Gender and the Built Environment Database
Safety in Public Urban Space: The Work of Women's Design Service
Women consistently express greater fears for their personal safety in urban environments than do men. Statistics demonstrate that, conversely, young men are the most vulnerable to actual attack in towns and cities, while women are more likely to be attacked in their own homes by someone they know well. However, these figures are possibly skewed by the fact that if women are afraid to go out on the streets alone they are less likely to become victims of crime in the urban environment.
Research by Women's Design Service reveals that it is fear of sexual assault which underlies women's anxiety. Women have been at risk from male sexual assault through history and across cultures, a situation often legitimated by a concept of women's inherent inferiority to men. Furthermore, they are rarely treated as innocent victims of assault. Where rape cases are brought to law, the woman often ends up ‘more accused than the accused' (Joyce Maluleke, Gender Coordinator, South African Justice Department) In the UK today only 7.5% of reported rapes result in a conviction, and it is widely thought that 90% of rapes go unreported.
During the 1970s, when the second wave of the Women's Liberation Movement was at its height, a number of "Reclaim the Night" marches were organised. The aim was to give women the confidence to go out into urban public spaces after dark. One of the popular chants was ‘However we dress, wherever we go, Yes means Yes and No means No!' These demonstrations helped to push the agenda of women's safety forward, but recently the marches have been revived by the London Feminist Network because the pace of change has been too slow.
Women's fear of going out alone after dark means that, in northern Europe, they confine themselves indoors from 4.0pm onwards during the winter months. This has a huge impact on women's ability to engage in employment, adult education, civic and community participation and social and leisure activities.
Our Making Safer Places projects, initiated in the late ‘90s, set out to identify how changes to the physical environment might help women to reclaim the right to use public space as and when they wish. Whereas previously many women may not have questioned the social factors that have contributed to their fears, the process of engaging with these issues through discussion with other women has led many of our participants to join groups and organisations working to change the relations between the genders and the social frameworks that perpetuate them.
A Making Safer Places audit underway in a London park
The process follows seven separate stages: discussion, mapping, observation, recording, analysis, presentation and implementation. We started by looking at pedestrian routes, play, leisure, and shopping facilities, with groups of women of different ethnic identities in three London neighbourhoods. Subsequently, we won a 3-year grant from the Lottery to run a major project in London, Bristol and Manchester. We identified two areas in each city and worked closely with existing groups and statutory agencies in the neighbourhoods to bring together representative groups of women to look at community safety over a period of months, ensuring that funding was in place to implement changes. All six neighbourhoods have successfully done so.
More recently we worked with groups of women to produce safety audits on a number of London parks (What to do about Women's Safety in Parks, WDS 2007). Better lighting and maintenance of clear sight lines by cutting back or re-locating shrubs and planting were common recommendations, but all the women were keen to retain a green environment. Some suggested giving pedestrians priority over traffic, and in particular removing pedestrian subways. Clear signage was another issue, since ‘knowing where you are' is very important from a safety perspective. Signs of physical neglect such as poor maintenance of buildings and street furniture, inadequate street cleaning, litter and dog mess made women feel that the area was uncared for, and in consequence that nobody would be looking after them either. Most of the agencies welcomed the women's findings, and because we had engaged with the decision makers at the outset generally delivered on at least some of the women's recommendations for improvements.
Clear signage is important in making women feel safer in public spaces
The women took issue with mainstream UK initiatives to ‘design out crime' in their dislike of the surveillance culture and technology promoted in the name of community safety. This government-promoted approach includes felling trees to ensure clear sightlines for CCTV cameras, erecting railings around steps and public monuments where people like to linger and chat, covering public spaces with ugly signage prohibiting everyday activities, or installing "mosquitos" (high-pitched sounds) to deter young people from congregating in the street.
The very presence of CCTV made women feel that an area must be unsafe. Although many wanted to see more uniformed people in public spaces, they preferred the sight of park wardens, bus conductors, and toilet attendants rather than police. Fenced-off areas and barriers made them feel trapped. Security guards, overseeing privatized public spaces, were also seen as a problem - concerned primarily with the profitability of the enterprise, and not the well-being of the visitor.
WDS's research has shown that CCTV does not make people feel safer
The factor that contributed most highly to women's sense of safety was ‘a variety of/ lots of other people about'; often they would add ‘smiling people', ‘happy people', ‘the sound of children laughing'. WDS therefore does not support the current mainstream approach to community safety. Designers and decision-makers need to think more about how to attract a wide range of different people to come and enjoy themselves in the public spaces of towns and cities. One way of achieving this is simply through making such places beautiful - a concept rarely discussed in the context of safety. It is this quality above all which will draw people out of their homes and cars to occupy and enjoy a sense of well-being in public urban space.
Wendy Davis
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