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Wander
Women
On women’s perception of fear in public spaces at night
By: Parinaz Pajouyan
Supervisor: Prof. Els Enhus
Master thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master
of Science in Urban Studies (VUB) and Master of Science in Geography, general
orientation, track ‘Urban Studies’ (ULB)
Date of submission: 17 August 2021
Master in Urban Studies – Academic year 2020-2021
Cover and Layout Design by: Author Cover Image by Talented Artist: Jenya Kishmária
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic destiny
defines the figure that the human female acquires in society; it is civilization as a whole that develops
this product, intermediate between female and eunuch, which one calls feminine. Only the mediation
of another can establish an individual as an Other. In so far as he exists for himself, the child would
not be able to understand himself as sexually differentiated. In girls as in boys the body is first of all
the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that accomplishes the comprehension of the world: it is
through the eyes, the hands, and not through the sexual parts that children apprehend the universe.”
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Abstract The night is an indispensable and exciting part of modern city life, but women, as well as minorities, report a bigger fear of public spaces in nocturnal cities. De- spite inroads having been made by social changes in the past half-century and the increased importance of the night time economy, the night remains inaccessible to women and blocks their right to participate in and enjoy urban life. This thesis aims to determine where these fears come from and in which ways they are perpet- uated. Specifically, it investigates which roles sexual harassment, the perceptions of fear and safety, and the built environment play in this problem. In this context, the perception of fear and safety are the collective notions and imagery of what is respectively dangerous and safe. The thesis relies on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Through the literature review, it comes to the conclusion that sexual harassment is the main cause of women’s fears. The built environment, traditional gender roles ingrained by history, and the perception of fear and safety reproduce gender dif- ferences in public spaces. Certain quick spatial fixes, such as increased lighting, cleanliness, and surveillance are found to either need careful calibration in the urban environment to be effective or to have no positive effect at all, instead fur- thering stigmatization. Moreover, 1550 participants, almost all women, responded to a survey on their bad experiences in Brussels, which included several open sec- tions. These data offer interesting insights which complement the literature review in a local context. This study indicates that even though spatial resources are unequally distributed and certain spatial elements – when implemented diligently and with women’s participation – can alleviate women’s fears, the only permanent solution is to raise awareness and educate people on sexual harassment to bring about societal change. Keywords: perception of fear, gender equality, perception of safety, night life, night-time economy, right to the city, public spaces at night, sexual harassment, women, citizenship, fear
Acknowledgment This thesis has been written during the COVID-19 crisis while the world is strug- gling to establish some order in this new chaotic life and our meaning-seeking minds were in search of comfort in the absence of attachment. There was a lot of stress and anxiety involved in the process of writing this thesis, and I would like to thank everyone who made this path easier for me. The coolest supervisor that I could ever ask for, Els Enhus, for her kindness, patience and guidance that helped me to not drown and find my way to the end. My family and friends, especially my Mom for always believing in me, and Jules for all of his help and support. As I add the final touches to this thesis, Kabul has fallen, and together with it 20 years of women’s indescribable endeavour and sacrifice to achieve freedom. We are living in very dark days in history: as the international community stands by and sends its thoughts and prayers on Twitter, Afghanistan is thrown hundreds years back without any light in sight. While the world is watching, women’s hopes for freedom are dying as a casualty of war. With deep feelings of rage and despair, I dedicate this thesis to all Afghan women who sacrifice their lives for freedom and enlightenment.
Table of C
Introduction 01
Problem Statement 03
Research Question 03
Overview of the Thesis (Methodology) 04
Theoretical framework 05
Defining Fear 07
Dispositional Fear and Situational Fear 07
Different Aspects of Fear 07
Causes of Situational Fear 07
Foundational Studies 08
Personal Experiences 09
Perception of Fear 13
Perception of Safety 13
Literature review 15
Women, Fear and Public Spaces 16
The Relationship Between Public Spaces and Fear 16
Order and Cleanness 18
Lighting 18
Surveillance 20
Women and the Night 21
Genealogy of the Night and Darkness 21
The Night-Time Economy Saves the Day ... 23
Or Does It? 25
Critical Analysis 25
Case Study: Brussels 27
Selection of case study 29
Demography 29
Economy 30
Transport 31
Crime 31
Contents
Methodology 32
Quantitative-Qualitative methods 33
SaferCities 33
Questionnaire & Research Scope 33
Participants 34
Methods 34
Methodological limitations 35
Data Analysis 36
General findings: quantitative data 37
Why? The self-reported causes of fear 37
Where? The places of fear 38
When? The time of the incident 39
Intervention by others 39
Effect of the incident 40
Perception of safety 40
Qualitative data and topical discussion 41
Surveillance 41
Lighting 43
Order & Cleanness 44
Racism & Prejudice 45
Mobility 47
Visibility and Risk 48
Shame and Identity 49
Passive Presence 50
The (n/r)ight to the city 53
Conclusion 57
References 61
Annex 71
Annex 1: Questionnaire for bad experience 72
Annex 2: Questionnaire for good experience 75
Annex 3: Experiences shared by participants 77
List of Figures
Figure 1: Mechanism of Fear 08
Figure 2: Face recognition under horizontal (left) and vertical (right) lighting 19
Figure 3: Sex ratio in Brussels 29
Figure 4: Age coefficient in Brussels 29
Figure 5: Foreigners from North Africa, Turkey and EU15, living in opposite 30
regions in Brussels
Figure 6: Average taxable income per capita in Brussels 30
Figure 7: Participants in Brussels according to gender; good and bad experiences 34
in Brussels; Map of Safer Cities locations in Belgium
Figure 8: Map of bad experiences 37
Figure 9: Map of surveillance cameras (public and semi-public) in Brussels 42
Figure 10: Map of bad experiences 42
Figure 11: History of Sexism in Advertising (1) 49
Figure 12: History of Sexism in Advertising (2) 49
Figure 13: Gender distribution of street names in Brussels 56
List of Graphs
Graph 1: What other features can you add from the experience? 38
Graph 2: Do any of these apply to your experience? 38
Graph 3: When did the incident happen? 39
Graph 4: Did anybody react or offer help during or after the incident? 39
Graph 5: What maks a place safe? 40
List of Tables
Table 1: What kind of negative experience did you live? 37
Table 2: What happened next? 40
Table 3: If discrimination was a factor in making you feel bad about this place, 46
was it discrimination on the basis of
Introduc
tion
Introduction
Problem Statement
The night is an indispensable and exciting part of modern city life, but women, as well as minorities, report a
bigger fear of public spaces in nocturnal cities. These are not mere private issues of comfort: women’s fears
at night have societal repercussions. Even if nowadays women are often politically and legally fully emanci-
pated, not being able to go out at night and having to shun certain places makes them second-rank citizens.
Various elements – from increased CCTVs and lighting to pink taxis – are seemingly there to make public
spaces fear-free. However, in order to be able to combat and solve this problem, a deeper understanding of
the causes of these fears is needed.
Research Question
This thesis explores as its main question: (Whether and) why do women have fear in public spaces at night?
Much ink has flown on this question within the context of the ‘gender-fear paradox’, the quandary of why
women are more afraid to be victimized than men even though their reported victimization rate is actually
lower. But this debate misses the point by starting from the premise that women are ‘fearful’ to begin with,
frail objects which need to be protected from the dangerous outside world, while men are not (Lee 2007).
This thesis rather wants to address the research question by understanding the struggles and discrimination
against women which lie behind these fears, none of which are natural or to be accepted as such, but can
be explained through the prisms of the psychology of fear, society, and space. This is because fear is like a
medallion with two sides: it is at the same time a very personal, intimate emotion which can be felt in the
body, and a social construct, “a sensitive indicator of gendered but complex power relations which constitute
society and space.” (Koskela, 1997)
What makes women feel safe or uncomfortable? How do popular perceptions of what is dangerous and
what is safe shape women’s mental maps of their environment? What is the role of society in maintaining
women’s fears?
Besides these issues, I want to look at the relationship between these fears and the built environment. What
is the role of the built environment in producing fear? Some argue that the built environment is in itself a
determinant of fear, as male urban planners still dominate the profession and instil their values in public
space while being blind to women’s needs and rights (Wilson, 1992; Kern, 2020), and an inconsiderately built
environment increases women’s unsafety, and consequently, their fears (Jacobs, 1961; Newman, 1972). Oth-
ers contend that the built environment is but a minimal factor on women’s fears, as the underlying sexual
harassment, patriarchal values, and mental markers are purely operate fully independently from the built
environment (Pain, 1997; Koskela & Pain, 2000; Valentine, 1989). This interaction between society and space
must be further addressed to understand women’s fears.
Many of the earlier studies regarding women’s fears involved the night in their research as a key element
to women’s fears, regarding it as a place of liminality and transgressions (Lovat & O’Connor, 1995). Women
were reported to be more afraid of crime at night, from which commentators inferred that darkness is a stim-
ulus of fear and the night an agent of crime (Maxfield, 1984). This pathologized image of the night has been
reevaluated by studies on the night-time economy, building further on the Lefebvrian notion of the construc-
tion of space (Lefebvre, 1974). The night is more than a time: capitalist processes and social conventions have
turned the night into a “space-time that induces a special atmosphere, associated with particular activities,
experiences and possibilities” (Williams, 2008). These shifting accounts tend to emphasize the ambivalent
nature of the night and the positive experiences night ventures and activities might bring to women (Roberts
& Eldridge, 2009). This discourse has also entered feminist movements and actions groups, most notably the
3“Reclaim the Night” movement (2021) which has in recent years vindicated women’s right to access to the
night. Thus, the role of the night has shifted from a categorical evil to a pharmakon, both remedy and poison
(Edensor, 2015). Therefore, the night is an important and complex part of the puzzle, since the imagery of
fear is time-dependent (Knox & Pinch, 2013).
The established literature will be juxtaposed and contextualised in a case study of Brussels. I had the oppor-
tunity to have the SaferCities data by Plan International (an independent and humanitarian organization
that advances children’s rights and equality for girls) at my disposal, a broad quantitative-qualitative survey
in which women explained their struggles in public spaces.
Overview & Methods
All fear surveys and studies presuppose, but all too often do not define ‘fear’ nor exactly explain what the
‘fear’ is that they are studying. Accordingly, the Theoretical Framework (p. 7) seeks to define ‘fear’ and its
various denotations to serve as a theoretical canvas, starting from the crucial difference between ‘disposi-
tional fear’ and ‘situational fear’ up to the ‘perception of fear’ and the ‘perception of safety’ (content analy-
sis), as well as provide a brief overview of the foundational studies on women’s fears and the so-called ‘risk-
fear paradox’ to answer the preliminary question whether women experience fears in public spaces at night.
In the Literature Review, I take a closer look at the research on why women experience these fears by fo-
cusing on the three key elements of the research question: women’s fears, public spaces, and the night. The
first section (p. 16) explores the relationship between these fears and public spaces by comparing different
schools of thought abstractly and then developing further inquiry into the relationship between women’s
fears at night and specific spatial elements, namely surveillance, order, and lighting (thematic analysis). The
second section (p. 21) takes a plunge into the history of women’s place and their fears at night from the
Middle Ages to the rise of the modern Night-Time Economy and subsequently keeps tally of how accessible
the night has become to women (genealogical analysis). The theoretical part of this thesis concludes with a
summary analysis (p. 25) before moving on to the practical part, which compares the data of the case study
to the theoretical findings and elaborates them.
After introducing Brussel’s demography, economy, transportation, crime (p. 29), the case study’s method-
ology is further explained on p. 33. Next follows the results section of the quantitative data (p. 37). The
subsequent presentation of the qualitative data, interlaced with a topical discussion, evaluates the literature
review’s conclusions, but also builds further upon them, especially with regards to the different ways in
which women cope with and experience their environment (p. 41).
Lastly, the synthesis draws the main findings of the theoretical and practical parts of the thesis and meditates
upon possible solutions for women’s fears (p. 53), before reaching the conclusion (p. 57).
4Theoretic frame
al work
Theoretical Framework
“The problem of fear is the meeting point of many important questions, an enigma whose complete solution
would be as a food of light upon psychic life.” (Freud, Lecture XXV. Fear and Anxiety, 1920)
Defining fear
Fear is such an ubiquitous concept that Freud famously said that “fear itself needs no introduction” (Freud,
1920). Almost every conventional definition of ‘fear’ describes it as “an unpleasant emotion caused by threat”
or in similar terms (e.g. Oxford Educational Dictionary). But beyond that, actually defining fear in more
detail has proven a notoriously difficult task. Approaching the concept of fear, breaking down its main
components and distinguishing its diverse meanings will avoid confusion and allow for clarification in the
upcoming literature review and the subsequent data analysis. But as fear is a personal emotion, different in
everyone, which is moreover ruled by an intricate network of ‘trigger and feedback processes’ (Gabriel and
Grave, 2003), every categorization and distinction in this field is a conceptual simplification.
Dispositional Fear and Situational Fear
Catell (1961) was the first to make the important, but slightly abstruse difference between ‘dispositional fear’
and ‘situational fear’. Whereas ‘dispositional fear’ is the fear that the subject has based on individual expe-
riences or collective knowledge of threat, ‘situational fear’ is the experience that comes and goes during the
encounter of an identified danger. Experiencing one’s ‘dispositional fear’ is ‘situational fear’. Both concepts
are related and intertwined: if a person has been subjected to a series of situational fears, they might be more
perceptive in identifying threats in the future, thus increasing their dispositional fear. Vice versa, more dis-
positional fear might increase the probability of having more situational fears when confronted with what
the person perceives as a similar threat.
This distinguo is important because surveys and studies on fears can intermingle both types of fear: there is
a difference between thinking that one is afraid of something (dispositional fear), and actually being afraid
when confronted with it (situational fear).
Different Aspects of Fear
The psychologists Gabriel & Grave (2003) further developed Catell’s insight by differentiating three different
aspects in ‘situational fear’:
- the affective aspect or feeling of fear: ‘Do I feel afraid?’
- the cognitive aspect or cognitive perception of a threat : ‘Is this a threat?’
- the expressive aspect or behaviour: ‘How do I react?’
These do not each constitute different types of fear, but rather are different necessary components of ‘situ-
ational fear’. The affective aspect relates to the ‘emotion’ of fear in the narrow sense, i.e. the feeling of fear.
The cognitive aspect implies that any situation one is afraid of, must also be perceived to be dangerous or
(potentially) threatening: feeling afraid but not thinking (consciously or unconsciously) that the fear trigger
is a threat at all is a contradiction. The expressive aspect relates to the behaviour expressed in reaction to
this perceived threat.
Causes of Situational Fear
These aspects are the constitutive components of fear, but what is it that causes fearful experiences, i.e. situ-
ational fear? Situational fear arises when the subject is confronted with an object, surroundings, or situation
that they perceive to be threatening (Mineka et al., 1998). Thus, situational fear is caused by an objective el-
ement, i.e. physical/verbal/visual triggers, and a subjective element, namely the identification of this threat.
The identification of the threat happens by values and heuristics derived from personal past experiences, as
well as opinions and images of what is dangerous and what is secure, which in this thesis are respectively
7called ‘perception of fear’ and ‘perception of safety’.
Figure 1: Mechanism of Fear (Source: Author)
Foundational studies
Fear entered the field of criminology and sociology as an autonomous topic fairly recently. In the late ‘60s
and the early ‘70s, during the first wave of ‘bureaucratic’ criminology (Lee, 2007), governments surveyed
people on their victimization, in a first attempt to capture ‘the dark figure of crime’, which has since been
established as the most widespread method of measuring crime across the globe (Maguire & McVie, 2017).
The first British Crime Survey (BCS) in 1982 added a couple of questions polling the general public on their
fear. In his analysis which had been commissioned by the Survey, Maxfield (1984) deduced three conclusions
from the data:
- that those subjected to prior victimization are more likely to be afraid
- that women are more than fearful than men
- that the elderly are more fearful than the younger
These observations – which would now be considered somewhat trite or commonplace, even though they
remain controversial – were for the first time enshrined in a coating of scientific objectivity. Since then, al-
most every other national crime survey has included questions regarding fear, and policymakers now use the
survey not just to inform the rate of victimization, but also to stay up to date on the “development of strat-
egies in crime control and prevention, public reassurance, and well-being” (Bradford and MacQueen, 2015).
In the aftermath of this development, the academic community noticed a discrepancy between the many
surveys which purported to uncover the real figure of crime and the newly reported levels of fear amongst
women: even though women were on average less likely to fall victim to crime (at least in public spaces),
they displayed higher levels of fear than their male peers. This divergence between reported fear and ‘ac-
tuarial risk’, dubbed ‘the risk-fear paradox’, was encountered as a problem to be solved by academics along
two main approaches (Lee, 2007).
The first approach explains the risk-fear paradox by looking for a solution in the nature of the psychology
and physiology of women and their social history. Killias (1990) posits that women’s physical vulnerability is
8a key variable in fear. Guided by a propensity towards clichés (e.g. ‘bank employees have risky jobs’), Killias
assumes that women have more fear in public spaces, because they would be physically powerless in front of
an attack or harassment compared to their male peers, even though men have a higher comparative risk of
being attacked. Grabosky (1995) came with a similar argument from a sociological perspective: the tradition-
al gender roles have reduced women’s autonomy and self-confidence, increasing their levels of fear. What
these authors have in common, is that they assume an actual disbalance between women’s reported fear
and real risk, and impute this disbalance entirely to women’s nature (be it in physical or sociological terms).
This approach has been criticized by left-realist and feminist authors (Lee, 2007), most notably Elisabeth
Stanko, who maintain that the first approach is sexist because it departs from the locus communis that wom-
en and their fears are irrational. If women’s levels of reported fear are relatively high, it is because women
face a “continuity” of insecurity which is not always well-captured by statistics (Stanko, 1990). “That an act
of rape is different from an act of street harassment is not argued, but in fact, each act is a physical and/or
sexual intrusion, only the form, the intensity, differs.” (Stanko, 1985) She maintains that sexual and physical
intimidation from strangers or acquaintances might not always be regarded as a severe act, or even qualify
as a crime (even though criminal law is targeting sexual harassment better than in the ‘80s and ‘90s), but
remind women of their vulnerability to violence. Moreover, this second group of researchers suggests that
women tend to adapt their routine and mobility to minimise their risk of victimization, thereby avoiding
public spaces and reducing the number of actual victimizations exactly because of the high risk of victimiza-
tion, so-called ‘risk-management behaviour’ (Ferraro, 1996; Stanko, 1990), something which has been backed
up partially by empirical data (Loukaita-Sideris, 2009). Also, Pain (2001) believes that women are more prone
to express their emotions, while machismo may lead to a reluctance amongst men to report fears.
Thus, they criticize the former approach because it presupposes women’s nature to be ‘irrational’. Instead,
they have tried to legitimize and rationalize women’s fears of crime, shifting the blame from the women to
the victimization that they have been experiencing.
Murray, who wrote a very critical analysis of the concept of Fear of Crime, does not fit either category. Ac-
cording to Murray, it is not the risk/fear paradox, nor whether women’s fears are rational or not, but wheth-
er we are right to accept that “women are fearful and men not” to begin with. The statistical surveys all
approach women in terms of lack (of safety) and thereby impose gender divisions through the surveys and
reproject them on popular opinion (Lee, 2007). They approach women in terms of lack because they consider
them to be ‘deviances’ from fearlessness, the male norm. He maintains that ‘Fear of crime’ has turned into
an industry and policymaking tool that has come to serve its own goals. Moreover, the statistics also have
severe methodological limitations: they are vulnerable to a ‘feedback loop’, increasing fear of and eliciting
fearful responses (Lee, 2007) Similar concerns are voiced by Gilchrist et al. (1998) who maintain that the sur-
veys magnify the differences between men and women and that qualitative research paints a more nuanced
picture: no matter how much statisticians beg to differ, fear is subjective and individual, just like any other
emotion, and moulding it into an objective and universal statistic can devoid it of its meaning.
But then, what do these studies show? The fear surveys do not show how and why the general public (and
women in particular) are afraid. The absolute number of the general public that is afraid according to these
surveys “is a product of the way it has been researched rather than the way it is.” (Farall et al., 1997)
Personal Experiences
Earlier (‘Defining Fear’; p. 7), the formation of ‘situational fear’, i.e. a fearful experience, was discussed.
‘Situational fear’ comes about after the subject is able to become aware of something in their surroundings
through their senses and deems this to be a threat. The heuristics through which the subject recognizes the
threat to be present are ‘dispositional fear’, i.e. the knowledge which associates certain elements with dan-
ger. Such assessments of what constitutes a threat or not are based on individual experiences and collective
9bodies of knowledge, namely the perceptions of what forms a threat according to the media, advertisements,
and society.
These individual experiences can have been severe acts of trauma, which increase one’s dispositional fear to
similar elements greatly (Gardner, 1990; Valentine, 1992). But encounters of sexual harassment in every-day
life can have a similar effect on dispositional fear (Ledoux, 1997). Some have seriously argued that women
might have higher levels of fear because they are physiologically more used to generalizing fear and remem-
bering older events than men (Pain, 1995), but luckily, such claims have been rebutted (Smith & Torstensson,
1997). A more plausible explanation would be that these fears are not ‘irrational’, but have a solid basis in
reality: if women have higher levels of fear, it is because they are more often exposed to traumatizing ex-
periences. Valentine (1989) has found out that most women have suffered at least one frightening sexual
experience in public spaces, such as being followed, harassed, or flashed. Quantitative data corroborate
that women are constantly exposed to sexual assault and harassment (Tandogan & Ilhan, 2016). A scientific
paper by Tolin & Foa (2006) concluded that sex-related potential traumatic events, which are more often
experienced by women, have a higher chance of giving rise to post-traumatic stress disorders than other
potentially traumatic events more often experienced by men. These studies seem to agree with Stanko that
the “continuity” of insecurity experienced by women contribute to their dispositional fear (Stanko, 1990).
A series of sexual harassment encounters can add new elements to the ‘dispositional fear’. But it will also
leave an imprint on her experience of space. Perception of fear always happens in a certain place: the human
mind associates such encounters with inner representations and schemes on a mental map “to filter the
barrage of environmental stimuli to which the brain is subjected, allowing the mind to work with a partial,
simplified (and often distorted) version of reality.” (Knox & Pinch, 2013) Thus, if someone has experienced
sexual harassment in a specific place, that memory might make them feel more afraid when travelling again
through the same or a similar place, and will possibly change their routine and thereby hamper their mobil-
ity (Ferraro, 1996; Stanko, 1990; Loukaita-Sideris, 2009).
10Percep- tion of Fear
Safety
Perception of Fear
But the dispositional fear is not only influenced by personal experiences and memories. There are certain
commonplace ideas of what is dangerous, and when a woman enters an environment, “she makes judge-
ments about her safety in public space on the basis of preconceived images she holds about that area and its
occupants, as well as from cues she receives about social behaviour from the actual physical surroundings.”
(Valentine, 1989). For example, darkness, graffiti, and the homeless are often regarded as a threat, and their
presence can spark situational fear in areas which one visits for the first time, because these images have
been formed and inculcated by public, political, and media discourses (Koemans, 2011). This thesis calls these
predictive images ‘the perception of fear’.
Valentine (1992) maintains that the media dwell disproportionately upon unusual crimes of the most vile
kind committed against women in public spaces, while barely bringing attention to male domestic violence
against women, because the former sells more than the latter. In doing so, the media will often link specific
places (e.g. dark parks and railways) to the scoop of the violent act in order to set the story. The exact effect
of news consumption on dispositional fear remains debated, with the few existing studies coming to contra-
dictory conclusions (Lane and Meeker, 2003). But it is clear that news media contribute to image shaping and
constantly reinforce the mental (un)safety map of its followers (e.g. Molenbeek in Brussels).
Such media framing shapes the narrative of stigmatization of specific places and increases their avoidance, a
process in which politicians too have played their part. Stigmatization of specific places and neighborhoods
increases “the symbolic dispossession of their inhabitants, which in turn not only recasts them as social or
urban outcasts but also deprives them of their collective representation and identity.” (Larsen & Delica, 2019)
As such, the perception of fear can also ‘other’ and lead to exclusion from public spaces of those who are
perceived as threatening, and acts as a way in which the exclusive discourse shapes space (vide infra, p. 45).
Valentine (1992) also mentions that the media, police, and public opinion partially shift blame to a woman
who was attacked or raped in such places while alone at night: as if the scenery had already been set. Cul-
ture too has indented the perception of fear. Societal clichés that going out at night is dangerous is imparted
by parents and institutions, premised upon the patriarchal notion that women are safest in the household,
despite plenty of evidence to the contrary (idem).
Perception of Safety
The societal norms of what is dangerous go hand in hand with the societal norms of what is safe: the per-
ception of safety. (Un)safeness is a ‘social construction’ (Mincke et al., 2009): certain environmental elements
are perceived as ‘naturally’ enhancing safety, such as surveillance, cleanness, and lighting.
The discourse of surveillance as increasing safety has deep roots in culture, which have been famously
traced by Foucault (Foucault, 1975). The presence of surveillance has been incorporated in many different
urban planning schools and become an omnipresent theme amongst politicians, who have eagerly adapted
them in public space, resulting for example in CCTVs becoming commonplace in public spaces, especially
in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. Despite weak evidence of their effectiveness, public opinion in Belgium
as elsewhere overwhelmingly perceives such measures as reducing danger and providing safety (Bennet &
Gelsthorpe, 1996; Keval & Sasse, 2010). After such elements of surveillance have been installed, however, the
reality has proven more complex (vide infra, p. 20, 41).
Similarly, cleanness and order, i.e. the absence of anti-social behaviour, are also held to be producing a safer
environment (Kelling & Wilson, 1982). While ideas of what order and socially acceptable behaviour con-
stitute are malleable and fluid throughout history and culture, ever since the popularization of the Broken
13Windows Theory, the idea that small ‘disorders’ can lead to greater danger and must at all cost be avoided
has recently been gaining ground. This academic discourse has been adopted by political and legal entities,
through revitalization of stigmatized places via neighborhood contracts and Belgium’s notorious municipal
fine system (Mincke et al., 2009) (vide infra, p. 18, 44).
Lighting might be a primordial, universal and ‘natural’ marker of safety: light brings visibility, which is
tightly bound to the perception of safety, and dispels darkness, which harbours the unknown and is tied to
the perception of fear. But technological advances have also diversified lighting, giving it a myriad of ‘arti-
ficial’ applications in nowadays’ cities, whether it be by city planners through uniform lighting plans (e.g.
Brussels’ 2017 Lighting Plan) or private, commercial actors. Lighting has therefore become contextualized,
and its influence on the perception of safety varies accordingly (vide infra, p. 18, 43).
Each of these three markers of safety can be both conceived as a mental concept and as a series of physical
objects, present in the urban built environment through cameras, shiny sidewalks, and luminaires. But do
fears and feelings of safety come from this built environment, or do they themselves shape the built envi-
ronment?
14Literature review
Women, Fear, and Public Spaces
“Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other.” (Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and
Place, 2001)
The Relationship between Public Spaces and Fear
The threat of sexual harassment, the perception of fear, and the perception of safety instilled by the media
and society at large have thus created a mismatch between the geography of fear and the geography of
violence: the risk of danger in the public space has been overemphasized compared to the understated risk
of danger in private spaces (Valentine, 1992). Nevertheless, research indicates that women are more fearful
in public spaces (vide supra) and associate specific spatial elements with these fears (idem; Koskela & Pain,
2000), which raises the question whether the physical environment creates, exacerbates, or allays these fears.
One can discern three main approaches when it comes to the relationship between the urban environment
and (women’s) fears.
First are those who maintain that fears are very much the result of the urban built environment. By altering,
changing, and controlling the city, these fears can be ‘designed out’. In its earliest (but also more nuanced
form), Jane Jacobs proposed this thesis in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961), when
she attacked orthodox city planning in the aftermath of World War II for neglecting the needs for social
cohesion and informal surveillance (‘eyes on the street’). In her view, environmental planning could prevent
fearful experiences by, for example, directing residential buildings towards the street and promote feelings
of neighborhood belonging. Newman (1972) took these ideas up a notch, when he suggested that spatial
development which emphasized territoriality, i.e. the demarcation between common space and private space
to showcase proprietal responsibility, as well as natural surveillance, i.e. increasing the presence of inhabit-
ants, would deter crime and consequently increase the feeling of safety. By offering more practical (and less
refined) guidelines than Jacobs, Newman paved the way for the developmental strategy of Crime Prevention
Through Environmental Design (CPTED), which has turned as much into an industry as an academic field.
CPTED tends to emphasize increased lighting, CCTVs, and cleanness, (Cozens & Love, 2015) all of which
have become mainstream features both in the political discourse and urban planning policy.
This stance has been vehemently criticized, particularly by feminist authors, who stress that women’s fears
exist independently of the urban environment, and that tackling these fears requires looking at the under-
lying social causes. Reacting to CPTED practices, which she deems deterministic, Pain (1997) writes that
“the environment itself might redistribute fear on a relatively small scale, but the explanation of fear lies
elsewhere” namely in patriarchal values and the gendered division of labour which perpetuate this fear. In
her article written with Koskela, she maintains that “fears about attack may be transferred onto specific
environments which become markers of unsafety, but this does not mean that they cause or produce fear”
(Koskela & Pain, 2000) – it might very well be that these associations are projected upon the environment.
“Even the darkness of the night itself, a “natural” element of environmental difference frequently implicated
in the fear of crime, is socially mediated” (idem). Valentine (1989), while not denying that women’s fears
are at least partially spatial, asserts that these are rather projected upon space through the assumption that
“the location of male violence is unevenly distributed through space and time”, because continuous sexual
harassment and secondary information gives the image that strangers in certain places are thought to be
unpredictable and uncontrollable.
The last group seeks the middle ground, by seeing space and hence the urban built environment not as ob-
jects which merely exist, but which are also constantly physically and mentally (re)produced by its users and
changes them in turn. The urban built environment and its wanderers are in a ‘continuous two-way process’
(Knox & Pinch, 2013), a ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (Soya, 1980).1
1 This whole debate can be compared to the Kantian debate on empiricism-rationalism. Rationalists, such as Descartes,
16Kevin Lynch laid the groundwork for this viewpoint in his seminal book The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960).
Through his research, he was able to show that people’s experience of their city is reflected in their own,
personal mental maps. These mental maps often have common elements between social groups, which he
categorized in paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.
Henri Lefebvre (Lefebvre, 1974) further developed this idea from a leftist-economic perspective. As a Marx-
ist, he emphasized that space is kneaded by economic, i.e. capitalist, processes: people crush, develop, sell,
and fragment space based on the movements of the market. Urban developers and architects obviously do
not create space to set loose their own creative potential, nor to serve the common good, but work on assign-
ment of the capitalist class and infuse space with capitalist values. The underlying socio-economic dispari-
ties and the capitalist distribution of labour are projected on space, with different evolving forms of capital-
ism (assembly line capitalism; neoliberalism) shaping their corresponding cities (Fordist and post-Fordist).
But as a humanist, he insisted that the production of space is not merely a physical and economic, but also
a mental and social process, shared by all who live within it. While the dominant ‘representations of space’,
such as maps, administrative compartimentations, and gentrification plans are determined by capitalist forc-
es, everyone also builds their own ‘spaces of representation’ based on their own experiences and standing
within the city, not unlike Lynch’s mental maps.
Applied to women’s fear, this last approach indicates that the perception of safety and perception of fear
both are emanations of the urban built environment and creators of the urban built environment.
On one side, Pain, Valentine, and Koskela (vide supra) are right when saying that patriarchal values are
projected upon space; through personal experiences, as well as markers of fear and security, women form
mental maps of fear, instilling gender inequities upon these ‘spaces of representation’.
On the other side, the urban built environment is a ‘representation of space’, built by men, for men. Urban
planners and architects reflect their ideology and values in their creation of public space (Knox & Pinch,
2013). Dominant urban planning dogmas such as Newman’s (1972) territoriality (vide supra) presuppose that
space belongs to some but not to others, including women. While modern architecture often portrays itself
as progressive, it all too often reinforces the gendered distribution of labour outside of the home and ignores
women’s needs (Wilson, 1992). As Kern (2020) has put it aptly in her recent book, Feminist Cities: Claiming
Space in a Man-Made World, “the primary decision-makers in cities, who are still mostly men, are making
choices about everything from urban economic policy to housing design, school placement to bus seating,
policing to snow removal with no knowledge, let alone concern for, how these decisions affect women.”
This way, public space both physically and ideologically excludes women by not giving them a place, i.e.
a space to make their own, and thereby keeps them out. Using de Certeau’s (1984) famous strategy-tactic
duality, one could state that public spaces and men perpetrators use strategies to control women, strategies
whose successes can be “stockpiled” in space. On the other hand, women are “out of place” and forced to
take recourse to tactics, such as the avoidance of spaces at night, walking fast and changing the side of the
street to avoid catcallers and wearing a more ‘modest’ style of dress, which are but coping mechanisms “in
the absence of a proper locus” (de Certeau, 1984, as cited in De Backer, 2020).
The following subsections will discuss more in detail the relationship between women’s fears and public
space through three common elements at night: order and cleanness, lighting, and surveillance.
believed that nothing in the physical world of time and space outside of the subject can be known with certainty. On the contrary,
empiricists like Hume maintained that the physical world is the only objective reality, and that as a consequence nothing of any
intellectual value could be formulated by our subjective minds pertaining to reality. Kant resolved this debate in the Critique of Pure
Reason (1781) by positing that the human intellect recreates and orders the physical realm through the categories: for him, time and
space do exist, but as categories of the intellect, which order and project the outer stimuli perceived by the subject’s senses. It is the
subject which produces time-space, not the other way around. In a similar vein, it are its users who (re)create the urban. environment
– whether by designing and building it or by re-imaging its various aspects as they experience it – and not the urban environment
which creates the city.
17Order and Cleanliness
On the issue of order and cleanliness in the streets, there is not one public opinion, but rather a variety
of public opinions on what constitutes a disorderly (and by extension, dangerous) setting. This is clearly
shown in the case of graffiti: research has shown that the public has surprisingly diverging opinions on the
issue, which depend very much on the specific context and circumstances. Through the analysis of surveys,
Vanderveen recognises that, just like drinking in public, people’s tolerance, liking and disliking of graffiti
fluctuates according to a number of circumstances, such as the neighbourhood, context, message, time, and
artist of the work. People often do not despise graffiti and define it as a threat per se. Rather, they equate it
with threat and insecurity in specific neighbourhoods and specific places: they affirm one’s negative judge-
ment about a place, rather than form it (Vanderveen & Van Eijk, 2016).
Nevertheless, public, political, and increasingly legal discourses maintain that the perceived civil disorders
and filthy streets increase insecurity. This politicized narrative of the ‘Broken Windows Theory’ (Kelling &
Wilson, 1982) holds that disorder increases fear, and fear automatically leads to crime. Not only is this logical
pattern flawed and overly simplistic (Thacher, 2004), but it also bears several counterproductive effects. Just
like (in)security (vide supra), space is a social construct, crafted and grafted by power and culture relations,
deeming certain groups and populations to be ‘deviant’ (Knox & Pinch, 2013). The here-mentioned discourse
promotes their exclusion from public spaces: Sibley (1995) speaks of the ‘purification’ of public spaces by so-
cial powerful groups in their attempt to purify space from ‘undesired groups’ and ‘outsiders’ when examin-
ing special schools for Roma children in the English countryside. Some criticized Sibley on the grounds that
he is more willing to find fault with the status quo of exclusion but is himself unwilling to draw the line be-
tween which behaviour should be socially acceptable and which should not (Smith, 1996). Still and all, Sibley
is right when he says that whenever policies aim at ‘cleaning the streets’ to ‘reinforce a sense of community
and citizenship’, it is crucial to think about what ‘cleaning the streets’ actually means and which community
would be served this (De Backer et al., 2016). These narratives often stigmatize people from lower socio-eco-
nomic backgrounds, neighbourhoods, and ethnicities and add to their exclusion from public spaces. Parnell
(1993) and Swanson (1977) have even traced the history of South Africa’s urban segregation and planning
back to the discourse of hygiene and cleanliness, which served as a cover for racial discrimination.
Lighting
Lighting is the important Olympian trait characteristic of the perception of safety. There is a consensus that
lighting is a component of perceived safety because it enables people at night “to perform long-range de-
tection of possible threats and make confident facial recognitions of other people on the street”, i.e. lighting
offers pedestrians a prospect of their environment (van Rijswijk & Haans, 2018; Caminada & Van Bommel,
1980). Two other oft-cited contributions of lighting to perceived safety are that lighting raises awareness
of places of escape and places of refuge/concealment in proximity (Haans & de Kort, 2012) and that they
increase neighbourhood control and informal surveillance (Struyf et al., 2019). But where this consensus
usually ends is on the question of what it is in lighting that reduces the perception of fear: some believe that
brighter lighting leads to higher feelings of safety per se, while others maintain that lighting’s positive effects
vary according to the specific context and place (Dastgheib, 2018).
Among the rather sparse literature on the role of light in the perception of safety and fear, Boyce has come
forward as the unabashed defender of increased lighting in public spaces. In his qualitative-quantitative
study of urban and suburban lighting in NYC, he states that the law-abiding believe they are less likely to be
taken by surprise if bright lighting visualises one’s space and that the feelings of security of all his study sub-
jects narrowly corresponded to the intensity of lighting (Boyce et al., 2000). According to Boyce, “the mere
presence of lighting” has a positive effect on increased safety (idem), from which he deduces that intensive
lighting is the most effective tool to combat perceived insecurity (Boyce, 2019).
In recent years, this monolithic approach towards lighting has been challenged. A large study conducted in
Sydney (Matthewson et al., 2019) came to the conclusion that brightness on its own does not mathematically
18lead to an increase in perceived safety. The study reaffirmed that the ability to see ahead and on the side was
a main indicator of perception of safety, but came to the conclusion that greater lighting intensity does not
always make women feel safer in public spaces at night.
On the contrary, areas perceived by the public to be unsafe (cfr. the horrendously dubbed ‘no-go zones’)
were often over-lit as a response by public officials to counter the neighbourhood’s negative reputation.
But this can have the opposite effect, reminding women of the dangerous reputation of the neighbourhood.
Moreover, very bright lighting can accentuate so-called ‘blind spots’ further down the road, showing what
one cannot see rather than what one can see (Matthewson et al., 2019). Paradoxically, stronger lighting can
therefore more easily highlight the limits of the long-range detection of threats it offers, reducing perceived
safety (van Rijswijk & Haans, 2018). Another important addition to spatial safety is the possibility of escape:
knowing that one is able to leave in the case of a threat relieves fears. Lighting in dead ends and closed spaces
can increase such feelings of powerlessness (idem; Matthewson et al., 2019).
Research has also refined our understanding of which specific types of lighting context reduce fear. For
example, two scientific experiments by van Rijswijk & Haans (2018) concluded that – surprisingly – night
wanderers preferred lighting in their immediate vicinity, even if this came at the cost of reduced lighting fur-
ther ahead. One would have expected the opposite, as the prospect light offers is the most important reason
for perceived safety in space. But van Rijswijk & Haans hypothesize that this is because lighting from afar
is not more helpful for seeing further, whereas strongly illuminated spaces in one’s immediate surroundings
make it easier for the eyes to look further in the dark.
The source and direction of the light play a crucial role too in the perception of fear related to darkness.
Lindh (2012) maintains that “within the field of lighting, distribution, colour and level of light are the most
important lighting factors for spatial experience. One may even say that distribution of light is the most im-
portant quality for spatial experience.” Other important conclusions Lindh came to in her research through
a series of experiments were, for example, that horizontal lighting increases the shadow over bystanders’
faces, while vertical lighting makes them more recognizable. Likewise, lower sources of light create lighter
shadows, while higher sources of light create heavier shadows, making faces look less natural (Dastgheib,
2018).
Figure 2: Face recognition under horizontal (left) and vertical (right) lighting (Source: Lindh, 2012)
The reason why Lindh (2012) maintains that the distribution of lighting is so crucial, is because good lighting
should not only be in sync with the specific place and setting but also adapt to the mobility and route of the
person moving through space. With movement comes rhythm, ‘the extension of light and distinct pauses of
darkness that appears between the illuminated areas’: too short intervals can create horizontal lighting and
grim face looks, while long intervals create dark spots in between.
Some, such Edensor (2015), have gotten even a step further, by lauding darkness’ aesthetics and positive con-
notations. He maintains that the current climate crisis will force officials to rethink energy consumption and
reduce public lighting, and predicts many opportunities to re-invent spaces by making them darker. While
research has shown that some places are effectively over-lit (vide supra), lighting does affect perceived safety.
Public officials will have to make a balance between political pressure, climate/budgetary pressure, and the
19perception of safety (Struyf et al., 2019).
This all seems to indicate that lighting is a very important and simultaneously complex factor in women’s
fear at night, which should not be imposed from up-top with uniform solutions, but always carefully cali-
brated within the specific environment.
Surveillance
Another common element perceived to make a space ‘safe’ – despite studies showing just a minimal impact
on actual safety (Melgaço et al., 2013) – is surveillance.
The word ‘surveillance’, in almost any academic context, conjures the spirit of one man: Foucault. In his
influential Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Foucault, 1975), Foucault tried to trace the history and
explain the emergence of modern institutions of control, such as prisons. According to him, such institutions
work as tools to forge within society a structure of consent, i.e. the ‘processes through which people agree to
have their lives determined by others’ (Knox & Pinch, 2013). Consent is not, however, produced mechanical-
ly, but rather generated through several discourses of power (vide supra). Power to Foucault is not a product,
a ‘poiesis’ in Aristotelian terms, but an action, a ‘praxis’, which is brought forth in a ‘network of relations in
a state of tension’ (Foucault, 1975).
Such power relations come to fruition once individuals start spying on each other (‘carceral archipelago’).
This mutual spying is accomplished on the urban scale in the ‘carceral city’, which requires ‘a state of con-
scious and permanent visibility’ to assure ‘the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault, 1991). His famous
analogy is made with Bentham’s Panopticon, a cylindrical prison structure from which a single, central
guardian could oversee all prison cells. The guardian’s power did not just lie in that he could supervise
everyone and punish them for deviant behaviour without having to move through space, but also in the
mere threat of supervision. Bentham believed that the feeling of being surveilled continuously would ulti-
mately push prisoners to censor themselves from exhibiting any deviant behaviour. A prison designed to
spotlight this feeling required in the eyes of the English philosopher “full lighting and the eye of a supervi-
sor to capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected [the inmate]. Visibility is a trap” (Bentham,
1791 as quoted by Foucault, 1991). This metaphor has proven useful to Foucault in explaining recent devel-
opments in the ‘carceral city’, which he describes as an ‘archipelago of prisons’, which do not only include
penal institutions, but also working places, schools, courts, and public administration building, all places in
which we are expected to behave in a specific way.
Within the urban built environment, Foucault’s paradigm has been used to explain the function of increased
policing, close circuit television (CCTV), and private security guards.
Research on their effectiveness in establishing actual safety and crime prevention has been inconclusive,
with some evidence of crime reduction in heavily-surveilled closed indoor spaces (Melgaço et al., 2013),
particularly car park schemes (Welsh & Farrington, 2009). A frequently mentioned explanation for this is
that criminals often carry out crimes impulsively, unreflective of their environment and cameras (Melgaço
et al., 2013).
Nevertheless, political discourse is very much in favour of strong surveillance, with substantial resources
being allocated to camera plans since the early 2000s (Debailleul & De Keersmaecker, 2014). The public
discourse too has steered into the direction of enthusiasm towards CCTVs (Keval & Sasse, 2010). Especially
in the aftermath of security disasters, such as 9/11 or the 2016 Brussels terrorist attacks, there is a spike in
public and political support for increased surveillance and security centralization. Such surveillance pro-
jects bring together many different people and interests, with technological private companies playing an
increasingly crucial role, such as in the top-notch Brussels Regional Crisis Centre, which has been gathering
massive amounts of surveillance data from both public and (soon) private cameras (Bruzz, 2019). However, as
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