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What Do ‘Safe Spaces’ for Women Look Like?
Traditional solutions just aren’t cutting it anymore
I’ve written before about how women spend 70% of our energy strategizing how to stay safe, a reality amplified by every woman killed while going about her own business, every life cut short by male-perpetrated violence: Sarah Everard, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and now Sabina Nessa, the 28-year old South London school teacher murdered somewhere along the path of a five minute walk through a populated park to meet a friend for a drink.
The latest highly publicized murder of a woman on London’s streets has raised the discussion topic of “safe spaces” for women, e.g., redesigning public space to make them safer for women and girls.
But what does a safe space for women and girls look like?
Redesigning public spaces with women’s safety as top-of-mind priorities has been at the core of urban planning for the past few years, particularly in academic and tech circles when imagining the cities of the future.
The solutions most often proposed tend to go for the obvious: open spaces with no places to hide, well-lit areas with unobstructed lines of vision, closed circuit television cameras to monitor public behavior, while the interim proposal is the evergreen solution favorited by local…
