Shaping the city with faith: place-making of immigrant Muslim women in Helsinki

Islam is a fast-growing urban religion in Finland, and Muslims today form a visible minority faith community in the country. While immigrant Muslim women are also visible in European public space and discourses, they are rarely seen as producers of urban spaces. And despite scholarly interest in lived Islam and spatiality, Muslim women's place-making remains understudied. In this article, I analyze immigrant Muslim women's physical and social place-making through an ethnographic neighborhood study in eastern Helsinki. Using a women's clothing shop as a case example, I argue that immigrant Muslim women's place-making is based on their religious, social, and economic needs and reflects their minority position in Finnish society. Highlighting a nuanced relationship between the city, gender, religion, and belonging, their place-making challenges existing secular and religious spatial arrangements and poses a question about who decides how city spaces are imagined, produced, and used.