How to Design Streets and Parks with Women's Safety in Mind

Why the same street feels different to women

International institutions repeatedly point out that public spaces have historically been planned around a supposedly 'neutral' male user, so the daily needs and routines of women, girls and gender minorities are underrepresented. The World Bank notes that cities shaped this way tend to work better for men than for women: women's routines include escorting children and older relatives, carrying loads, travelling at off-peak hours and often feeling that parts of the city are out of bounds after dark.

Perception matters as much as recorded incidents. UN Women reported in 2026 that in Serbia nearly half of women voice concerns about their safety in public spaces and fear sexual violence; many change routes, avoid certain areas after dark and quietly adapt their routines. These behavioural constraints are real even where incident statistics are low, and they are exactly what a safety audit is designed to capture.

What a gender safety audit measures

A safety audit is a participatory method that originated in Canada and is now used by UN Women, UN-Habitat and a number of cities. In organized walks, women and girls assess familiar streets, parks and public spaces from the perspective of their everyday lives, then map their observations and turn them into recommendations for local authorities. In Serbian cities hosting UN Women safety audit walks, participants pointed to poorly lit areas, neglected infrastructure and locations where they felt uncomfortable, and proposed improvements to lighting, parks, playgrounds, paths and regulations.

Barcelona has applied a related approach since 2016: guided walks with women analyse how space is used during the day and at night, explicitly including the time factor, and more than twenty such walks have been held. In UN-Habitat's Her City work in Nairobi, schoolgirls assessed streets along five dimensions of public space: use and users, accessibility, amenities and furniture, comfort and safety, and the green environment. This set of criteria is a useful frame for auditing anything from a small square to a major boulevard.

• Use and users: who uses the space and how, at different hours and days.
• Accessibility: ease of entry, path width and surface, ramps and crossing points.
• Amenities and furniture: seating, toilets, litter bins and clear navigation.
• Comfort and safety: lighting, sightlines, activity, maintenance and cleanliness.
• Green environment: managed planting that avoids dense 'blind' thickets.

Lighting and sightlines come first

Lighting is the factor named most often. Vienna applies an explicit gender-mainstreaming approach to public lighting: instead of illuminating only the carriageway, light should fully cover footpaths and pedestrian routes, and underpasses need extra lamps so that light cones are not blocked and 'anxiety rooms' are avoided. The city's lighting department runs a park campaign analysing conditions in 200 parks and maintains a catalogue of measures for problematic pedestrian crossings.

The second pillar is sightlines. A space feels safe when a person at any point can see entrances and exits and is themselves visible to others, which reduces blind zones behind walls, dense planting and sharp turns. In practice this means managed trimming of shrubs, avoiding tall blank fences along walking routes, and placing seating and playgrounds so they are overlooked from passing paths. The 'see and be seen' principle is especially important in parks and near transit stops, where women are often alone after dark.

Maintenance, activity and infrastructure

A well-designed but neglected space quickly loses its sense of safety. Broken lamps, litter, graffiti and overgrown vegetation read as signs that nobody supervises the area, so a maintenance plan and a clear, answered channel for reporting faults are as important as the original design. Ongoing operations should include checks on lighting and planting, not just cleaning.

Safety is reinforced by 'active edges'—when residential windows, shops, cafés or workshops face the space and stay lit and occupied in the evening, creating natural surveillance. Amenities also help: toilets, benches and water fountains placed near busy areas rather than in remote corners. Accessibility is part of the safe route: even, non-slip paths wide enough to walk beside a pram or wheelchair, ramps and lit crossings make a space more comfortable for everyone, including older people and parents with children.

Running an audit and turning findings into decisions

A practical cycle looks like this. First, assemble a diverse group of women—different ages, with children, with disabilities—and complete at least two walks: a daytime and an evening one, ideally also a night walk. On a map, mark where participants feel uneasy or, on the contrary, safe, and record the reasons in the participants' own words. Then consolidate findings into a table of issues and recommendations and hand it to the responsible authority—roads, parks or municipal services.

Next comes prioritization, because budgets are limited. There is no universal recipe, but a sensible order is: fast, inexpensive fixes first (restoring lamps, trimming shrubs, cleaning), then structural changes (lighting on pedestrian links, reworking entrances, moving benches), and finally capital projects. The World Bank notes that short-term 'stop-gap' measures can complement and even enable longer-term strategies. Close the cycle with a repeat audit after a few months to verify results and prevent the space from sliding back into neglect.

At the design stage, embed audit findings in the brief and budget: specify requirements for pedestrian-zone lighting, preserved sightlines, surface materials and time-based use scenarios. Where possible, accompany new projects with a gender impact assessment so safety is designed in from the outset rather than retrofitted.

Limitations and caveats

It is important to understand the method's boundaries. An audit records perception and lived experience, not actual victimization rates, so it works best combined with local incident data and complaint logs. The priorities named by one group may not match those of another, and what reads as 'unsafe' differs across cultures and neighbourhoods, so conclusions should not be copied mechanically from one district to another.

The guidance in this article is general methodological information, not legal, security or psychological advice; lighting norms, design standards and responsibilities vary by jurisdiction. Before implementation, check the regulations in force in your country and city and involve qualified professionals alongside community groups. Finally, an audit must reflect the real needs of people with disabilities, older people and parents with children—a safe space is not one that is safe for only some users.