Kathryn Weaver, Urban Planning Consultant, scooped the Outstanding Student Project award for her project ‘Walking with Women: A Female Review of Safety in the Sydney Commercial District’.
With increasing focus on how smart city planning can create safer places, Kathryn, a UNSWE student, interrogated the efficacy of NSW’s ‘Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design’ (CPTED) framework related to perceptions of safety and the use of public space by women.
Emerging in the 1970’s, CPTED has influenced urban planning and architectural design thinking for nearly five decades, yet Kathryn provides a sound argument that its application has not adequately addressed both real and perceived levels of fear that women experience in engaging urban spaces.
Through a combination of extensive literature review, interviews, safety audits and focus groups, Kathryn’s ground-breaking research sought to determine women’s responses to the safety of public spaces in the Sydney’s central business district. The research highlighted that the women interviewed ‘perceived a lack of visual and aural permeability and bad aesthetic quality to signal disuse and subsequently low levels of safety’ in response to physical featured of spaces in Sydney.
Kathryn’s findings reveal a disconnect between women’s’ perception of safety and both the theory and practical application of CPTED policy. With a replicable and scalable research methodology, her work has the potential to evolve CPTED theory and improve use of public spaces by women both in Sydney and nationally.
