constraints such as time limitations or concerns about the weather, others were more hesitant about being seen in public participating in the research. These responses underscored the very issues of spatial exposure, identity management, and safety that this project seeks to understand.

Results

“Am I safe?”/Perceptions of safety

The relationship between one’s perception of safety and spatial practices within an urban setting is mutually constitutive and on-going (Jabareen et al., 2019). Examining this relationship offers insight into how public spaces are experienced differently based on factors such as race, gender, class, etc. (England and Simon, 2010; Tulumello, 2020; Valentine, 1989). Jabareen et al. (2019) refer to the analysis of this phenomenon as the drawing of a unique and multi-layered socio-spatial map of the city: one that reveals the multiplicity of experiences present within a given public space. This paper finds that Muslim women in London maintain unique, multi-layered socio-spatial maps through a complex reading of public spaces and a series of careful adjustments to mitigate their vulnerability. Addressing the first half of this statement, we found that perceptions of safety were based on two main factors: Design features and being identified as Muslim.

As expected, and outlined in existing literature, the presence of design features such as open spaces, good lighting, the presence of other people etc. contributed to making Muslim women feel safer in public spaces, including crowded spaces:

“I would like the area to be quite open, busy, well lit up and there needs to be people around, it shouldn’t be secluded, things like that…” (Participant 10, age 23).

Relatedly, eight out of the 12 interviewees who opted for the walking component pointed out specific spatial features that invoked fear and anxiety, particularly at night:

“That alleyway just around the corner there (points to the alleyway), I wouldn’t walk alongside that even though it’s near the main street. It’s very dangerous because you are completely blocked off from the side view: from the view of the main road. And once you do walk into there, it would be just you and the person who has ill intentions towards you” (Participant 12, age 21).

Further, echoing Kelling and Wilson’s (1982) Broken Window’s theory, our interviewees also referred to well-maintained spaces as a feature of urban space that improved their perception of safety by discouraging anti-social behaviour:

“I think what contributes is cleaner space as well. Clean attracts fewer people of antisocial behaviour, I would say” (Participant 16, age 32).

But, of course, the opposite was true as well:

“...Because there’s so much graffiti and vandalism, when I walk through that market, I feel more unsafe, just because of the general environment: it’s dark, it’s dim, it's run down, there’s graffiti, there’s broken glass. It’s not a very nice area. It’s not pleasant to walk through, and it’s a lot more likely to attract crime just because of its appearance” (Participant 11, age 21).

Certainly, such experiences validate current academic rationale around safety in public spaces. However, some of our findings directly challenge existing discourses. For example, regarding the tense relationship between surveillance and minority communities in the West (Lowe et al., 2017), eight of our interviewees expressed a preference for CCTV cameras and police presence while navigating public spaces. Despite an abundance of research on fears of racialization and discrimination through police surveillance, these women mentioned feeling safer in spaces where CCTV cameras and/or police personnel were visible:

“[For me] it depends on police presence, like, whether you can see any law enforcement or anything that would deter people from doing anything to you” (Participant 1, age 21).

Conversely, the absence of police and cameras made them feel more vulnerable to attack:

“It’s also… when there’s a lack of police presence and cameras, you wouldn’t feel safe walking around” (ibid).

Additionally, two interviewees mentioned gentrification as a ‘positive’ phenomenon that ‘cleaned up’ run-down areas and brought important changes, like the ‘middle-classes’, which made them ‘feel safer’. On the other hand, despite acknowledging the need for green spaces as sources of health and wellbeing in urban environments, echoing Sreetheran and van den Bosch‘s (2014) enjoinder, our interviewees expressed safety concerns regarding the potential coverage that greenery might provide attackers:

“I think the greenery is good for health, mental health”, said one interviewee. “But in terms of safety: a lot of things can happen especially in spaces like parks. I wouldn’t choose to walk through the park. No.” (Participant 13, age 21).

In addition to design elements, Muslim women’s perceptions of safety were based on real-time readings of how they were being perceived by others. And for all our interviewees, their hijab most strongly identifies them as Muslim. Indeed, every interviewee articulated that how they felt they were being perceived in public altered their engagement with urban public spaces, as well as their own perceptions of others. For instance, our interviewees’ awareness of being perceived as Muslim was most commonly associated with the ethnic and/or religious composition of the area they were in, especially when they felt part of a minority. The women often felt they were being perceived as objects of fear in spaces that were predominantly white, and that this perception felt like it was based on negative dominant narratives around Muslims in the media, which in turn made the women wary of the white majority. Moreover, the range of aggressive behaviours that our interviewees face as Muslim women goes beyond physical and verbal abuse, such as strangers shouting at them or pulling off their hijabs, which happens all too frequently. They also involve ‘micro-aggressions’ like strange looks and people jumping away in fear, as Participant 12 (age 21) explained:

“It’s mainly stares or just shoving, and people moving off to the side. But it’s not moving off to the side to give way: it’s jumping out the way because they are scared to see you. It’s sad when this happens.”

The heightened awareness amongst Muslim women of such negative perceptions and reactions problematizes our understanding of safety in public spaces. Seen as objects of fear – the perceived ‘other’ in majority non-Muslim spaces – Muslim women’s sense of safety is closely linked to a range of cues, some more subtle than others, that indicate how they are being perceived. Thus, although the design, planning and maintenance of public spaces and buildings can either increase or decrease one’s sense of belonging and security in a given space, a more nuanced approach to safety must involve understanding these “moments of political and personal trouble” to help prevent crimes against more vulnerable groups.

In response to such design and non-design-based factors, our interviewees employed various strategies to mitigate their vulnerability in public spaces. Echoing strategies that have been studied in relation to women in general (Franck and Paxson, 1989) they most frequently adjusted their use of urban spaces based on temporality and the presence of other people. The women described largely avoiding public spaces at night, with 18 of our 22 respondents preferring to remain at home during darkness or choosing to use buses and Ubers instead of walking. However, based also on their identification as objects of fear and targets for assault, as Muslim women they additionally employed strategies that shifted the ways they navigated public spaces more generally, including: tightening their hijabs when out in public, standing close to railings when heading into stations, avoiding walking near platforms, and generally making sure there were ‘no loose ends’. As Participant 8 (age 24) typically explained:

“What I do with all this is, I stay aware of these situations, especially when I’m on the train. They say to stand behind the yellow line, right? But, after knowing what’s been happening recently [recent attacks], I stand further back – near the wall – because you never know if you might be randomly attacked. And I feel like, even hearing just one thing on the news – it stays with you.”

Such heightened sense of awareness in public spaces was accompanied by other pre-emptive strategies, like taking self-defence courses, and a careful mapping of routes:

“The first thing I think about is, “Oh my God, that woman’s going to pull my hijab off”. So, you know, I’m like, “Refrain! Refrain!” I did kickboxing for four years. So, that’s also a shield for me. Like, if someone comes and attacks me, then I’ll straight away do some kickboxing moves on them” (Participant 16, age 32).

In addition, our interviewees expressed a clear preference for familiarity and community networks. They predominantly lived in areas where their own ethnicity and religious community was present; and they preferred this, citing reasons such as having a common culture, understanding each other, not standing out and feeling like they had people they could turn to. Safety and a sense of community were mostly mutually reinforcing, as Participant 10 (age 23) detailed as we walked through her neighbourhood:

“Even on our way here, there are so many houses I know, people I know, people who are part of the community. If there was an issue along the way, I could just knock and let someone know. There are loads of points where I could ask for help.”

Although such measures certainly did not guarantee their safety, the resulting sense of ‘belonging’ contributed to easing the fear and anxiety that was felt in majority white spaces. Interviewees also appreciated seeing other Muslim women who were wearing the hijab in public spaces:

“As ‘hijabis’, we have this unspoken, not rule, but, this thing we do. We just keep an eye out for each other, which is quite nice. It's like a sense of support. It’s something we do for each other” (Participant 8, age 24).

Importantly, beyond shaping their own spatial practices, participants’ strategies also contributed to the social production of safety infrastructures in East London. Our interviewees repeatedly described relying on a network of familiar, publicly accessible places - such as libraries, shops, cafés and community facilities - as informal refuges when feeling unsafe. These everyday practices of route selection, place avoidance, and reliance on known ‘safe’ interiors cumulatively helped to shape how public space was used, valued, and navigated. Indeed, such practices did not remain solely at the level of individual adaptation. Some participants described how experiences of harassment, threat, and fear were shared within families, peer networks, and community organisations (such as London Citizens), contributing to wider discussions about women’s safety in public space and informing local safety initiatives, including community-based ‘safe space’ approaches in the area. In this way, Muslim women’s practices of navigating risk operated not only as responses to insecurity but as part of a broader, relational process through which urban safety is negotiated and governed. As such, the distinction between the safety derived from design interventions and the safety based on a perceived sense of ‘belonging’ cannot be ignored.

The work of safety: As the other

Muslim women’s perceptions of safety in public spaces, the factors that contribute to these perceptions, and the strategies that emerge in response to them reveal a complex socio-spatial interaction in public spaces. Although safety strategies such as avoiding certain spaces at night, preferring to be accompanied, and heightened awareness of oneself and others can be ascribed to women as a broader category, we find that a closer look at veiled Muslim women’s use of public spaces introduces significant nuance. Similar to the strategies employed by women in urban spaces to ensure their safety, minority ethnic and religious groups alter how they navigate the city to at least partly mitigate the fears associated with routinely being read as ‘strangers’ (Shaker et al., 2022). These fears include physical and non-physical violence in the form of hate crimes, micro-aggressions, verbal assaults etc. (see also, Pain, 2001; Pain and Cahill, 2022). For Muslim women who wear the hijab, these fears manifest as a complex mix of identity management and spatial negotiations. We refer to this as the ‘invisible work’ of maintaining safety. Perhaps the most significant aspect of this invisible work, with 19 of our 22 interviewees mentioning this, was how Muslim women altered their behaviour to present themselves in ways that were read as polite and civil when in public spaces that were predominantly white, to counteract being read as a source of threat. These practices are best understood not as freely chosen performances, but as forms of compelled self-presentation undertaken in response to racialised and gendered risk (cf. Butler, 1993, on ‘constrained performance’, and Ahmed, 2003, on fear and ‘bodily orientation’). While Bibi (2022) uses Du Bois’ (1903) theory of double consciousness to highlight such identity management as a means by which Muslim women (both veil-wearing and not) navigate their everyday lives, our study takes this further by underscoring the spatial element of safety. Not only was the invisible work of projecting themselves as non-threatening in majority non-Muslim spaces undertaken to present a positive image of Islam. Personal safety in public space was of primary concern.

“I have to change myself even more when I travel out to these places. I’m a bit kinder to people. I enunciate my words even better to show them that I’m not a ‘foreign threat’. So … I speak proper English, automatically… And I’m a lot more socially aware of what is going on around me, because anyone can come up behind me, threaten me or anything like that” (Participant 12, age 21).

In this way, urban spaces become restricted for Muslim women in invisible ways – their ability to make mistakes, express certain emotions, and exhibit certain behaviours is mediated by a fear of exposing themselves to danger because they might be perceived as ‘threatening’. Thus, they effectively become hyper-visibly invisible (Bibi, 2022): immediately recognizable as Muslim by their clothing even as their work of safety and representation is rendered invisible. These changes in behaviour reflect a complex four-way interaction with, reading of, and response to being present in public spaces as a Muslim woman wearing identifiable religious attire. This invisible work of safety maintenance begins with an acute social and spatial awareness of any given space and its inhabitants, with the ability to keep oneself safe dependent on how well urban spaces are examined for potential threats in real-time. One participant recalled how, in 2019, when a white supremacist group circulated letters calling for an ‘Attack a Muslim’ day in London, she was advised by friends and family to thoroughly scan the public transport/public spaces she was in to gauge how people were reacting to her so as not to be caught off guard. She was also told to avoid falling asleep on public transport so that she could maintain this awareness of her space. Although such strategies allowed our interviewees to feel a sense of control over their safety, they also created a barrier between the women and the politicized spaces they were in. This barrier left them feeling like they could not be themselves in majority non-Muslim spaces.

“I’m always conscious to be on my extra best behaviour. I’m not able to be myself. I’m not saying that I always have to be a different person, of course; but I do feel like I can’t make a silly, stupid mistake because, you know, the consequences would be different” (Participant 4, age 38).

Taking this invisible work to maintain safety further, Muslim women who wore the hijab (especially younger women) mentioned altering the way they dressed to be perceived as more ‘Western’; for example, by switching out their abaya for a loose dress or wearing a blouse to work to be more professional.

Some participants reflected on the tension between expectations of professional dress and religious modesty, highlighting how norms of workplace attire remain implicitly racialised and gendered (McDowell, 1997; Lewis, 2015). These insights echo broader debates on Islamic fashion, where women actively negotiate between faith, identity, and aesthetics in contexts shaped by both consumerism and surveillance (Gokariksel and Secor, 2011; Tarlo, 2007).

“So, I stopped wearing it (the hijab) when I first started working in Central London, and I was the only hijabi in the whole building,” explained Participant 8 (age 24). “It did feel weird… I felt so out of place, you know? And it was an engineering company, so it was mainly male too! I felt quite uncomfortable, like, ‘oh no, do I seem too religious here?’ ...So I was like, okay, I don't want to wear this. Let me buy some work clothes, work dresses, work shirts and stuff like that. So, I went and bought some. It felt… I felt a bit strange; but at the same, I felt a whole lot more comfortable as well.”

Such grappling with one’s internal feelings about the adjustment of clothing to increase feelings of safety and comfort was something expressed by each of our interviewees, most of whom had adjusted, or would adjust, their clothing if they felt it was necessary, based on factors such as time of day, location and ethnic composition of the area. However, whilst some emerged feeling emotionally ‘secure’ about their personal choices, others experienced emotional distress. For example, while one woman casually explained her choice to wear Western clothes to work as ‘a practical decision’ to feel more comfortable, another described, with regret, removing her face veil before university for fear of being treated badly. For some respondents, such emotional distress was purely personal. Altering their clothing to better fit in with the white majority went against their personal values in some way. For others, the mixed reactions they received from within of their Muslim community were also a source of distress. Similar to Johnson and Miles’ (2014) findings in their study of Muslim women in New York, some of our interviewees described how, for instance, some older Muslim women looked down on such assimilation strategies, which were perceived as a shift away from religious and cultural norms.

Still further, layered into these different emotional responses were explanations of diverse motivations, with safety in public spaces being at the forefront in the vast majority of cases, whether explicitly or implicitly. For instance, on top of adjusting their clothing to maintain their immediate personal safety, some respondents also did this to represent their religion in a positive light to ‘outsiders’ – e.g., wearing a brighter-coloured hijab, or a fusion of traditional and Western clothing (see also McGinty, 2020). Again, this pressure to counteract preconceived notions about Islam produced an additional factor for visibly identifiable Muslim women to consider and carry with them. As Muftee (2023) argues, this burden of representation can be understood as an additional form of ‘othering’ – a sentiment that was echoed by our interviewees:

“I do feel pressure to represent Islam because I wear the hijab,” said Participant 2 (age 38). “If I'm in public and a child drops something or someone needs help, you feel responsible. Like you need to take that moment to show people that your religion and your culture are peaceful, and they teach you to do good. It feels like everything I do is being monitored. Like if I do something, people will tell others: “That Muslim lady did X”. And that changes the way they think of the religion as a whole.”

Another respondent described the pressures she felt to undertake this invisible work due to her religious visibility, noting how people put things together to form a stereotypical ‘other’:

“Whenever I’m leaving my home, I feel like, because of the hijab that I’m wearing, I have to show Muslims in a good light. I tend to be a lot kinder to people and strangers and especially when I come across white British people. Because of the media they watch they may have an unconscious bias against Muslim people, so I want to try to beat that stereotype so that when they go home that day, they can say, ‘Oh I met a nice Muslim lady today!’” (Participant 12, age 21).

Negative mainstream representations of Muslims, coupled with rising tension towards those perceived as foreigners, position Muslim women as either, “suspects, potential extremists, or invisible as victims of overt patriarchy” (Bibi, 2022: 639). In light of such views, Muslim women mentioned feeling a strong sense of responsibility to align their actions and words with positive representations of their religious community. Importantly, although some of our interviewees expressed frustration at having to carry the burden of such representations, others took pride in their ability to change the way people thought about their religion. As Participant 12 explained:

“To others it’s a negative identification, but to myself it’s a very positive one. I’m not ashamed or embarrassed of who I am. In fact, I would proudly claim, shout, scream that I am Muslim.”

For this respondent, her capacity to remain positive about the invisible worked she undertook was in recognising the ignorance and futility that often underlies such ‘othering’:

“For you to feel scared, threatened, anything like that”, she explained, “then that’s your problem, because I know I’m not here as a threat. I’m not here as a danger to you at all! I’m just here as another normal human being who chooses to follow a different religion: who chooses to clothe herself a bit more.”

Despite varying reactions to being perceived as the ‘other’, almost every participant felt an immediate awareness of this othering. Safety, and the politics of fear, then become politically loaded concepts that are closely tied to perceptions of who is seen as different in social contexts i.e., racial, ethnic, economic differences (Fanghanel, 2016; Holman et al., 2023).

The work of safety: Within the community

Taking this discussion around identity management and safety forward, our final set of findings reveals an additional layer of complexity in the context of Muslim women within their communities. Building upon Bibi (2022) and Muftee’s (2023) work on intra-community pressures altering how Muslim women who wear the hijab interact with public spaces, we seek greater nuance through a broader notion of safety. Expanding our understanding of safety to include the ability to navigate spaces in Muslim majority spaces without fear of reprisal, harm to one’s reputation, sense of belonging, and expression of self, complicates intra-community dynamics in Muslim communities. This final set of findings take us furthest from the ability of planning directly to intervene but, nevertheless can further attune planners to the complex relationship between people place and safety (similarly, see Jarvis et al., 2001). Although, as mentioned in previous sections, Muslim women expressed a preference for their cultural and religious community in terms of feeling safe, the experience of being visibly Muslim in such areas had its own set of consequences for our interviewees’ safety. This included representing the self to their ethnic and religious community, with participants mentioning a pressure to conform to the ideal of the ‘Good Muslim Woman’. This ideal was experienced as a spatial construct: one that dictated how the women appeared, where and when they were seen, who they were with, and what they were doing in public spaces. Muslim women in Muslim-majority areas, particularly young adults, felt surveilled and judged on the basis of traditional and religious norms.

“There’s a definition of the ‘Good Muslim Woman’ everywhere,” noted Participant 13 (age 21), “and here it’s mainly if you wear the scarf; you shouldn’t have any makeup on; you should be wearing modest clothing: and by modest they mean the abaya. Usually, your skin shouldn’t be showing....”

But the definition of the ‘Good Muslim Woman’ goes deeper than just attire:

“…And you shouldn’t be talking to any guys, even if it’s professionally. You shouldn’t be seen around the area doing that because people will just spread rumours. Even the other day, I met someone from uni, in this area. Everyone was just staring. Even though he’s completely different to me, he doesn’t look like me, he’s not Asian: he’s Malaysian! He just lives in this area as an international student. So, for me it was normal because he’s from uni. But in this area, there’s definitely like, you know, ‘that’s not what an ideal Muslim does’. So that adds a lot of pressure as well.”

From varying opinions on what constitutes true modesty to moral judgments around social interactions, the above quote depicts some of the expectations Muslim women feel within their communities. In response to such intra-community pressure, our interviewees engaged in a strikingly similar form of identity management as carried out when in majority non-Muslim areas. However, instead of managing their identity for the sake of their physical safety in public spaces due to ‘othering’, here, our respondents were projecting themselves as Good Muslim Women with the intention of protecting their essential selves from rumours, judgement, stares, etc. This was done in two main ways. Firstly, by adjusting their clothing in public spaces.

“I feel like whenever I’m in my own neighbourhood… I have to be very cautious about what I’m wearing, because if I’m wearing tight clothes, I know I’m being judged by my own community. So, I’ll be a lot more cautious. So, in central London, because it’s more mixed I feel like I can still wear whatever I want” (Participant 12, age 21).

Secondly, by altering their use of public spaces.

“I definitely try and avoid certain places if I know I’m not wearing something that is considered acceptable. For example, if I’m wearing trousers, then I definitely would not go out into the area. For example, I go to my nearby park where there’s no one there just because I want to avoid gossip and, also, I want to feel comfortable wearing what I’m wearing. I don’t want people staring at me just based on my clothing” (Participant 13, age 21).

Driven by internal community pressures to conform to some respectable norm, this process of “saming” – of making identical to dissolve difference and achieve a greater single whole – resulted in our respondents being hyper-aware of their clothing, their spatial interactions with others, and their behaviour to maintain their safety. Judged for veering off into the (White) ‘other’ and diluting the values of the (Muslim) ‘same’, our interviewees were having to perform their identities differently in different public spaces, to live out their essential, multifaceted selves. And this was particularly pressing for younger Muslim women who had grown up in a multicultural environment (see also Mohammad, 2013), as one interviewee elaborated:

“Let me tell you from the experience of my own daughter. She’s 19. When she goes out, she’s told me several times that she’s wearing something like a dress, perhaps with a blouse, and the dress is long. And she’s said that often men comment and say, ‘The dress of these young women these days!’ And she comes and asks me, ‘Mum, I haven’t done anything wrong, have I? So why are these men saying stuff like that?’ And she says it has happened on multiple occasions. So I’ve said, ‘you haven’t dressed indecently or anything. They just want to make a comment’. And so, as a young woman herself, she feels like she’s being watched because of these comments. I certainly feel for young people. I do feel that they are being watched and that can be difficult to deal with, especially when you already feel watched and judged by outsiders” (Participant 4, age 38).

The experiences of these interviewees reflect an acute awareness of how the hijab, and so, the visible identity of a Muslim woman, is associated with certain religious and cultural expectations. Although intra-cultural surveillance, judgment, policing, etc. are observed in various contexts, for Muslim women, the added dimensions of visibly performed religion, cultural notions of modesty and the politicization of Islam contribute towards a uniquely complex labour of safety in which multiple identities are negotiated in-and-through multiple spaces. In doing this ‘invisible work of safety maintenance’, Muslim women who wear the hijab seek to protect themselves from judgment, surveillance, and perceptions of dishonour within their communities, and this is reflected in their spatial strategies, as one interviewee explained to great effect:

“It really depends on where I’m going and the people I’ll be interacting with or seeing. So, if I’m with the older generation like my parents or my parents' friends or my aunts and uncles, I’m under more pressure to dress a certain way, represent the religion, make sure of everything I’m doing; and if anyone is looking at me, I’m able to portray that Muslim woman image. But if I’m [out] with my friends I’m more laidback and I feel I can be how I want. I don’t feel I have to conform to that ideal” (Participant 10, age 23).

Conclusion

“There is always insecurity. You’re always watching your back. And I think that will stay regardless of your demeanour, if you speak English, of your education, because they don’t want to look at any of that. They want to judge you. It’s like they take one look at you and that’s it” (Participant 16, age 31).

This paper shows that although designers, planners and policymakers have long sought to integrate cultural diversity and foster inclusion, certain insecurities cannot be resolved by spatial strategies like clear sight lines or community spaces. As the quote underscores, the fear, anxiety and unease felt by hijab-wearing Muslim women in public spaces reveals a complex socio-spatial interaction that demands closer attention. Our findings highlight how this shifts the burden of maintaining safety onto Muslim women themselves, requiring them to adjust their use of space, clothing and behaviour, and remain hyper aware to mitigate insecurity and positively represent their faith. Even in Muslim-majority areas, where women often felt safe from racial and Islamophobic attacks, they faced distinct pressures tied to visibility and community expectations, and often adopted similar strategies as in white-majority spaces. This dual challenge underscores how Muslim women navigate both ‘othering’ and ‘saming’, shaping their physical, emotional and existential safety. It highlights the need for a broader understanding of ‘safety’ that moves beyond conventional planning considerations to engage with these layered experiences of space.

We also acknowledge the limitations of this study in fully representing the diversity of Muslim-identifying women. Our focus on hijab-wearing women in East London reflects a specific, visible group whose experiences of safety and racialisation are particularly acute, but we recognise that this emphasis risks reifying the category of “the Muslim woman” in ways that can obscure difference. As Cooke (2007) and others remind us, Muslim women are not a homogenous group, and their experiences are shaped by multiple intersecting factors including race, class, migration history, sect, and personal interpretation of faith. While we do not seek to speak for all Muslim women, our aim has been to shed light on a set of lived, situated practices of identity management and spatial negotiation. Future work could extend these insights by exploring how racialisation, visibility, and safety are experienced differently across the broader spectrum of Muslim women’s lives.

In this paper, we have illuminated the multifaceted and complex nature of safety as experienced by Muslim women who wear the hijab in public spaces. Although participants noted preferences for design elements such as better lighting, wider sightlines and cleanliness, our findings show that the challenges of integrating cultural diversity and fostering inclusion in urban design extend far beyond what traditional spatial strategies aimed at ‘designing out fear’ can achieve (Koskela and Pain, 2000). The persistent sense of insecurity, heightened by both external societal judgments and internal community expectations, places a considerable burden on Muslim women. Our study brings to the fore the ‘invisible work’ they undertake to negotiate safety and identity. In spaces where they are a minority, they employ diverse strategies to mitigate insecurity and positively represent their faith. Even in Muslim-majority areas, they navigate distinct pressures, balancing societal and familial expectations with their own sense of identity and safety. This intricate balancing act underscores the need for a broader, more nuanced and phenomenological understanding of ‘safety’ in urban planning and policy – one in which planners and city managers consider precisely how minority communities, especially those marked by religious difference, experience space. In this respect, we build on Ahn’s (2023) work on participatory place-making, and on Sweet and Ortiz Escalante’s (2015) call to bring bodies and embodied experiences into planning practice. Our research contributes to this discourse by highlighting these complex socio-spatial dynamics and advocating for urban design that is genuinely inclusive and responsive to the diverse needs and experiences of minority communities.