IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cog/urbpla/v4y2019i2p154-168.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Women’s Safety and Public Spaces: Lessons from the Sabarmati Riverfront, India

Author

Listed:
  • Darshini Mahadevia

    (School of Arts and Sciences, Ahmedabad University, India)

  • Saumya Lathia

    (Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, USA)

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 11, as well as the New Urban Agenda, emphasize gender equity and safe, resilient, and inclusive cities. The ‘safe cities’ idea for women includes their equal right to the city and public places within it, which includes their right to be mobile in the city at any time of the day, as well as their right to loiter in public spaces without any threats of harassment or sexual violence. These issues have gained importance in urban planning and design in contemporary India. This article is an assessment of how safe Ahmedabad city’s largest public space, the Sabarmati Riverfront, is for women. Ahmedabad, a city in western India, has long carried an image of a safe city for women. The Sabarmati Riverfront is over 22 km in length, 11 km on both sides of the river. This assessment is made through mapping of space use disaggregated by sex and age at four different time points throughout the day and of 100 women’s accounts of the experience of harassment on using the space. The article concludes with specific recommendations on proposed activities and space design along the riverfront to make these spaces safe for women throughout the day.

Suggested Citation

  • Darshini Mahadevia & Saumya Lathia, 2019. "Women’s Safety and Public Spaces: Lessons from the Sabarmati Riverfront, India," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(2), pages 154-168.
    • Handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v:4:y:2019:i:2:p:154-168
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/article/view/2049
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation, Government of India,, 2014. "Inclusive Urban Planning: State of the Urban Poor Report 2013," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198097419.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Michael W. Mehaffy & Tigran Haas & Peter Elmlund, 2019. "Public Space in the New Urban Agenda: Research into Implementation," Urban Planning, Cogitatio Press, vol. 4(2), pages 134-137.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kala Seetharam Sridhar, 2016. "Costs and Benefits of Urbanization: The Indian Case," Working Papers id:11447, eSocialSciences.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cog:urbpla:v:4:y:2019:i:2:p:154-168. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: António Vieira (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cogitatiopress.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.