It’s 2:00 am, you’re walking back home from a night of dining and drinking with your friends at the local bar. The streets are awfully quiet, a street light is flickering and all of a sudden a car alarm goes off in the distance. The hair on the back of your neck stand straight, your heart starts beating faster and you find yourself walking a bit faster as you feel more and more uncomfortable. You make a right turn and enter that scary alley you hate. You know it’s the quickest way to your door. The minute you enter the alley you see a guy walking towards you. He seems drunk as he’s stumbling on his steps. You walk slightly faster. You’re getting closer. You’ve already grabbed your keys and are thinking about the minimum amount of movements required to insert the key in the keyhole, open the door and close it behind you as fast as possible. The guy gets closer, closer, and that’s it, he just walked past you. You’ve made it. You rush to open the door, but you don’t really want to show you’re scared. Your adrenaline is through the roof as you enter the elevator and think to yourself: Shit, I need to move out of here.

Sounds familiar? One way or another we’ve all experienced something like this, especially in big cities. The thing is that safety and comfort are tightly associated. They define a city’s quality of life and attractiveness. However, what we can do as planners and designers to improve the safety and feeling of comfort of our cities is not entirely clear. The perception of safety changes with gender, age, profession, religion, class, time of day and many other factors that relate to the individual and the context it finds itself in.

Urban Planner and Architect Vasia Bakomichali, wanted to explore this lack of clarity and take a deeper look at the way women experience public spaces in an effort to create new insights on the way we plan and design safe cities for all.