The Image of Fear: Visualising Safety, Threat and Belonging in the Contemporary City
Authors: Brackenbury, D., O'Sullivan, H., Nwebonyi, F., Wilson Vasquez, G.
Conference: 17th International Conference on The Image
Dates: 01/10/2026
Publication Date: 01/10/2026
Abstract:Feeling safe in public space is fundamental to how people experience and navigate city life, yet urban safety is often understood through crime statistics, surveillance data or assessments of the physical environment. Such approaches can overlook the lived and situated ways in which safety and fear are experienced. This paper highlights the lived perceptions of urban safety, exploring how people interpret and negotiate safety and threat as they move through the contemporary city. It considers how visual cues interact with personal experience, memory, local knowledge and narratives of place, asking how and why particular places, people and urban features come to be understood as reassuring, threatening or somewhere to be avoided. The paper draws on an ongoing qualitative study of perceived urban safety in Bristol, UK, centred on the experiences and situated knowledge of people who live in and move through the city. Participatory focus groups explore where, when and why participants feel safe or unsafe in their everyday lives. Open discussion and place-based reflection are combined with emotional mapping and visual elicitation. Photographs of recognisable locations are used as prompts, enabling participants to connect what they see with experiences, memories and associations. This approach captures how perceptions of safety emerge through the interaction of urban environments, lived experience, social encounters, local reputation and everyday patterns of movement and avoidance. Emerging findings suggest that urban fear is not contained within the image itself but produced through the relationship between what is seen, who is looking, and the social and experiential meanings brought to that act of seeing. Identical visual cues can produce contrasting interpretations, demonstrating the instability of apparently recognisable signs of urban danger. Images may therefore contribute to cultural conversations that stigmatise particular neighbourhoods, populations or forms of urban space, but they can also provide a means through which these narratives are questioned. The paper argues for a more socially situated understanding of visual representations of urban safety and demonstrates the value of participatory visual methods in revealing how fear, place and belonging are constructed and contested.
Source: Manual