Dr May Newisar, a lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Leeds, has published a study investigating the role of local town planning in women’s daily lives.
Her research found that many women’s fears in public spaces are connected to the threat of rape or harrasment. Increasing the input of women in town planning could be one way to help alleviate and combat this stress, as well as afford women their rightful liberation within the streets of their hometown.
As part of the study, Dr Newisar has mapped the areas where women felt most unsafe across Leeds. Woodhouse Moor was identified as one of these areas – the location in the Hyde Park area where a series of sexual assaults took place in October last year.
In response to these attacks, women called for better street lighting to help improve the area’s safety. Dr Newisar’s study also identifies other architectural changes that could be made to increase a sense of safety in the city. Alongside lighting, the number of windows on a street as well as the design of street furniture are details than can have a positive impact.
Whilst safety resides at the centre of town planning, the definitions of a safe area are different for women than they are for men. As Dr Newisar concludes in her report, having more female input into local councils and the decisions that make our towns would put women at the centre of the city.
In the long winter nights especially, many women feel their freedom being curtailed. Girls on the Go, an organisation in Manchester and Liverpool that aims to reduce loneliness for women, noted a marked drop off in attendance of events over the winter. In an interview with the BBC, this sentiment was echoed by the founder of Reclaim Blackpool, who noted the extra cautiousness and fear that women feel in the darker months.
This unofficial curfew that many women feel is the result of a wider culture of misogynistic abuse and crime. It forces women to change their habits – like choosing to not go out or take longer, ‘safer’ routes home – for the sake of the threat that lurks in the corners of their hometown, isolating and confining them. The real problem here is not the way our cities are constructed, but how perpetrators are able to use the city to harm, threaten and isolate women, lacing each dark alleyway with fear.
It is this situation that Dr Newisar argues town planning must take into account, so they can reduce the ways in which a city can be used to hurt, scare and limit women. The feminism, or lack there-of, can be read in the very fabric of a city, which should be moulded to uplift and care for all its citizens. And who better to craft that change than women themselves?
A 2025 State of the Profession report, carried out by the Royal Town Planning Institute, showed that 50.7% of town planners in England are female, according to local government respondents. In Scotland, 46.7% identified as female and in Wales, 33.3%. This is an increase from the RTPI’s 2023 report which found that around 40% in the profession were women. Statistics of local authority councillors boasted similarly high figures of equality, with 41% female local authority councillors in England, according to the House of Commons Library website.
These promising statistics will hopefully point towards the changes that Dr Newismar outlined in her report, and lead to safer, improved cities and towns. Urban spaces are complicated, where many lives, cultures and ideas intersect, but they should always remain accessible to all.
Opinion article by The View.