24 Mar Transforming Nightlife: Designing Secure and Welcoming Public Spaces for Young Girls and Women

This is a guest contribution by Ronika Postaria
Cover image by Emma Mulligan on Unsplash

Toronto, Calgary, and Ottawa – some of Canada’s largest cities are applauded for their bustling streets, cultural events, lively restaurants and dynamic nightlife. However, young girls and women are excluded from this urban experience due to safety concerns, poor public space design, and tailored amenities. Their participation in nightlife is reduced to feeling unsafe and unwelcome in the public realm. This fear not only restricts their freedom and development but also undermines the equity and inclusivity of our cities.

In Canada, only 28% of women aged 15 – 24 feel ‘very’ safe walking alone in their neighbourhood after dark, and 61% of women from the same age group experience unwanted sexual behaviour in public. Adolescence is a key stage where children form their identities, explore interests, and value peer relationships. Ignoring their safety and accessibility risks, limiting their opportunities, too. While the nightlife economy generates significant cultural and economic value, the challenge is ensuring it is accessible to everyone.

Designing Safe Spaces

The idea of a safe space is subjective. Heightened anxieties and peer pressure often burden young girls. For them, safe public spaces go beyond having well-lit streets or secure transit stops. They should be able to move freely, engage socially, and participate in cultural activities without fear.

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

‘A sense of belonging’ is often associated with feeling secure and empowered to take risks and explore new ideas in such spaces. The idea is to balance safety with autonomy, allowing them to engage meaningfully with their surroundings instead of merely avoiding danger.

It is imperative to make both the infrastructure and socio-cultural elements more inclusive. Soft lighting, clear sightlines, and community-led safety initiatives can make young girls and women feel safer in public spaces at night:

1.      Safer Transit

Transportation planning, access to transit services, and street design are essential to making cities safer for women. Studies reveal that 78% of women in Toronto neighbourhoods endure harassment on public transit and often feel unsafe while waiting in the dark or walking to and from stations. This is not a ‘transit-only issue’ and requires a holistic approach to city planning and policy beyond providing frequent and reliable services or installing street lights and surveillance cameras.

Research shows that poorly maintained transport nodes reduce young people’s perception of safety and increase fear. While proper lighting is essential to enhance the feeling of safety, the light output quality is equally important. An individual’s ability to distinguish a bush from a person, or the colours someone is wearing, is as crucial to feeling safe as seeing the face of a person approaching. Similarly, over-surveillance can breed mistrust, heighten women’s fears, and negatively impact a place’s safety perception.

One design solution is low-level vertical lighting, which illuminates nearby trees or bushes and the path itself. Further, local co-designing and co-creation sessions to identify safe waiting points and optimize bystanders’ presence during off-peak times can make first—and last-mile travel safer.

2.      Designing Spaces Specifically for Young Women

City nightlife offers a range of activities; however, indoor places are often not affordable for the youth, indirectly restricting entry to people with enough disposable income. On the other hand, outdoor spaces are usually dominated by males, making the girls feel uncomfortable. One study in the UK found that 60% of all girls and young women are intimidated by a group of boys.

Women feel unsafe or uncomfortable in public spaces when they face incivilities from strangers, such as walking too closely, invading personal space, pushing in line, shouting, and being rude. Young women are significantly more vulnerable due to their limited ability to resist victimization, either due to physical power dynamics or psychologically infused expectations of being polite and friendly, which restricts their ability to identify a perpetrator sooner. This fear eventually leads to them avoiding certain activities and places altogether.

Installation by Tennesha Joseph, Are You Afraid of the Night, T.O.? Photo credit: Jiya Benni, 8 80 Cities.

To encourage more young women to spend time outdoors, especially at night, public spaces should be designed with their needs in mind. Comfortable places have adequate lighting and abundant seating, encouraging relaxation, communication, and a sense of community. More importantly, these spaces should support various activities other than sports, emphasizing the ‘social aspect’ that engages them as a ‘group.’ In Toronto, a women-led initiative called Are You Afraid of the Dark T.O. by 8 80 Cities project manager Tennesha Joseph, with funding from Ontario Community Changemakers, explored how creative lighting and seating could improve perceptions of safety in public space and create more free social opportunities for women and girls after dark. Temporary activities like this can be used to test design concepts and engage women and girls in sharing what they need from public space to encourage their presence and participation at night.

Urban design often neglects young girls’ needs, impacting their sense of safety. It is essential to collaborate with them to improve inclusivity and redefine safety beyond physical measures. A successful example is the JU:MP (Join Us Move Play) program in Bradford, UK, which involved teenage girls through workshops to co-create a local green space. Seeing their ideas implemented boosted their confidence and sense of community. In another project area, the girls created an ambassador group, and local community leaders secured funding to help girls take ownership of the space.

3.      Reducing Perceived Unsafety in Public Spaces

Photo by Justin Ziadeh on Unsplash.

Beyond physical design, the influence of social norms and perceptions is also critical. Some researchers argue that women often experience higher fear levels in all circumstances due to the high level of non-stranger violence they generally face. This fear is further heightened at night due to fewer crowds, reduced available help, less bystander intervention, and the inability to see potential offenders or risks. For young girls and women travelling alone, this perceived unsafety limits even the tiny fraction of options they have to participate in nightlife activities.

The concept of ‘eyes on the street’ is one clear solution to reducing perceived unsafety, especially since women and girls naturally feel safer in the presence of other females. Facilities that are popular with them, such as cafes, outdoor gyms, or social seating, should be placed in areas of relatively high footfall. Similarly, while designing walking and cycling networks, multiple routes should be provided, or at the very least, route choices, where available, should be indicated clearly to give women the option of choosing the busier street. Another design aspect that plays a vital role is to avoid edges that conceal the view – whether while walking or sitting – and thus, not giving a potential attacker any space to hide.

‘Safety walks’ is a standard audit tool used in Sweden. A group of residents, representatives of local associations, housing enterprises, politicians and the police tour an area to pinpoint locations of specific concern and discuss solutions. Several Swedish cities organized dedicated safety walks to improve women’s safety, and the concerns raised during safety walks resulted in visible improvements in the neighbourhood, generating a sense of influence and trust among participating residents and users.

Conclusion: Participatory Design Is Imperative

Women and girls should not have to adapt to a society built for men. They have to psychologically prepare themselves each time they go out; they must choose the right clothes, take precautions, be on guard, and pay attention to the surroundings – when coupled, these eventually reduce the number of public spaces where women feel safe. Therefore, subtle safety measures should be rooted in community input rather than enforced from the top down. Integrating tools such as digital mapping and local focus groups can ensure that young girls’ voices are heard and drive the design decisions.

Creating safe public spaces requires effective planning, design, and collaboration. We must engage women and girls early in the design process to understand better and address their specific needs, promoting inclusion and participation. We should focus on better designs and policies that rely on active involvement from the community. By doing this, we can change the city at night into a welcoming place for everyone. Young girls and women’s participation in social activities and cultural events increases when they feel secure in public places, eventually supporting local businesses and enriching the city’s vibrancy. It is not just about reducing fear but creating an environment where all individuals feel they belong.

About Ronika

Ronika is an urban planner and designer passionate about creating inclusive and liveable cities. She aims to empower youth, women, and other underrepresented groups by examining the intersection of the public realm, gender, and age. Some of her previous works explored how we can empower children to actively participate in shaping their communities, the influence of public spaces on people’s experiences of the city, and behavioural barriers to walking and cycling for children and adults.