Critical paths
Unraveling women's challenges in urban spaces
How can design support a better understanding and representation of the multiple challenges faced by women when navigating the city?
Critical Paths is a collaborative design project with women in the Brighton & Hove area aiming to visualise their experience of the urban environment and co-create immersive narratives to communicate this experience to a broader audience. From a young student taking the last bus coming back from her part-time job, a mother of two having to do multiple trips to school and nursery, or a woman living with disabilities using a mobility scooter to travel around the city, the study embodied diverse facets of women's mobility today.
In 2018, a survey exposed that 85% of women between 15-24 in the UK have experienced sexual harassment in public, and 63% said they felt unsafe in public spaces. Fear becomes a barrier limiting the use of public spaces and restricting women’s mobility, creating a form of spatial exclusion and invisibility. To better understand what impact this fear had on women’s days to days in the Brighton and Hove area, we invited twelve female inhabitants from 18 to 40 years old to keep track of their journey (walking, cycling, driving or taking the bus) during two weeks, through the medium they prefer (pictures, videos, writings, poems and GPS maps).
Following this data-gathering phase, the twelve participants joined a 3-hours online workshop to make sense of their city experiences individually and collectively, define what safety looked like for them, and map the city through six overarching themes that emerged from their journaling: geography of fear, invisibility of women in public spaces, street harassment, multi-modal trips, coping mechanisms, and space negotiation.
Left: extracts of participants' journaling, illustrating the diversity of mediums and content. Workshop mapping activities. Right: Zoom on the collective mapping activity, allowing the six main themes to emerge.
Each of the six themes consolidated during the first workshop was mapped into the Brighton and Hove area as a way to reclaim those collective spaces. The group of participants and researchers spent another three sessions co-designing visuals, where it was decided that each map created should have a specific style and design to reflect the diversity of experiences and ensure participants' viewpoints, experiences, and voices were always at the centre of the maps. Each map was associated with a quote illustrating the theme it represented and a QR code linking to a soundtrack of noises recorded in the streets of Brighton and Hove. The association of sounds and visuals aimed to create a multidimensional experience, allowing a deeper immersion into women’s journeys.
The maps were disseminated as posters on the streets or by taking over more ‘official’ map boxes, aiming to bring new perspectives of the city to its visitors and questioning what is and is not represented on the official map and what it says about our perception and navigation of space.
The final co-designed maps illustrate the six key themes: coping mechanisms, space negotiation, multi-modal trips, the invisibility of women in public spaces, the geography of fear, and street harassment.
Pictures of poster maps, someone using the map's QR code, some hidden maps in 'official' boxes, and someone reading a map.