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Urban planning and women’s safety: a research project
Can urban planning contribute to women’s safety in public spaces? In the wake of the watershed moment for women’s safety earlier this year, we focussed our thoughts on how the built environment sector can play its part in improving safety, allowing women to fully engage with public spaces.
Previous articles explore gender-focussed design and planning, and health equality in the public realm. Our latest article continues the theme, with Assistant Planner, Ffion Middleton, drawing on her final year research project at Cardiff University. Ffion explores whether urban planning could contribute to the improvement of women’s safety in public spaces. A version of this article originally appeared in the RTPI Wales quarterly issue of ‘Cynllunio’.
Unintentional gender bias
The design of our cities and public spaces is unintentionally gender-biased, resulting in a built environment that perpetuates gender inequalities. To be clear; cities don’t produce gender-based violence, but they create situations that make women more vulnerable to violence and harassment due to poor design. As a result of the fear sometimes associated with public spaces, women generally tend to adopt avoidance strategies, for example, avoiding certain areas, taking longer routes and avoiding going out at night. Even if an area is safe, certain elements of the built environment can still be perceived as unsafe.
Women’s safety
Safety is essential for everyone, however, women are disproportionately impacted by poor design in public spaces. This tends to make women feel more vulnerable in certain areas, for example, enclosed areas that are poorly lit. Indeed, 55% of women state that they would not use public transport after dark and 34% state that feelings of insecurity have stopped them from travelling at times[1]. UN Women found that over 70% of women in the UK have been sexually harassed in public spaces, with only 3% of women aged 18-24 saying they had not been subject to sexual harassment[2]. Women are less likely to use parks and paths after dark because of perceived danger[3], often due to issues of enclosure, lack of surveillance and poor lighting.
It has been argued that women cannot fully enjoy cities until they have safe passage through public spaces and that the perceptions of women must be included in urban planning and design processes if women are to enjoy and engage in public life[4]. It is therefore important to recognise gendered differences in planning practice. However, this should be an intersectional approach, considering how the various aspects of identity (e.g. gender, age and race) interact to shape how people experience public spaces.
Can planning contribute to the improvement of women’s safety?
Whilst crime against women is the product of many complex factors, research has shown that planning and design can influence the occurrence of crime. Urban planning can reduce the vulnerability of people to crime by removing opportunities that are provided inadvertently by the built environment. Indeed, the UN report on Safer Cities and Safer Public Spaces[5] identifies ‘a gender approach to urban planning’ (p. 3) as one of the four key ways to improve women’s safety. We must consider how we can adapt cities and public spaces to become more inclusive and considerate of women’s safety, including perceived safety. Pedestrian underpasses, blind corners, overgrown vegetation, isolated bus stops and poor street lighting are just some of the things that generally make women feel unsafe in public spaces.
Safety is often seen as a ‘tick-box exercise’, where it is only considered towards the end of the planning process. We must ensure as planners and urban designers that we are considering safety and gendered differences from the beginning of a project, to ensure that the overall design will create a safe space that is sensitive to the needs of women.
Planners tend to use their life experiences and ‘worldview’ within the planning process[6], often looking at spaces through their own lens and not through the lenses of others (though this is unintentional). In her book ‘Invisible Women’, Criado-Perez argues that these design failures aren’t intentional but are the result of a ‘data gap’ in the amount of information that is collected about women, creating a lack of understanding of the female experience. Since women occupy just 10% of the highest-ranking jobs at urban planning firms worldwide[7], it’s clear that planning is a male-dominated industry. Whilst the situation is improving, the lack of female representation within the industry (especially at senior level) therefore makes a gendered perspective harder to implement.
Conclusion
For my research project, I wanted to discover whether urban planning can contribute to improving women’s safety, and why safety is not currently something that is given significant consideration. I interviewed a range of planners and urban designers from the public and private sectors.
My research concluded that practitioners find themselves constrained by the structures and systems they work within. The primary suggestions regarding ways practitioners can help improve women’s safety related to policy, consultation, education within the profession, workplace norms, resources, research and female representation. Essentially, these relate to adopting gender mainstreaming in the planning system. Encouraging an attitudinal shift within the profession is key in all sectors, as well as encouraging more females in senior roles. This must be accompanied by systemic change and data collection on female-friendly environments, including practical policy and guidance on implementing gender mainstreaming measures and providing LPAs with adequate resources to enable this. More research is needed on how the private and public sectors can actually implement the necessary changes and how best to engage women in the process. These are not easy to achieve, however they are possible.
It is vital therefore that we begin to apply a gendered perspective to planning, where we consider gendered differences in the way we interact with public spaces. We must then make the necessary adjustments to ensure this understanding of gender bias is addressed and prioritised.
14 October 2021
For more information please contact Ffion Middleton.
[1] https://www.arup.com/perspectives/publications/research/section/travelling-in-a-womans-shoes
[6] Greed, C. 2006. Making the Divided City Whole: Mainstreaming gender into Planning in the United Kingdom. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie. 97(3), 267-280, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9663.2006.00519.x