Gender-informed planning: creating safer spaces

LLDC is urging big developers on its patch like Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield to consider how the built environment can help women and girls to stay safe. But gender-informed planning must become the norm if we are to have truly inclusive spaces. In Stratford, east London, where “violence and sexual offences” form one of the most common categories of crime, multinational property company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has turned to local women and girls to steer the latest design interventions around its shopping centre. Urged on by its planning authority – the London Legacy Development Corporation – it sought out their voices as well as drawing on evidence from its security team. “We wanted to find out how the design of our development could be used to have a positive influence on areas around safety for women and girls,” says James Buckingham, development director at URW. Engaging to drive design interventions As the team worked up plans to develop a 520-bed student housing scheme on top of the centre, it engaged women’s safety consultant Karen Whybro to organise a safety walk with local women using routes from the Underground station. Crucially, this took place just as dusk was falling on a winter’s night. The local participants were rewarded financially for their time and expertise. Sadly, they will know that a 20-year-old woman was raped close to the shopping centre in January. Buckingham says the safety walk has directly informed design interventions. An existing 200m pedestrianised route will now feature yellow beacon lights, a low-level light strip on the wall and will be overlooked by additional windows from URW’s building to increase the sense of surveillance. In another move encouraged by LLDC, Buckingham’s team also brought in charity Make Space for Girls, which exists to campaign for parks and public spaces which are designed with teenage girls in mind. Co-founder Susannah Walker led a review of URW’s initial designs for a new public, rooftop park, to be delivered next to the student housing project, giving “pretty strong feedback”. This led to a three-hour workshop with URW’s design team and a complete rethink of initial plans to put enclosed five-a-side football pitches and caged basketball courts into the 30,000 sq ft park. That is because research shows these types of space will be dominated by teenage boys and avoided by teenage girls because they do not feel safe or comfortable in them. “We pivoted towards a leisure area that is adaptable and informal,” says Buckingham. URW took these emerging designs to local youth board Elevate, which was set up by LLDC in 2019 and is made up and led by a dedicated group of 18–25-year-olds. Its aim is to represent diversity in age, ethnicity, gender and lived experiences, to bring an alternative perspective to those making decision for the area. “Across the board, male and female contributors were very much more supportive of having an adaptable, informal space,” Buckingham says. The park will now feature social seating, including large circular swing chairs beneath a sweeping canopy. Metal infrastructure suspending the seating can be used to suspend nets for ball sports when needed for events. The floor markings are there. But this will no longer set the permanent tone of the place. “Most of the time it will be informal, welcoming,” says Buckingham. “It will be for women and girls; it will be for everyone.” Gender-informed planning These initiatives are all part of a growing movement called gender-informed planning. Slowly but surely, the voices of women and girls are becoming a material consideration, challenging the societal norm which for hundreds of years has omitted the consideration of their needs. LLDC, which formally returns its planning powers to the area’s four boroughs in December, has been practicing gender-informed planning since 2021 – blazing a trail lit by Pam Alexander OBE, the LLDC board member who died from cancer last year. In July, it unveiled a groundbreaking handbook aimed at all local authorities, developers and designers, called Creating Places that Work for Women and Girls. URW, already a signatory to LLDC’s Women’s Safety Stakeholder Charter, was fortunate to have sight of this before publication and embraced it – including appointing a gender champion on its project, which is a key recommendation. The handbook followed two epic rounds of evidence gathering in 2021, involving around 1,000 women and girls. It also draws on emerging national and international work. Produced with Arup, the handbook turns this into practical steps that urban planners, developers, architects, and other stakeholders can take to ensure a gender-informed approach – from the inception of any project through to delivery and long-term management (see panel, below). What a gender-informed approach means Embedding gender-informed principles in the development brief Nominating a gender champion and ensuring diversity within the team Engaging women and girls through a participatory-led approach (eg exploratory walks) Collecting gender-disaggregated data Informing design based on participatory assessment and other collected data Demonstrating approaches taken throughout the planning process via submission of relevant planning documents. Source: London Legacy Development Corporation – Creating Places that Work for Women and Girls: Handbook for Local Authorities, Developers and Designers [caption id="attachment_1251670" align="alignright" width="424"] Marina Milosev[/caption] Marina Milosev, who is principal planning officer at LLDC and a co-author of the handbook, says it is time for the planning process to give weight to “how people experience places”. Renewed drive on all of this is expected from the London mayor, building on his Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy. At the time of press, Sadiq Khan was due to respond to recommendations from the London Assembly’s planning and regeneration committee, following its own investigation into how design impacts the safety of women and girls. These include ensuring that the next iteration of the London Plan includes policies that make explicit reference to the importance of creating gender-diverse spaces. The mayor has also said that he wants to see LLDC’s handbook becoming the benchmark for urban professionals across London. No one is saying that the built environment alone can protect women from violent men. “The built environment is a tiny part of this,” says Milosev. “The educational piece is going to take the whole of society many years to deliver. But this is also not a reason for us to shy away from the topic and say, ‘oh, this is a bigger issue.” Improving inclusivity at policy level The hope is that the design of the built environment can be an agent for change and inclusivity. For this to happen, Milosev, who gave evidence to the London Assembly committee, says there must be explicit reference to gender in policy. National, London, and local planning policies already require inclusive and accessible environments for all users – but guidance on how these policies should be implemented to meet the needs of women and girls has been missing. In the LLDC area, gender-informed planning is supported by the baseline it established in 2021, which identified seven hotspot areas reported by participants as feeling unsafe and unwelcoming. Public realm interventions and developments within those areas must specifically address this. The handbook also stresses the need to assess impact beyond the site boundary – not least because women in London are nearly twice as likely as men to list personal safety as a barrier to walking, cycling and taking public transport. Sexual harassment is one of the most common barriers, the handbook says, ranging from staring and catcalling to stalking, indecent exposure and non-consensual physical contact. “Participatory-led engagement needs to be done before anything is put on paper. It needs to inform the developer’s very initial thinking” Marina Milosev, LLDC From the developer side, gender inclusivity must be considered right from the start, Milosev says. “If the requirement for designing gender inclusive spaces is not within the project brief, it will not happen later because this is the stage where you need to allocate money, resources and time,” she says. Without this, the developer will come to the first pre-application meeting having already “put something on paper”. “It’s already too late. We have lost the opportunity,” she says. The appointed gender champion does not need to be someone with a PhD in gender studies, Milosev says. What matters is that this person is informed, that they look at the local evidence, including demographics and barriers to gender inclusivity, and feed this into the project’s vision, commitments and design strategy. They must also plan the time and budget to engage with local women and girls throughout the project life cycle. In URW’s case, the role was taken up by an external project manager. “Participatory-led engagement needs to be done before anything is put on paper. It needs to inform the developer’s very initial thinking,” Milosev says. The handbook offers step-by-step guidance on how to do this, including through exploratory walks, co-design, co-clienting and community asset mapping. The immediate cost is “negligible”, Buckingham says, and there will be no impact on the “raw hard costs” of URW’s student housing scheme either. “The overall footprint of the development hasn’t grown,” he says. “The volume of work doesn’t necessarily change.” What has changed is the “public realm treatments are better suited”. Building up communities There are clear gains for developers. It creates the opportunity to show that they are “giving back to society” as well as the potential to get “an easier ride through the planning process”, Milosev says. “In my experience, it means you’re getting better conversations with the planning team and there’s benefit in that,” Buckingham says. “From a long term and a holistic perspective, it has helped inform us to get to a design solution that we feel is going to be better for our shopping centre and better for the community that is going to use it.” Milosev hopes the handbook will change the dynamic for planning officers, enabling them to ask developers how well they know the local community. “Developers come to you all excited, saying they are going to build the best community, they are going to build social cohesion,” she says. “Then they analyse the roads, the wind, the light, where the pipes are, but they don’t even know who lives there. What are their struggles and aspirations? What do they love about this place? What is valued and how can we make it better? How can we respond to the needs of the people who live here?” URW’s scheme, which won consent in July, will now test its knowledge of the local community – but it won’t be a one-off exercise, Buckingham says. “This handbook is something we are already using on other developments in other parts of London,” he says. “It has already been shared with our development teams working on Croydon and Westfield London.” Gender-informed planning is going mainstream. The rise of gender-informed planning Momentum for clearer planning policies around gender is building. In Tower Hamlets, a piece of research involving 450 women, girls and non-binary people in the borough now forms an evidence base for its new Local Plan, which went through public consultation under regulation 18 and 19 earlier this year. Meanwhile, the London borough of Newham is using the evidence base gathered by the London Legacy Development Corporation and has proposed specific gender-informed policies in its draft revised Local Plan. Transport for London is pushing for a more collaborative approach with developers to tackle safety for women and girls beyond the red line boundary of developments. This will feed into its new transport assessment guidance, expected by the year end. Alison Bradshaw, spatial planning area manager (West) at TfL, says new transport assessment guidance will encourage developers to consider the kinds of travel routes women and girls take, and their feelings of safety on their walks to public transport at all times of the day and night. This is crucial given that 1.2m people are working at night in London, with healthcare making up the biggest segment. “The developer cannot control what happens on the bus, but they can influence walking and moving and how you feel the moment you leave your flat or unit,” she says. The new TfL guidance will make specific reference to the mayor’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy – something which she says is surprisingly absent from transport assessments submitted by developers. She still sees plenty of planning applications which assume people will walk through a park or cemetery to reach a new development. There is progress outside of London too. In 2022, Glasgow City Council unanimously backed a motion stating that women should be at the heart of all aspect of city planning, becoming the first city in the UK to embrace “feminist urbanism”. In West Yorkshire, guidance was launched last year on how to develop green spaces where women and girls feel safe. The research was carried out by Leeds University and funded by the region’s metro-mayor Tracy Brabin. Photos © LLDC. CGI images © URW/AHMM