Everyday Geographies of Night‐Time Fear: (Re)Negotiating Fear of Crime, Gender and Safety

ABSTRACT Grounded in qualitative research in Siliguri, a rapidly expanding city in eastern India, this paper examined how low‐income residents perceive and negotiate fear of crime after dark. Based on immersive, night‐time ethnographic methods—including narrative interviews, walk‐alongs and sensory observations—this study examines the lived geographies of crime and fear in the everyday urban margins. While extensive literature on fear of crime exists in Western contexts, Global South research remains uneven, with limited attention to how fear is shaped by infrastructural neglect and marginality. In developing countries like India, such place‐based, embodied studies remain limited, especially in low‐income residential contexts. Findings reveal that night‐time fear is deeply gendered, relational, and amplified by territorial stigma and infrastructural neglect. Women deploy everyday tactics—rerouted paths, bodily discipline, walking in groups—to manage insecurity. The paper contributes to scholarship on crime, marginality and emotional geographies by showing how fear is not only a response to threats but a force that reshapes urban life. It calls for a more grounded, context‐sensitive understanding of urban safety and affirms the right to move, dwell and be visible in the city after dark. By situating fear as a spatial force that (re)organises urban life after dark, this paper contributes to debates on emotional geographies, urban marginality and the nocturnal geographies of fear of crime in the Global South.