Blinding bright lights hang across the lanes. Shops display clothes, jewellery, handbags, shoes, toys, cosmetics, bangles, khussas, wedding items, and other goods typically associated with women's shopping. Informal stalls spill into a landscape of concrete shops and historic forms—churches, carved jharokas—where the new and the old, the formal and the improvised, are layered tightly over one another. Some stalls are set up on tables; others laid out on sheets on the ground. Bikes are parked in rows, and customers move through narrow gaps with practiced urgency. Even on a rainy daythe lanes were packed with Eid shoppers who had decided the weather was irrelevant.

At first glance, the layout of Bano Bazaar—a women-dominated section within Anarkali Bazaar in Androon Lahore,seemed chaotic and overwhelming.However,t with repeated visits, a pattern began to emerge. Wider main streets carried the loudest movement and the heaviest crowds. Smaller lanes branched out from them, some noticeably quieter. The bazaar also extended upward: shops below, with workshops, residences, and salons above. Regular visitors knew which lanes to enter, which shop to return to, where prices were likely to be lower, where the rush thickens, and where a quieter side street might open up.

This difference between first impression and repeated use became central to our research. Women were not absent from the bazaar; they are central to its everyday life. The question was what kind of presence this was. Bano Bazaar brings women into public space through shopping, but the space does not let them occupy it casually. Its crowding, noise, mixed pedestrian and motorcycle movement, temporary stalls, and constant forward motion shape how women are able to use it.

A Space Organized Around Motion

The most consistent feature of Bano Bazaar was circulation. People did stopto ask prices, bargain, wait for someonebut these pauses were brief and pushed to the edges: beside parked bikes, outside shopfronts, near stairs, or inside narrower lanes. An interviewee described the urgency with which one moves through the bazaar: “Your entire concern is looking at the ground and walking carefully so that you don't slip into a puddle or pothole in front of you.” She also described how, when focused on finding something, she sometimes did not notice catcalls or stares until someone pointed them out to her.

The sociologist Henri Lefebvre argued that space is not a neutral backdrop; it is socially produced, and the way it is physically organized shapes the kinds of behaviour and movement that become possible within it ¹. Bano Bazaar was designed for motion, producing a particular mode of being there: forward-moving, task-oriented, purposeful. Women came primarily on a mission—to get bangles for an outfit, khussas for an event, or compare fabric prices. The structure of the space, and the urgency it produced, left no room to waste time.

Shopping as a Skill

Navigating Bano Bazaar successfully is a form of expertise. Women learn which streets sell what, which vendors are bluffing, when a price is fixed and when it can be negotiated.

Michel de Certeau wrote about how ordinary people navigate systems they did not design, using everyday knowledge and improvisation—tactics—to make those systems work on their own terms ². Women do not control the space's prices, layout, or social dynamics, but they develop mechanisms of working within these constraints anyway. For one interviewee, this included having to unlearn shame around bargaining. She had initially associated asking for a lower price with begging, eventually learning the skill by watching her mother and practicing with friends, coming to see it as competence rather than pleading. Her main tactic was appealing to logic: citing prices from other shops or pointing out why a rate was unreasonable. This knowledge is what differentiates someone who experiences the bazaar as overwhelming and someone who finds it navigable.

Women's Public Presence Within the Bazaar

Women are visibly and numerically present in Bano Bazaar, but this presence does not come without conditions. Women are constantly managing the terms on which they are there.

Most women we observed came with others—friends, sisters, mothers, daughters, husbands, or brothers. One interviewee said she never visits alone, describing her group as a kind of protective barrier within the larger crowd. Another said directly: “If I go alone I feel very uncomfortable. I feel like an easy target.” Several women described feeling more at ease once inside precisely because women were so densely present. The concern was concentrated around entrances, exits, and less crowded stretches—the edges of the space rather than the heart of Bano Bazaar.

Clothing was another significant dimension. During one field visit, we noticed that one of us was drawing more attention than the other.Eventually registering that it was because she wasn't wearing a dupatta on her head. A female body is highly visible within this space, and women are constantly aware of that visibility. One interviewee described becoming "hyperaware" of herself when alone: “Mera dupatta kahan hai, mein kahan hoon, mein kya karnay aai hoon?”

What the Bazaar Reveals

Bano Bazaar is, ultimately, a space women learn how to use through repeated exposure over time. They learn its streets and its pricing logics. They know how to bargain, how to dress, when to come, and who to bring. They know which routes feel safe at which hours and with whom. This knowledge is built through repeated visits, observation, and advice from other women. It is a form of spatial intelligence that often goes unrecognized in how we discuss women's public life.

What Anarkali also shows is how much of this intelligence is at risk when urban spaces change—construction projects, standardized signboards, rising prices gradually shifting the bazaar's class composition. These are not only physical or economic changes. They are changes to the conditions under which women's spatial knowledge was built and operates.

To study how women navigate Bano Bazaar is to study one small piece of how women navigate public life in Lahore. The skills they bring are not specific to this market. They are the tools of gendered urban life more broadly. What Anarkali makes visible, because its crowds and its history and its density force the question, is how much work goes into what is so easily described as simply "being in public." Women are there. They have always been there. Getting there, and staying there comfortably, is the part that takes effort.

Raiha Shah is a graduating senior in the Sociology/Anthropology undergraduate program. Her research interests center on questions of gender and class, with a particular focus on educational and urban spaces.

Emaan Fatima is a graduating senior in the Sociology and Anthropology programme at LUMS, where her research spans gender, urban planning, climate, and corporate sustainability.

Aleeza Niazi is a rising senior in the Accounting and Finance programme at LUMS, her interests span finance, gender, class and public spaces in Pakistan.

1. Henri Lefebvre, *The Production of Space*, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 38–39.
2. Michel de Certeau, *The Practice of Everyday Life*, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 19–21.