Mapping women+ safety through visibility
Introduction
Delhi, like many global cities, presents a paradox for women+ navigating its public spaces: a landscape where visibility can feel both protective and precarious. According to the National Crime Records Bureau (2022), over 14,000 crimes against women were reported in Delhi alone. Yet statistics only scratch the surface of a deeper, more complex urban condition—where perceptions of safety, not just incidence, governs women+’s freedom of movement.
This research investigates the perception of safety among women+ in Delhi, arguing that safety cannot be understood solely through crime data or infrastructure. Instead, it must be explored as a subjective, situated, and collective experience. Grounded in empirical evidence—ranging from surveys and interviews to video diaries and social media interactions, the study listens closely to women+’s lived realities: the fear of walking alone at night, the comfort of a well-lit street, or the quiet panic of crowded public transport.
Spatial factors such as lighting, openness, people density and visibility emerge as recurring themes in shaping these perceptions. However, the research goes further to dissect the duality of visibility as both “projective” (being seen by others) and “introspective” (one’s own awareness of surroundings). This distinction becomes especially critical in understanding how women+ assess risk and safety not just reactively, but intuitively and contextually.
Through spatial mapping and qualitative assessment of key urban zones, the research highlights the limitations of existing safety audits, such as those by Safetipin, which, while rigorous, often fail to account for the emotional and communal dimensions of safety. In contrast, this study emphasizes how community presence and social legibility, what Jane Jacobs once described as “eyes on the street”, serve as intangible yet vital components of safety perceptions.
By centring women+’s voices, the study reclaims safety as a relational, embodied, and everyday urban right that is co-constructed, constantly negotiated, and deeply tied to the right to visibility, mobility, and community presence.
Research Question
Ultimately the research asks many questions, but the key research question is:
How can the evaluation of designed public spaces [through the lens of women+ safety perceptions] in Delhi, inform urban strategies that support their free and confident movement through the city?
This raises of series of sub-questions which are researched and answered in a sequence of 3 chapters.
Sub-Research Questions
- What urban characteristics most significantly influence women+ perceptions of safety in Delhi, and how do these factors impact their mobility and spatial agency?
- How can the tacit knowledge and everyday navigational choices of women+ in Delhi be surfaced and leveraged to restore their agency in urban mobility?
- What models of community-based navigation and support can enhance safety for women+ in Delhi, and how can such systems be designed to offer personalized, trust-based safety optioneering?
Chapter 01: Reading Delhi
identify key spatial factors that shape women+ sense of safety
On December 16, 2012, India witnessed one of the most heinous and shocking crimes against a young woman in Delhi. Nirbhaya—a name given to protect her identity—was a 23-year-old physiotherapy trainee who was brutally gang-raped and mutilated by six men in a moving bus before being thrown, severely injured, onto the streets of South Delhi. This incident had a nationwide impact, triggering both positive and negative societal shifts. On one hand, it led to a surge in reports of sexual harassment and gender-based crimes, as more women+ came forward to share their experiences. On the other hand, it intensified fear among women+, further restricting their freedom in urban spaces. Many began avoiding public spaces after dark, becoming hyper-aware of their surroundings while navigating the city. While similar crimes had occurred before—and continue to occur—this case became a turning point in conversations around women+ safety, reshaping how public spaces are perceived and experienced by women+ across India.
Alarming crime drifts in Delhi
India currently has 19 metropolitan cities, where most crime data related to women+ is recorded. These cities also report a higher number of complaints filed by women+ against offenders. Such complaints fall under the category of Crimes Against Women, as defined by the two primary legal frameworks governing criminal offenses: the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Special and Local Laws (SLL).
Comptroller and Auditor General of India defines this as “[Crimes against women] includes any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.“ According to these laws, while women+ can be victims of general crimes, this category specifically addresses offenses that target and defame women+.
Through this research and data available in the National Crime Records Bureau(NCRB), the number of reported cases across various subcategories of crimes against women+ in India’s top 5 metropolitan cities, have highlighted how women+ are not safe even the most developed cities of the country. Among them, Delhi stands out with an alarmingly high number of cases, making it a critical focus of this research. Between 2020 and 2022, 37,922 cases were reported in the capital alone. Delhi, the capital of India, has a projected population of 7.5 million spread across 700 km², resulting in a population density of approximately 10,700 people per km². Women+ make up roughly 46.27% of this population. As mentioned earlier, crimes against women+ in Delhi have reached alarming levels. From 2020 to the end of 2022, reported cases steadily increased, with the crime rate against women+ reaching approximately 400 per 100,000 women in 2022.
SafetiPin is a mobile app and urban technology platform developed to support safer and more inclusive cities by collecting and analysing data on the perception of safety in public spaces, especially for women and marginalized communities. Originally initiated in India and now used in over 65 cities globally, SafetiPin was developed in collaboration with organizations like UN-Habitat to integrate crowdsourced data into urban planning processes.
Delhi has been one of the key case study cities for SafetiPin, with approximately 44,000 safety audits conducted between 2016 and 2023. In 2016, Delhi received an overall safety score of 3.3 out of 5. By 2023, the score was reported as 6.6 out of 10. While this might initially suggest progress, a closer examination reveals that the overall safety in the city has remained largely stagnant over the seven-year period—the score essentially plateaued, not improved.
More critically, a deeper analysis of the data reveals a decline in the number of areas rated as ‘excellent’ in safety. Rather than expanding safe zones, the city has seen a contraction of high-rated public spaces, signaling a concerning erosion in quality, even if the average appears stable. This stagnation and decline in top-tier safety indicators underscore the limited effectiveness of existing safety interventions, and point to the need for new, community-driven approaches that go beyond infrastructure and policing to address the nuanced, lived realities of urban insecurity.
SafetiPin’s safety audits are structured around eight core parameters, developed to offer a global, comparable understanding of urban safety, particularly for women+. While these metrics serve as a strong baseline across cities, their interpretation—and relevance—must be contextualized to each urban setting. In the case of Delhi, a city marked by stark spatial and social contrasts, these parameters offer useful insights, but also reveal important limitations when divorced from lived experience.
While these parameters help quantify and map safety, they remain surface-level unless grounded in context. In Delhi, the nuances of caste, class, time of day, and social norms heavily influence how these indicators are perceived. Moreover, these eight parameters, though standardized, do not fully capture emotional, communal, or temporal experiences of (un)safety—a gap this research seeks to address through deeper listening, mapping, and collective narration of women+’s urban experiences.
Chapter 02: Listening to Women+ of Delhi
understand and utilize women+’s lived experiences to inform safer and more autonomous urban navigation
To address the limitations of standardized safety metrics and capture the subjective, emotional, and contextual layers of urban insecurity experienced by women+, an empirical research process was carried out as a core part of this study. Recognizing that parameters like lighting or security alone cannot account for how women+ actually feel and navigate spaces, the research prioritized methods that foreground lived experience and personal narratives.
The study employed a mixed-methods approach, which included surveys, video diaries, Instagram-based interactions, and semi-structured interviews. Each method was designed to elicit different facets of perception. The surveys helped quantify common triggers and safety indicators, while video diaries captured the immediate, embodied experiences of moving through the city. Instagram interactions provided a platform for informal and candid expressions, particularly among younger participants, and the interviews allowed for deeper reflection on personal and collective understandings of safety.
Together, these methods offered a layered, grounded, and diverse account of what it means to feel safe or unsafe as a woman+ in Delhi. They also revealed critical insights that are often missed in conventional audits, such as the role of emotional memory, body language, or the presence of other women as markers of comfort and confidence in public space. These rich, qualitative accounts not only challenged the adequacy of existing safety audits but also propelled the research forward. Two pivotal questions formed the backbone of this inquiry:
- “What do you avoid when you are outside for your safety?”
- “What are the places where you or other women feel safe when outside?”
The responses to these questions were striking in both their clarity and emotional weight. Women+ spoke of lonely stretches, poorly lit sidewalks along wide roads, and waiting outside metro stations at night as spaces they actively avoid—highlighting the interplay between physical form and social abandonment. Conversely, spaces perceived as safe were often not defined solely by design, but by their social life: crowded areas, well-lit streets, and locations with balconies or shops facing the street. These responses emphasized that safety is not just about infrastructure, but about visibility, presence, and relational awareness.
Crucially, this feedback underscored that women+ assess safety not in binary terms, but through a complex layering of spatial cues, people dynamics, and intuitive judgment. These lived insights have shaped the direction of the research, reinforcing the need for an approach that values situated knowledge and community perception as valid urban data. By centering these responses, the study moves beyond abstraction and toward a more empathetic, participatory, and feminist reading of the city.
To translate the depth of qualitative responses into a structured, analyzable format, a prioritization methodology was developed. This methodology was designed to extract quantitative insight from qualitative data, allowing recurring patterns, perceptions, and spatial associations to be measured with greater clarity. Leveraging advanced natural language processing techniques—including syntax analysis, BERT-based large language models, and cosine similarity scoring—the research systematically evaluated how often and in what context the eight SafetiPin parameters emerged in participants’ narratives.
The objective of this methodology was to identify which urban concepts most significantly influence women+’s perception of safety in Delhi. By mapping the frequency and semantic proximity of key terms across all data sets—surveys, interviews, video diaries, and social media interactions—the analysis revealed a clear and consistent outcome: Visibility emerged as the most critical concept driving the sense of safety among women+ in the city.
Moreover, visibility did not exist in isolation. The data showed that it frequently co-occurred with other parameters such as lighting, people density, and gender usage, reinforcing the idea that visibility is both a spatial and social construct. It became evident that spaces where women+ felt seen—not surveilled, but socially acknowledged—offered a deeper sense of comfort, confidence, and legitimacy in public life.
This data-driven insight validated and deepened the qualitative findings, positioning visibility as a central pillar in understanding and reimagining urban safety from the perspective of women+ in Delhi.
In the context of urban safety, visibility emerges as a layered and nuanced concept—one that cannot be reduced to mere illumination or visual access. It must be understood through its dual dimensions: projective visibility and introspective visibility.
In the context of urban safety, visibility emerges as a layered and nuanced concept—one that cannot be reduced to mere illumination or visual access. It must be understood through its dual dimensions: projective visibility and introspective visibility.
Projective visibility refers to the condition of being seen by others in a public space. It is inherently a collective experience, shaped by social surveillance, spatial openness, and the presence of “eyes on the street.” This kind of visibility can generate a sense of protection—when the eyes are perceived as caring, watchful, or community-oriented. However, projective visibility also carries a critical tension: the risk of being overexposed, surveilled, or objectified. In Delhi, women+ often describe the discomfort of being hyper-visible, especially in male-dominated or uncontrolled environments, where their presence invites not care, but scrutiny, harassment, or judgment. This complexity underscores that not all visibility is empowering; some forms of being seen can feel more like being on display than being safe.
On the other hand, introspective visibility describes an individual’s ability to see and make sense of their environment. It is a more personal and cognitive experience, rooted in spatial legibility and environmental awareness. When a woman+ can clearly identify exits, detect movement, spot other people (especially other women), and anticipate changes in her surroundings, she is more likely to feel in control and secure. Introspective visibility thus relates closely to autonomy and situational clarity—the ability to read space and respond accordingly.
These two dimensions often intersect in everyday navigation. For instance, a well-lit, crowded street may offer both strong projective and introspective visibility—making a woman+ feel both seen and aware. But their interplay can also create dissonance: a woman may be highly visible to others (projective) but unable to clearly see or assess her surroundings (introspective), resulting in heightened vulnerability.
Understanding this duality of visibility is essential to designing cities that are not only legible and well-lit, but also emotionally and socially responsive to the lived realities of women+. It is not enough to ensure that a woman is seen; how, by whom, and under what conditions she is seen makes all the difference between feeling watched and feeling safe.
Chapter 03: Designing Women+ Safety Systems
explore collective systems that support peer-based, trust driven navigation for women+
