Creating Engagement in Public Spaces for Safer Cities for Women

The rapid pace and nature of urbanization taking place throughout the world has thrown up new challenges for governments, and their populations as well as social scientists and activists. Urban spaces provide new opportunities for people to build their homes and lives, but at the same time reinforce existing inequalities and often create new ones. Gender is a central axis of discrimination along with poverty, disability and other vulnerabilities. While violence and fear may have impacts on the whole population, marginalized groups are much more vulnerable. Women face the fear of sexual violence as a constant threat to their ability to move around, to work and their general well-being.

There is increasing concern about women’s safety in cities over the past few years. The fear of violence in public spaces affects the everyday lives of women as it restricts their movement and freedom to exert their right as citizens of the city – freedom to move, study, work, and leisure. Women, particularly those living in low income settlements, feel unsafe in their settlements after dark as the areas are poorly lit, the streets are not well paved, the drain water overflows on the streets making it tough for them to walk, and the bus stops are often located in a corner of the settlements – forcing them to walk in the dark streets.

Creating safety involves much more than just responding to violence. It is important to create the conditions by which women are able to move about safely and without fear of violence or assault. Fear often plays a key role in women’s experience and access to the city. Therefore in order to create greater levels of safety and comfort, both actual violence and the fear of violence need to be addressed. Research has shown that many factors play a role in determining women’s access to the city including urban design and planning, community involvement, improved policing, usage of space etc.

Keeping this in mind, we developed the mobile app and online platform Safetipin which collects information on public spaces through a safety audit that can be done by anyone, anywhere in the world. In cities everywhere in the world, women’s safety in public spaces is becoming a growing concern. Safetipin is a free app and can be downloaded from the App store or Google play.

Research from different parts of the world show that women face sexual harassment on a regular basis in cities. In India, certainly the gruesome rape and murder in December 2012 has changed public perception of women’s safety and we find both greater reportage of violence and improved response from stakeholders. At the core of Safetipin is the safety audit that measures nine parameters including lighting, the state of the walk path, as well as the presence of people and specifically women, on the streets and ‘eyes on the street’. Each audit appears as a pin on the map and is used to compute the Safety Score of an area.

Safetipin has been designed both as a tool in the hands of individual women who can access information about safety in the city and as a method of collecting data on a large scale for city authorities to use for better planning and governance. An individual user can conduct a safety audit, pin places where she feels unsafe or has faced any form of harassment. She is also able to see all the information that has been uploaded by others and make informed decisions about moving around the city safely. Women (and men) can see the Safety Score of any place in the city and can also use it when they visit new cities.

But Safetipin also seeks to collect large scale information for helping city stakeholders improve safety using data. For the city authority, Safetipin provides large scale data that is crowd sourced and also provides a platform for interaction with citizens on their safety concerns. For example, there are over 6000 audits in the city of Delhi and this has been shared with police, transport and other stakeholders.

In order to help city governments, we are collaborating with UN-Habitat to collect data and address women’s safety in three cities – Bogota, Nairobi and Delhi. The data will be shared with key city stakeholders to ensure that it can feed into initiatives and programs to improve safety. Further, a second round of audits can be conducted to measure the change and impact of programs.

Currently we have data and safety audits in nine Indian cities. The App has also started to be used in Jakarta, Indonesia and Bogota, Colombia. Currently it is available in four languages – English, Hindi, Spanish and Bahasa. We plan to increase this as more cities join the network. We are hopeful that the data that is collected will be useful for city planners to make safer cities for women around the world.
Read more about the SafetiPinRead more about UN-Habitat and gender

Google Play Store… Personal Safety App

City Planning: Built Environment and Personal Safety

City Planning – Built Environment and Personal Safety 

Many researches indicate that real and perceived dangers of personal safety restrict an individual's lifestyles and movement. But still we find that a significant portion of our physical activity like walking, cycling, and physical exercise takes place in the public environment of our neighborhood. Now, is there any link between personal safety and the built environment? Which public policy or urban planning interventions can instill a sense of safety in your neighborhood? Which elements of the urban design and development discourage criminal activity? Can we thwart crime by changing the built environment of our neighborhood?

Crime and the Built Environment 

Today, interest in the link between the physical environment and crime is growing because of increasing crime incidents. The idea of crime prevention through well-thought-out urban design and development plan is attracting particular attention today. This is because of the growing pace of urbanization. Modern city designs in many cases are typically undermining people’s ability to observe public streets. People are restricted to their individual housing units, thus breaking down informal social control of criminal activity. Many city designers view natural surveillance (“eyeballs available on the streets”) as a good deterrent of criminal activities in your neighborhood.

Thus, crime and the physical/built environment are related in an observable and controllable manner. The physical or built environment exerts a direct influence on criminal activities in your neighborhood. It does so by marking territories, increasing or decreasing accessibility by creating or eliminating boundaries and circulation networks, and by facilitating surveillance by the individuals, groups and the police.

SafetiPin provides information about infrastructure and other physical attributes of a place to promote safety for women and other groups. SafetiPin mobile safety app facilitates public policy and urban planning interventions to instill a sense of safety in your neighborhood.

Source... www.safetipin.com

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The Sustainability Challenge for Inner City Safety in Johannesburg

Johannesburg inner city, although less than 130 years old, presents as tired and over-burdened. Developed and evolved as a thriving business hub, the city centre is now home to an estimated more than 500 000 people. The population is multi-cultural and multi-lingual and there is tension amongst widely varying nationalities. Johannesburg Child Welfare (JCW), an NGO that delivers essential outreach services n in the inner city, initiated a project almost three years ago, using the Social Transformation System™ (STS) methodology, to mobilise a collaborative approach to achieving a “best life” for young inner city women and children. The methodology facilitates the drawing of an inclusive, shared transformative spatial and social vision.  Participants agree to an intuitive benchmark starting point or current status and commit to appropriate skills, capacity and resources to move the whole towards this vision.

The project has recruited more than 60 partners since inception; key among these is the Regional City Management of Joburg, including the political office responsible for the area. Other partners range from NGOs and CBOs to Resident Associations and local Businesses. The project is site bound and includes two heritage sites – the Old Drill Hall and St Mary’s Cathedral, both rich in their historical links to the Apartheid struggle.

JCW delivers programmes at the Old Drill Hall to young women, and offers play programmes for children. The area around sites is chaotic. Taxi ranks receive and dispatch over 22000 taxis every day, disgorging 500 000 people into the environment. The streets and pavements are heavily congested and traders, both legal and illegal contribute to constant noise and jostling as well as throwing waste into already clogged storm water drains and gutters. Women suffer endless harassment, thuggery and worse; there is minimal respect for law and order and few places for women to turn when victimized. In the STS visioning process, women aspired to an inner city in which they could walk safely, dress as they pleased, sustain a livelihood and enjoy leisure activities during the day and in at night.

Using the vision as a long term “destination” against which to measure progress, partners in the project initiated a collaborative strategy to improve accessibility, mobility, health and safety of the users of the sites. They did this via a combination of advocacy, urging and supporting all relevant departments of the City to clean and maintain the area and enforce by-laws, and by integrating their efforts to deliver preventative and support services to their users.

Last year on World Aids Day this day, the area was cleaned up and there were real signs of progress. This year however, things had regressed and grime again characterized the precinct; women reported that they were fearful as they walked through the streets and the surrounds of the Cathedral are quite revolting from use as a toilet. The Drill Hall precinct was awash with litter. Clean-up programmes and by-law enforcement campaigns had dwindled in the face of lack of interest of the majority of the ever changing, always conflicted, incoherent “community” that makes up the inner city dwellers. The women delivering essential support and psycho-social services to women in the inner city said they feeling threatened.

The lessons for the partners are hard; for every step forward, there seem to be two backwards. In as much as it is hard to rally and sustain action amongst the protagonists, they continue to strive towards their goals of a safer inner city and a best life for all.

The crucial missing link however is sustained community commitment to this vision. Women are reluctant to participate, often hiding away from formal engagement, many because they are undocumented and fear reprisal, either for themselves or often, for their children. There is a desperate need for collective ownership of place and agency to bring dignity and peace to the inner city. Perhaps where survival takes precedence over all else, it is too much to ask that kindness, respect and love should guide behaviour and create an environment that protects the vulnerable, nurtures the young and supports the achievement of all.

The STS is premised on the knowledge that complex problems have no simple solutions – and that while they obviously demand collaborative approaches, these are difficult and require above all, resilience. The methodology provides for fully participative longitudinal assessment and inclusion in planning and decision-making based on lessons learned.  The partners will regroup in the New Year and try again, this time with an even greater emphasis on mobilizing inner city “communities” to participate in new behaviours that will benefit them all. The key to sustainable safety for the women of the inner city however, remains elusive.

AUTHOR: 

Barbara Holtmann is a feminist who uses her Social Transformation Systems methodology to harness the voices, skills, interests and capacities of women in community safety and development strategies.

Source…. www.safetipin.com

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Apple Play Store…  Download Safetipin App

Call for Internships at Safetipin 2015

About

SafetiPin is a map-based mobile phone application which works to make our communities and cities safer by providing safety-related information collected by users.

The organisation works to promote safety of women and has since its inception created a technology platform to address the urgent issue of safety in cities across the world.

Safetipin’s team has done ground breaking work in collecting large scale safety data from 12 cities in the world and have successfully used this data for advocacy. We work with the leading women’s oganisations in India and partner with them to bring change.

Purpose of Internships:

We encourage applicants from skilled and motivated young people to serve as interns at Safetipin. The purpose of the internship is to provide an opportunity for individuals to substantively contribute to and learn from our work in the area of women’s safety,

technology and urban planning. The intern will be given specific tasks and responsibilities and will be challenged to develop their capabilities and gain experience.

The intern is expected to be flexible and to take part in various activities at the office and sometimes in the field.

Requirements:

We expect applicants to have at least a first degree; and Masters degree students are encouraged. We are looking for interns who are committed, hard-working, positive, open-minded, reflective and willing to learn. At any one time we expect to host between

two to three interns. Internships are open to everyone. We will seek to find a balance by hosting people from

a diversity of interests, backgrounds and experiences.

Time Commitment:

Generally 1-2 months, to be mutually agreed

Conditions:

Internships are on a voluntary basis, and no payment is provided. In some cases, travel costs may be reimbursed. Shared office space will be provided in Gurgaon.

Application procedure:

Send a cover letter explaining your motivation and a description of what you hope to achieve during your internship at Safetipin. Specify your main skills and interests and relate them to our thematic areas of work. Also specify the requested internship period

/ dates.

Applications must be submitted via email to rashee.mehra@safetipin.com

Deadline for the submission of applications is 20 May 2015.

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