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Comfort or Fear? How the Perception of Safety in Urban Public Space Works in Conjunction with a Gendered Experience

Part 2 Dissertation 2022
Anita Blanchard
University of Plymouth | UK
The deaths of Sarah Everard and Sabina Nessa caused an uproar on social media towards women’s rights movements (Bates, 2021), with the protection of women greatly reduced as those begin to lose faith in the police service (YouGov, 2021). Influenced by each of the tragic indiscriminate murders of young women, this dissertation aims to determine how the perception of safety in urban public space works in conjunction with a gendered experience, analysed through concepts of comfort and safety, and risk and fear, and in relation to theories of spatial syntax and Lynchian style mappings.

Semi-structured interviews took place discussing personal experiences in public spaces. Gendered mental mappings of these experiences were produced to visualise the data describing the constant analysis that runs through a woman’s brain to decide if a space is safe enough (Kern, 2021). The analysed data was then applied to work by feminist geographers such as Marion Roberts, Leslie Kern and Christine Listerborn. Their theories aligned to the data collected, supporting the different gendered perceptions of space due to the gender gap (Roberts, 2013). The use of these mapping tools in urban design could allow a better understanding of gendered perspectives in the built environment (Askins, 2018).


Tutor(s)
Ioana Popovici
2022
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