Safe Spaces?

“A blog post once a month” she said. “That’s achievable” she said. Yet here we are, it’s April Fool’s Day, and there hasn’t been a blog post since February. This is not for a lack of ideas, more a lack of time. In fact it’s probably a deadly combination of too many ideas and too little time, resulting in a handful of hastily composed Twitter threads and….zero blog posts.

Anyway, points should be awarded for not skipping March completely and waiting until mid-April to write anything else. This is a postponed March post, and I will write another for April. I will. I will. I’m also trying to be less fussy about planning the content/structure – it’s a blog post after all, not a book chapter. 

For most of March Sarah Everard was at the forefront of my mind. What she symbolised I guess, rather than the woman herself, who I know so little about. I talked with my partner about our experience of being out in the streets, moving through spaces. For me this means always being on alert, always on guard. Putting up barriers between myself and the world. Being suspicious, untrusting, unfriendly, probably even unkind, because friendliness is a risk.

It’s not only women that feel unsafe on our streets of course, people from the LBTQI+ community, people of colour. Men too – they are actually more likely to be victims of violent attack. My sense though is that when men are attacked, they know they are being attacked. A mugging, a fight – traumatising, horrible and real. Do they feel that grey zone of uncertainty though? Of never really knowing, the feeling that even the most inconsequential interaction could take a turn. The feeling that you’re navigating a narrow path with a sheer drop on either side. Is it safer to smile or to frown? Is this a harmless compliment, or will they expect more? The car from which a lewd comment was shouted…will it circle back, will things escalate?

I wonder also if it’s location and context specific for men – they feel unsafe in a dark alley, late at night. But do they feel unsafe in broad daylight, in well populated public spaces? Answers on a postcard please.

I’ve had this week off. I was hungover yesterday after taking full advantage of being able to meet up with people outside the night before. It was a sunny day. I wanted a nap. I thought about going to our nearby park and sleeping in the sunshine. Wouldn’t that be nice? But the idea of letting my guard down like that in a public space was terrifying. The last sunny afternoon I spent reading in that park alone was interrupted by a shadow over my page and an awkward interaction with a man that very much wanted to talk to me and didn’t seem to appreciate my desire for peace and solitude.

The sweet image of napping in the sunshine was quickly embittered by the thought of what I might wake up to. Probably nothing would have happened, but it was off-putting enough to deter me. I thought too of all the homeless women. You rarely see them sleeping in the street. I thought of one particular homeless woman, who shared our house one night last year. “it’s ok” she’d said. “I’ll find somewhere for tonight, the office will be open in the morning – I’ll be ok”. I looked around at St Peter’s Square where we stood in the dark, the people milling around, the occasional shouts, distant sirens. I turned toward home but I couldn’t leave her. We both knew she might not be ok. She stayed for one night, but she couldn’t stay forever; I think about her all the time and hope she’s safe.

Homelessness is a topic in itself. The homeless experience is not representative of the issue of general safety in public spaces: to be homeless is to be inherently vulnerable, no matter who you are. However, the differences in the way that homeless men and women use urban spaces is revealing.

I saw a number of posts on urban design twitter considering how we might design places to be safer. It’s something that’s rolled around my brain the whole month. On one level we know this is possible. There is extensive literature on how to design safer and more secure spaces. We know about lighting, active frontages, passive surveillance, permeability, good maintenance, lack of “hidden” or secluded spaces. We know spaces have historically been designed by and for straight white men and this can’t fail to have an impact. Churchill said “we shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us”. You can easily broaden “buildings” out into “spaces” and ask who exactly is doing the shaping and who is subsequently being shaped.

It’s not the whole story though is it? I would love for there to be a design solution to this. But if people still feel unsafe in a sun filled, populated, well overlooked park or on a well-lit, continuous frontage, mixed-use street in the early evening, then there’s something else. An insidious power dynamic that’s hard to see and therefore even harder to correct. I’ve not seen a masterplan yet that can address the safety and entitlement some people feel in speaking to, shouting at, staring at, touching, hurting and violating others.

All of which has reminded me I still haven’t got around to reading Feminist City by Leslie Kern which I think explores more of the interplay between the social and physical components of this.

In the wake of the Sarah Everard story there was of course the vigil, the police response, conversations around the right to protest and the police, crime, sentencing and courts bill. I think in the next post I’d like to talk about the politics of space in this context. Maybe drawing together the urban and rural sides of this, as I’ve been reading the incredible Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes.

There’s probably something else to follow on urban recovery post-covid, the crossover between sustainability principles and the actions that might be needed in the context of pandemic recovery. This has been on my mind after reading The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson and Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam this month.

Like I said – too many ideas! 

Till next time.

Thanks to Tim Dennell whose creative commons images I used to illustrate this post.