On a Sunday afternoon in Karachi, Dolmen Mall is a sea of families. Women walk freely, laughing with friends, pushing strollers or browsing shop windows without the weight of being watched. In Lahore, the Liberty Market is buzzing with college girls splitting fries and stretching out their hours of independence. In Islamabad, Kohsar Market has its share of women sipping coffee and sitting outdoors without much comment. These are Pakistan’s most acceptable spaces for women to linger, to be seen, to take up space.

But step outside these ‘curated’ environments and the rules change. Local parks, desi ‘hotels’ and ordinary streets remain contested. A woman sitting on a bench alone in a public park attracts questions. A group of girls at a roadside chai stall often becomes a spectacle. For many, the line between respectable leisure and public impropriety is still policed, not through written law but through stares, whispers and the occasional scolding uncle.

This paradox tells us something important about our cities. Elite cafés and malls offer a safe haven because they are private, surveilled and expensive. They filter out the crowd, offering women a sense of security that comes at the cost of class segregation.

In Karachi, young women from middle- and upper-income families treat malls as their default public leisure. They may stroll along the seafront in Clifton or Defence, but Saddar’s old tea is less easily claimed.

Lahore tells another story. The city’s love for food makes women more visible in restaurants than perhaps anywhere else. From mall food courts to Gulberg burger joints, women dine with families and increasingly with friends. Cross over to Gowalmandi or a roadside hotel on Temple Road and the scene shifts. Men lingering over doodh patti at midnight go unnoticed; women doing the same make a statement. Even progressive families caution daughters about being too visible in such spaces.

Islamabad, imagined as more progressive, has its own barriers. The city’s wide roads and scattered sectors make casual hanging out harder. Women appear mostly in structured leisure spots — cafés in Jinnah Super, Margalla trails or select restaurants. Parks exist, but a lone woman reading under a tree is still rare.

The capital’s polite silence may replace Lahore’s stares or Karachi’s catcalls, but the effect is similar: women are aware of their visibility.

What stands out across cities is how women often reclaim public space through group presence — cousins walking together in Karachi markets, university friends picnicking in Islamabad or colleagues sharing a late dinner in Lahore. Safety and belonging are negotiated less by design and more by numbers.

This anxious negotiation with public space is recent. South Asia’s older cities looked different. Women once moved outdoors not as “outsiders” but as participants in trade, ritual and performance. Courtesans, storytellers, flower sellers, even women gathering at shrines gave streetscapes a layered female presence. Colonial urban planning and, later, middle-class respectability politics narrowed this visibility, pushing “achhi larkiyan” indoors leaving only working-class women outside — a division that continues to echo in our cities today.

Class cuts across all three cities. A working-class woman can walk to a bazaar in Orangi Town or Anarkali, but rarely with the freedom to sit and linger. Time in public space, for women, is functional rather than leisurely. By contrast, an elite woman in DHA or E-7 can afford the luxury of walking into a café alone, ordering a latte and staying until the closing. The question then becomes not just about gender but about how class and urban design intersect to decide who belongs where.

Change is under way. Cafés once dominated by men now see more female customers, even in small towns. Women’s cycling groups have taken over city roads at dawn in Lahore and Karachi. In Islamabad, young women gather for outdoor yoga or art events in public parks. These shifts are tentative, sometimes ridiculed, sometimes resisted, but they mark the beginning of a claim to space that goes beyond malls and manicured cafés.

What is striking is how quickly acceptability evolves once visibility increases. A decade ago, even coffee shops were considered bold for women to occupy without male company. Today, they are family-friendly staples. If more women began frequenting parks or dhabas, perhaps in another decade, these spaces too would lose their sting.

Urban planners and policymakers could help by designing safer, more inclusive public areas. But equally, it is the daily, ordinary act of women showing up that rewrites the rules.

Public leisure is not a trivial concern. It shapes how half the population imagines its relationship to the city. To walk, to sit, to linger without purpose are small freedoms, but they accumulate into the larger sense of belonging. For now, malls and cafés are our safe zones. The real test of progress will be when a woman in Karachi can drink chai at Burns Road without being a spectacle; when a girl in Lahore can sit in a park at dusk without worry; and when Islamabad’s tidy sectors allow women to claim the streets as casually as men always have.

Until then, women’s leisure will remain a measure of both our ambitions and our anxieties.

Kiva Malick is an academician and a writer who focuses on education,philosophy, music and culture