A thriving town for all
Women’s safety, Lighting, and Designing Out Crime
Long read ~12 minutes
Darren Tindall
Peer reviewed by Wendy Cheung and Kim Cooper
The design of the built environment has a profound effect on how all people experience towns. It influences both how safe we feel and our actual risk of becoming a victim of a street crime.
Crime, either from having been a victim or the fear it creates, drives people to avoid spaces or entire areas, supresses economic activity, social vibrancy, and drives poor physical and emotional health outcomes.
Fear of crime is not spread equally across society, with gender being one of the biggest differentiating factors:
74% of women say they feel unsafe some or all the time in London and 40% of sexual assaults (most victims are women) in London take place in public places*.
Over 70% of women in the UK say they have experienced sexual harassment in public with younger women most at risk - 97% of women in the UK aged 18-24 said they experienced some form of unwanted behaviour.
Almost two-thirds of women said they feel not at all safe or not very safe when out in Leeds after dark. Walking in the city centre was of most concern with 50% of women saying they ‘always’ or ‘often’ feel unsafe in the city centre at night.
84% also said they had experienced harassment or assaults in the city centre and 45% said they had been harassed in parks or other open spaces.
In Glasgow, 70% of women and non-binary individuals indicated they do not always feel safe when they are waiting for a bus.
*The author notes that London is a large city.
Why more Lighting doesn’t necessarily create safer towns for women
Many aspects of urban planning and design have traditionally failed to prioritise human experience let alone account for the differences between various diverse populations. Take for example, the legacy of 20thcentury car-centric nature of towns and cities.
Research by Monash University and Arup looking at women’s perception of safety analysed the features of 80 unsafe “hotspots” identified by women in Melbourne. They found that spaces with high illuminance (bright lighting) did not correlate with better perceptions of safety for young women. In fact, locations with higher light levels were actually more likely to be perceived to be unsafe.
Instead the most important factor was not the quantity of lighting, but the quality of lighting. For example, colouring rendering that matches colours in daylight, thereby allowing people to make out their surroundings clearly. In addition to this, lighting that is too bright or doesn’t consider the built form at a specific location can create dark areas due to high contrast, generate glare, and signal overcompensation because the space has a crime problem.
Despite this, urban lighting design has focused around on intensity and brightness with many design standards, focused on lighting roads for vehicles, fails to account for this depth of human or pedestrian experience.
Yes, there might be lighting here but does that actually make it feel safe? (credit: Tom Last)
It’s not just an issue for women
Alongside the 74% of women in London who said they feel unsafe some or all of the time, 70% of men also expressed similar concerns. Research on Irish transport showed that while 55% of women surveyed were unwilling to use public transport at night, 35% of men also said the same thing. While women consistently report lower feelings of safety compared to men, the proportion of men still reporting similar fears signals there is a broader problem.
The problem persists in other groups. Disabled adults report feeling anywhere from two to three times less safe than non-disabled adults in public spaces. And hate crimes have increased dramatically since 2016, with those motivated by race, disability and sexual orientation increasing by 46%, 70%, and 100% respectively.
While solutions that boost safety for women are likely to boost safety for other groups, the conclusion is that planning, design, and management of urban spaces needs to 1) focus on human experience, and 2) consider the diversity of human experience beyond the two traditional genders. This approach is what will enable towns to transform into attractive, inclusive, and vibrant places ensuring that regeneration plans are a success.
Leverage User and Abuser-Centred Design
Modern Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) Theory is a holistic process and framework that towns can draw upon. The principles of CPTED are:
Territorial reinforcement: making people care for spaces, clearly defining and supporting positive ownership of space, usually through both symbolic and physical boundaries (e.g. by defining public vs private spaces).
Access Control: physical and symbolic barriers to attract, channel, encourage or restrict the movement of people.
Surveillance: providing opportunities to ‘see and been seen by others’ using building configuration, the placement of windows, and by creating and influencing where activity happens.
Image: influencing the positive perception of space, promoting clean and well-maintained spaces that have a strong identity.
Supporting Activation: promoting and empower people to engage in safe and positive activities.
Underpasses are one of the most challenging spaces to make safer. At the University of Sheffield an underpass is given identity and safety through a strong but attractive lighting scheme (credit @sheffielduni).
Expressions of CPTED include an attractive lighting scheme that provides a space with a strong identity and maximises visibility. Mixed-use neighbourhoods that consider and encourage a diverse range of uses and activities at different times of the day in line with different groups. Other examples include designating a graffiti area where local artists can express themselves, give a space a unique local identity, and encourage community participation.
Within business plans, regeneration visions, and masterplans, towns can:
Set a strategic requirement or recommendation for Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) to be integrated into regeneration and development projects, including doing a crime risk assessment. Most local plans address security which expresses CPTED principles or CPTED inspired design measures. However, towns should also do a Crime Risk Assessment to understand what specific issues need to be addressed. ISO 22341:2021 is also a newly released CPTED standard that outlines a clear process.
Involve groups of users and sub-groups of users in the design and consultation process: Despite best intentions it is impossible for a man to fully understand the safety needs of women – especially the diverse needs and experiences across age groups, socio-economic demographics, race, and sexualities. Likewise, it is impossible for a person who is not disabled to understand the lived experiences and needs of someone with a disability.
Speaking directly to users who will use the spaces ensures that the experiences of groups such as women are heard and can be considered during the design processes. For example, site surveys with different groups of women at both day and night provides the opportunity to understand how women feel in certain spaces while also being in this same space. It is also imperative to understand that the experiences of one woman will also not be the experience of all women. Users of different, races, sexualities, socio-economic backgrounds, and those with negative experiences will affect how space is felt and viewed.
Engaging a diverse set of users in this way is a means to address any issues identified as part of the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED). For more details on PSED, please refer to TFDP’s PSED guidance.
Interrogate and expand the use of data sources: Reported Crime Data is commonly relied upon when looking at crime patterns in and around a space. Yet this data does not provide information on age, gender or other user demographics, nor does it provide intelligence on the situation surrounding a crime such whether it took place during the day or the night. Data should be interrogated to understand what it does and does not show and what assumptions may be behind it. Other data should be drawn on where possible such as surveys and higher level statistics such as the National Perception of Personal Safety Survey. The lack of nuanced user-centric data has given rise to crowd-sourcing apps such as Safetipin. If in doubt, test findings and assumptions in focus groups and workshops - does the data match with the lived experiences?
Highlight in business cases and in other strategic visions how security and tackling fear of crime is a fundamental enabler for functional, healthy, and productive towns: Spaces that are perceived to be safe are more vibrant, healthy, productive and boost physical, emotional, and community health. This translates into both direct and indirect economic and social benefits. Towns cannot regenerate successfully without being safe. However, this relationship can be all too commonly ignored.
This topic is critical to create thriving towns and regeneration provides a multi-generational opportunity to create safer towns and there is a wealth of further resources towns can draw upon to understand this topic better:
o Design Council: Designing out crime – A designers’ guide
o BRE: Reducing Crime Hotspots in City Centres
o Arup x Monash Research on Women’s Safety and Lighting