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| Photo Source: openIDEO |
Safe City Dialogues by
Shikha Trivedy of NDTV, a short documentary which captured the urgent need for
city plans to have a gendered perspective cracked wide open a number of these
long cherished and often invoked myths.
It began by
questioning whether gentrification made cities safer. In the 1990’s there were
many mills in operation within the city of Bombay. These mills employed a large
number of women. It was the presence of these migrant, often lower class and
caste women returning home from the late shift on the local trains late at
night that normalized seeing women of all classes out and about in the
city even very late at night. Far from the often invoked maxim that the only
way to keep women safe in big bad cities is to have them safely home during
daylight hours, the story of the women mill workers is proof that the only way
to make a city women friendly, is to have them as a constant presence in all
public spaces at all times. When the mills closed, these women disappeared from
city making all women more susceptible to becoming victims of crimes.
Though the mills
closed, the abandoned factories remained in varying stages of decay. Abandoned
buildings and areas are breeding grounds for the mushrooming of criminal and
undesirable elements. A failure to repurpose these spaces make them hunting
grounds for committing crimes against women without anyone on the street
noticing. The documentary recounts the case
of a woman photo journalist who was raped in one of these abandoned mills and
no one could hear her screams on the roads outside.
Equally imperiled are
the low income women relocated to distant colonies more akin to high-rise slums
with poor sanitary facilities and unknown neighbours and neighbourhoods. Their
harsher realities include fearing letting their daughters out of the house even
for school and a fear of going to the dimly if at all lit, voyeur prone public
washrooms at night. Young men travel freely in the narrow alleys between these
colonies, while the young women remain trapped inside their homes to emerge
only to be the object of harassment.
When cities are planned
without keeping in mind the needs of different genders, they become more
dangerous instead of safer for women. Equally dangerous are measures that give
you a veneer of security without any actual safety. Higher gates and walls
immediately give off the illusion of fortification and therefore safety but the
reality is chilling. Where once a woman had many options of escaping danger
running through the open maidans of Bombay, she must now skirt around their
tall boundary walls and often meet with high gates. Thus the security measure
has actually reduced her chances of making an escape.
We have to start a dialogue in
which women are an integral part not only of the vision of a city but are also
consulted in the making of this vision. An article
by Clare Foran recounts the successes that city administrators in Vienna
have had by designing laws that consciously try to benefit men and women
equally. The goal of “Gender
main-streaming” or a “Fair Shared City” policies as they now prefer have
in on instance made it possible for public parks to be shared equally by both
boys and girls where once their utilization by girls was falling.
Our vision must shift from one
designed to keep out the undesirables to one which aims to attract more and
more desirables. The need is for better not more policing, more toilets, more
public transport, more night shelters at major transport hubs. Gender sensitive
improvements to infrastructure make a city more livable and an equally
accessible space for all its citizens.
By Gayatri Verma
