Advancing Safe Community Spaces for All

Natasha Healey: In 2021, we undertook extensive research in the UK exploring the safety perceptions of women and girls when travelling. The research found that 92 percent of women say that their biggest fear is being sexually harassed or assaulted when travelling, and 94 percent of women have felt threatened when using public transport.

The research highlighted that everyone’s experience of using public space and transport is different, based on individual needs, demographic backgrounds, and circumstances. To create community spaces that are safer for everyone, we need to take a human-centred approach, which requires co-designing with end-users.

WSP’s new Safety Inclusion Assessment (SIA) allows design professionals, real estate developers, local governments and other key decision-makers to embed personal safety in the design of physical spaces. The approach includes guidance that draws on research, lived experience and best practice; it also provides data so that public- and private-sector decision-makers can understand which investments will provide the greatest benefit to people.

Abby Harris: We developed the Safety Inclusion Assessment to ensure that the design of community spaces—such as bus stops, active travel routes and stations, as well as other spaces around built environment infrastructure—thoroughly considers safety and a feeling of security for diverse users. By considering the needs of local communities and transport users in the design process, we can create spaces and systems that benefit everyone, improving safety and wellbeing. For example, measures such as well-lit areas, clear signage, and reliable surveillance systems can enhance safety from crime and alleviate concerns as individuals move through areas at different times throughout the day and night.

Susan Leadbetter:  We know that improving public safety requires broader societal change, and not all challenges can be resolved through design alone. However, design has a role to play; the research indicates that certain elements of design can impact safety perceptions. For example, our research found that 82 percent of women felt unsafe when lighting was inadequate; a separate study found that when street lighting is implemented sensitively, it can lead to reductions in crime and a reduced fear of crime as well as increased pedestrian street use after dark.¹  In our research, we’ve found that this isn’t just a UK issue, and the approach can be applied to communities around the world.

What type of criteria informs the Safety Inclusion Assessment?

Jaimee Boutcher-Hann: The Safety Inclusion Assessment provides a standard approach for built environment professionals to identify personal safety risks, capturing qualitative and quantitative data across diverse criteria such as surveillance, space activation, and legibility. Whilst we do look at crime statistics, we know that gender-based violence is often underreported. Therefore, our qualitative data is mainly derived from engagement, as this is key to ensuring that the design of community spaces works for the people that use them.

Susan Leadbetter: Capturing safety concerns from local users is a crucial part of the process. This will not only allow us to understand local context, but it will allow us to identify solutions that people want and provide design solutions to support safer communities. We know that engagement can often be seen as costly and time-consuming, but engagement could be something simple like hosting a workshop or pop-up stall, or even organizing an on-site walk with locals.

Abby Harris: Using feedback from people, site visits and quantitative assessments, we identify a day and night score to capture personal safety risks and changes in activity throughout the day. A nighttime review is undertaken to ensure our assessment considers a person’s experiences within an area after dark and how this impacts their feeling of safety.

Susan Leadbetter: In addition, the criteria consider the place and movement functions of the site, to ensure we capture the needs of the people using a given space and develop site-specific solutions. For instance, the criteria for urban parks will vary compared to an assessment of an urban road corridor. We use this insight to identify how transport designers, real estate developers and public-sector organizations can improve real and perceived safety risks.

How and at what point in the project lifecycle should the information generated from the Assessment be applied to achieve optimal outcomes?

Susan Leadbetter: The Safety Inclusion Assessment can be applied throughout the project lifecycle. It can be used at the start of a project to identify best practice, at the concept design stage to co-design a specific public space or transport scheme, and it can be used to assess an existing public space, to monitor how safe it is and identify improvements.

Jaimee Boutcher-Hann: We’ve recently used the Safety Inclusion Assessment on a large site redevelopment in London at Liverpool Street Station. This Assessment looked at aspects of the public realm, including streets and transport links in the area, considering elements such as lighting, amenities, surveillance, and movement paths, to identify changes that could improve how safe people feel when travelling.

What’s next for the SIA?

Natasha Healey: Our approach is constantly being developed as we learn more from the public about their perception of inclusion, which is why engagement with people is such a crucial part of our approach.

We’re taking a human-centred approach to other work too. As an example, we’re working with partners to deliver the UK’s first National Centre for Accessible Transport (ncat), which aims to make transport accessible and inclusive. Similar to the Safety Inclusion Assessment approach, we want to understand the views of disabled people — understanding their individual, intersectional²  experiences is key to delivering the best outcomes.

To enhance impact, we are continuing our collaborative activities. This means setting up cross-industry forums, engaging with communities as part of our projects and training clients about how they can embed a human-centred approach into their business practices. Finally, we will continue to learn about how everyone can advance safe community spaces for all.

1. ^{Kate Painter (1996), “The influence of street lighting improvements on crime, fear and pedestrian street use, after dark,” Landscape and Urban Planning, Volume 35, Issues 2-3, August 1996, pp. 193-201, Elsevier.}
2. ^{“Intersectionality and Multiple Discrimination,” Council of Europe.}