How do we evaluate the current paradigms of designed public spaces to test the perceptions of safety of women+ in India such that it aids urban designers to make free movement of women+ easier in India, especially Delhi?
Overview
Women+ and Urban Safety is a research to find answers to the question of “how do we evaluate the current paradigms of designed public spaces to test the perceptions of safety of women+ in India such that it aids urban designers to make free movement of women+ easier in India, especially Delhi?”. The project focuses on understanding the concept of Urban safety but specially to the vulnerable group of Women+. In doing so the research focuses on understanding a city like Delhi, India and its urban configuration from the perspective of women+ an its impact on urban safety and its perceptions.
In India the prevention of acts of sexual harassment have only taken forms of defensive measures with increase in deployed police in the city and increase in surveillance. However the rape rate in Delhi, which is the highest form of sexual harassment, has hardly shown any positive changes. In response to heinous rapes and increased sexual harassment in public places many people have started support groups and NGO’s to safeguard the freedom and safety of women+ in public places of the city. There have also been digital platforms that have emerged to help women+ feel safe in the city. After multiple measures, there is still lack of awareness about what can help and empower women+ in Delhi to move in the city fearlessly.
However the the gap between NGO’s and the digital world that have been created to aid women+ is the core understanding of the perception of safety for women+ in Delhi. This tacit knowledge that women+ have in the city and bridging its gap to quantitative digital data, can be the strongest way to evaluate the designed public spaces on their urban safety for women+ and also inform designers with better suggestions in the planning of cities.
Methodology
The research focuses on following a pathogenic method of investigating. This means that the objective would be to understanding what is happening at the root of the topic in spotlight. This method would involve, understanding the context and patterns of human behaviour and doing some literary reviews. This would help to create a base for the step of data collection, as India lacks open data on conflicts. The data collected would be very qualitative, to give the participants of this step more freedom of expression. With all the data collected the idea is to really unpack what is the ground reality of how the city is designed and how it encourages or discourages offenders to take actions in public. This is all that the research focuses on in the preliminary phase.
Context
Currently India stands to be the most populated country globally with a total projected population of 1.2 billion people. The sex ratio is not very drastically divided. There are a total of 620 million men that comprises of 51.5% of the population and the remaining 48.5% are women, that is approximately 580 million women spread across both urban and rural areas of the country. However, the divide has played a major role in the rights and freedom that women+ exercise in the country.
“I identify as a woman and am a part of the 48.5% of the population of India. Throughout my life in India I have lived in many cities, some developed more than that the others, in different stages of my life. Regardless of which city I have lived in, I have always had to be careful of the time of the day that I am in the public spaces of the city and vary off of my surroundings and the people in my surroundings. After taking all types of precautions in the cities I have lived in, I have been cat-called, groped and touched inappropriately. This compelled me to start digging deeper on this nation-wide behaviour as a designer.“ – self experienced
On December 16, 2012 India saw one of the most dreadful and heinous crimes committed against a 23 year old women in Delhi. “Nirbhaya” (now called so to keep her identity safe) a 23 year old physiotherapy trainee was gang raped an mutilated by 6 men in a moving bus in the Capital city of Delhi and thrown half dead on the street of South Delhi. This incident had nationwide impact in both positive and negative ways. Similar incidents had happened before and still happen an with this incident more women started to report incidents of sexual harassment and many other crimes that were directed towards the likes of women+. On the hind side, this incident also instilled a sense of fear amongst women+ that directly and indirectly obstructed their freedom within their cities. People were afraid to be out in the city beyond a passed time and were always very careful and mindful of their surrounding while moving around cities.
As of today India has a total of 19 metropolitan cities and most of the data available on crimes that have been committed against women are in these metropolitan cities and there are more women+ have flied complaints against offenders. The complaints filed by women+ of various offenses fall under the category of Crimes Against Women of the two major criminal laws: IPC (Indian Penal Code) and SLL (Special and Local Laws). As per these criminal laws crimes against women means “although women may be victims of any general crime, but it specifically focuses on crimes that are again women to defame them.”
The above graph shows the no. of cases reported under various subcategories of crimes against women in the 19 metropolitan cities of India. Delhi demonstrates an alarmingly high no. of cases of such crimes. Hence the research commences in the capital city of Delhi where a total of 37,922 case were reported in just a span of 3 years.
Scope
Delhi the capital city of India has a total of 7.5 million projected population living within a stretch of 700km2 , which leads to a total population density of 10700 people/km2 of which roughly 46.27% inhabitants are women+. As mentioned in the previous section, the number of crimes reported against women have demonstrated alarming results. Since 2020, the crimes against women have only increased until the end of 2022 which sets the actual rate of crimes against women at approximately 400 in 2022. This means that there were almost 400 women+ for every 100,000 women+ who were the victims of various subcategories of crimes against women. The subcategories with highest no. of cases are as follows:
1. Rape
2. Kidnapping and Abduction
3. Dowry Death and Torture
4. Molestation
5. Sexual Harassment
6. Importation of Girls
7. Immoral trafficking
8. Indecent representation of Women
and more
The above mentioned subcategories of crimes against women which are a part of IPC and SLL vary in scales of where such incidents happen and the research intends to focus on the ones which occur in a widely urban context.
Literary advancements
Safetipin is a free mobile app and online platform designed to promote women’s safety in cities by gathering and sharing data about public spaces. It uses a safety audit system to assess nine parameters, including lighting, the condition of walk paths, visibility, and the presence of people, especially women. Each audit generates a Safety Score for the area, which appears as a pin on the map. These audits help users and authorities understand the safety levels of specific locations.
Individual users can conduct safety audits, report unsafe locations, and view data uploaded by others to make informed decisions about navigating the city safely. For instance, users can check the Safety Score of a place or report incidents of harassment. Safetipin empowers women to claim their right to safe urban mobility while fostering community participation in safety initiatives. Beyond individual use, Safetipin collects large-scale crowd-sourced data to assist city authorities in improving urban safety through better planning and governance. The app provides stakeholders, such as police and transport departments, with actionable insights to address infrastructure gaps and safety concerns. For example, in Delhi, over 12,000 safety audits conducted via Safetipin have been shared with relevant authorities to enhance public safety.
The concepts in this project as mentioned in the diagram above are the key principles that this research would like to start its investigation from. However the research is not limited to or beyond these concepts. Taking these concepts as guiding lines to carry-forward the research, the next step was to start the process of qualitative data collection.
Data Collection
Instagram Interactions
Instagram is one of the most used social media amongst the younger generations in India. The objective behind starting Instagram interactions was to get the broader perspective about perceptions of Safety in Delhi, but in a more informal way. The interactions were carried out through stickers used in Instagram stories. The stories comprised very open ended and general questions of peoples understanding about 3 primary topics: (a) inclusive spaces, (b) Delhi and (c) perceptions of safety based on the concepts mentioned in the previous stage of the research. This interaction also helped spread the word about this research and spark more interest into the topic.
Website Interactions
Proceeding further into the process of data collection meant creating a website from where gathering qualitative data could be possible in multiple ways, all of which would be anonymous. This website includes 3 methods of data collection, each of which are intended to play different roles at different stages of this research.
1. Women+ and Urban Survey: This method redirects the user to a form that has questions which are more narrowed down as compared to Instagram
2. Women+ and Urban VideoWalk: This method redirects the user to a server where they can upload videos of their usual walks or travel around Delhi
3. women+ and Urban Stories: This method redirects the user either to a server or to a form, based on the choice made by the user to share a story about urban safety
Women+ and Urban Survey
The Women+ and Urban Surveys is a 3 part google form which involves more specific questions in comparison to Instagram stories. The first part of the form is about the profiles of the participants in this process. Followed by questions which address generally the city configuration and gender and finally leading to the third part which is about gender biased experiences in Delhi. The entire form is very Delhi specific and requires only people who have spent a considerable amount of time in Delhi to participate.
Women+ and Urban Stories
The Women+ and Urban Stories is a part of the website with the objective to create a story board of people’s good and bad experience about gender biased urban safety across the country. In this specific segment participants are requested to keep the story as anonymous as possible with explicit details about where and what kind of urban setting did an incident occur. This helps to get more spatial yet qualitative data from people.
This segment particularly help to carry the research forward. In this segment it was noticed that when few of the concepts from safety overlapped the scenario for urban safety was completely different from what one might anticipate. Hence, the research proceeds to understand all the collected data better to find intersections in the overlap of the defining concepts.
“Safetipin” lacked the overlapping of concepts and understanding what is the real urban safety when concepts intersect
Understanding Data
Word Clouds
With all the data collected through Instagram and the website, this word cloud demonstrates which word have occurred the most number of time sin all the responses. However, the word cloud did not deliver a very qualitative understanding of people’s perception of safety, but it definitely demonstrates what words come to people minds when spoken of urban safety.
Alternative method for extracting intersection in concepts
The alternative method was to use some large learning models to really extract the hidden qualities in the collected response. This process started with creating a consolidated dataset made from all the responses at the end of the data collection phase. Succeeding that the syntax analysis helps to only focus on the most important words in each response, most of which were noun or adjective. Feeding the broken down data to the BERT LLM helps to find cosine similarity between the filtered word and the 8 key concept from Safetipin. The next step is to establish a word-concept pairing based on it’s frequency of occurrence in the original consolidated dataset. The expected result of this process would be find which concepts when overlapped are the key drivers of the feeling of safety or the feeling of threat.
The above graphic demonstrates the outcomes of the process as explained before. At the end of this process it is observed that two concepts that instantly catch ones eyes are open and visible. The concept of open through all the responses has shown least importance in the feeling of safety same as mentioned in safetipin. Regardless of its overlap with all the other concepts, having vast open open spaces are perceived extremely unsafe for women+. On the contrary, the concept “visible” has demonstrated very high occurrence in pairs like visible-security, visible-path, visible-light in the original compiled dataset. This drives the research to focus on enhancing visibility.
