Access and inclusive design award

CABE Built Environment Awards 2024 winner Urban design guidance: Creating places that work for women and girls from LLDC and Arup was an innovative project to understand women and girls’ interactions with their environment and perceptions of personal safety, writes Denise Chevin.

The brutal murder of Sarah Everard in London in March 2021 sparked an outpouring of national grief, followed by angry protests. Her tragic death highlighted yet again the vulnerability of women in public spaces, particularly at night, and gave added urgency to attempts by police and local authorities to de-risk what should be – but is clearly not – the simple act for women and girls of moving from one locale to another within the urban sphere, at any time of day.

One planning authority that has risen to the challenge is the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), the body charged with building on the achievements of the 2012 Olympic Games and helping maintain and oversee the transformation of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the areas of Stratford, Hackney Wick, Leyton and Bow.

Just a few months after Everard’s murder, LLDC committed itself to tackling the issue of safety of women and girls. While acknowledging that the topic of gender inequality is a deeply complex one, the development corporation felt that, as a planning authority, landowner, developer and regeneration body, it has a responsibility to ensure development (and other interventions in public space) contributes to creating a safe and welcoming environment for all, including women, girls and other vulnerable groups.

“The perception of not feeling safe leads women and girls to adopt an avoidance strategy that restricts their right to the city. This not only impacts their personal wellbeing, but also hinders their involvement in crucial aspects of life such as work, education and social activities,” says Marina Milosev, LLDC’s Team Lead on Planning Policy.

“Consequently, this prevents them from fully benefiting from the investments and opportunities that accompany urban development, adversely affecting the aims of sustainable development. Addressing this issue is not just about making spaces safer; it is about dismantling barriers that hinder women from progressing towards equality,” she adds.

Words to action

To tackle this inequality, the LLDC undertook an extensive consultation and research programme spanning three years. Through workshops, surveys and research, the consultancy gathered evidence from more than 600 local women and girls and delivered a document that signposts the myriad ways local planners could create public spaces that work for them and promote greater gender equality. The outcome of the engagement was presented in a consultation report prepared by Arup.

Using the findings of the Arup report, and after consulting with gender equity experts as well as others who are leading research and campaigning in this field such as Make Space for Girls, London School of Economics and Political Science and UN Habitat, LLDC produced a set of gender-informed urban design and planning principles. 

Designing Places That Work for Women and Girls is the first guidance of this type in the UK. It provides many practical suggestions and best-practice steps that urban planners, architects, developers and other stakeholders can take to ensure that “a gender-informed approach is applied in the planning, design and decision-making process, from the inception of any project through to delivery and long-term management”.

The work of LLDC and Arup in conducting the research, the report and the production of the handbook won the pair the access and inclusive design award at this year’s CABE Built Environment Awards.

One of the key messages is that, although the built environment is generally perceived as gender neutral, “in reality, cities have been predominantly designed by and for men in positions of authority, lacking an understanding of the lived experiences of women and girls. This approach has embedded gender biases into every aspect of city design, compounding gender inequalities and limiting opportunities for progress,” says Milosev.

Handbook recommendations

• Establishing clear organisational commitments for systematic implementation of gender-inclusive processes in all projects and decisions

• adopting mechanisms and governance frameworks to ensure continuity of these commitments and their effective delivery

• informing decisions, strategies and designs based on a genuine understanding of women’s and girls’ lived experiences through participatory-led approaches. This requires multi-stage data gathering, from evidence-based research to local knowledge acquisition at a project-specific level

• adopting a holistic approach, with cross-boundary and cross-sector collaboration with key stakeholders, including education, social services and policing; and

• measuring impact and successes to collect data aiding the identification of lessons learned, patterns, emerging trends and good precedents.

For local authorities, this includes:

• establishing an action plan/corporate strategy

• implementing mechanisms such as gender budgeting and gender-sensitive procurement

• forming a working group to ensure systematic implementation of gender-inclusive processes, alongside establishing a stakeholders group

• gathering local evidence

• practising gender-informed town planning by adopting a gender-inclusive planning policy, producing planning guidance and using planning obligations to secure delivery and long-term management, including collecting financial contributions

• upskilling development management officers to support the process

• setting objectives/targets/KPIs; and

• monitoring, assessing progress and learning from experiences.

For developers this includes:

• embedding gender-inclusive principles in the development brief

• nominating a gender champion and ensuring diversity within the team

• engaging women and girls by taking a participatory approach (eg exploratory walks)

• collecting gender disaggregated data

• using the data collected to inform the design; and

• demonstrating approaches taken through the submission of planning documents.

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Research findings

LLDC consulted local women and girls about their perception of their own safety, using engagement methods such as focus groups, sessions with young people and youth groups and innovative digital approaches such as an online consultation platform and targeted social media campaigns. The consultation report prepared by Arup provides an analysis of feedback that LLDC collected; Arup was commissioned to work with LLDC in defining the solutions to identified problems.

Working with stakeholders, Arup employed what it termed “initial site experience walks” to understand what mattered most in terms of public space and safety. The video walks were an interactive way of engaging with the community and collecting lived experiences to feed into the process and solutions. As part of this, a digital platform was developed to collect data and compare responses to identify common themes.

A number of elements were identified as uncomfortable by women and girls who walked across the Olympic Park. These included the lack of quality lighting at key areas; groups of men gathering in areas such as the bus station; general perceptions of anti-social behaviour and crime in the neighbourhood; canals and footbridges; poorly maintained areas often used by fly tippers; routes that are not overlooked; and routes that feel isolated and unsafe and/or cause them to feel trapped such as those often found along canals and footbridges.

In response, Arup suggested several initiatives and design interventions including: lighting audits, CCTV and signage reviews, customer service training for security staff and challenging developers to engage with stakeholders and consider the safety of women and girls at all stages of future design and development.

The guidance that has emerged – which is set to be launched this month – addresses all these issues and helps stakeholders to incorporate gender-inclusive principles of urban design from the earliest stage of the design process. And that includes the meaningful involvement of women and girls in the design and decision-making process.

This involves capturing their lived experiences and addressing these throughout the development, maintenance and design phases – a “gender-informed urban design and planning” process, says Milosev. She hopes that this will lead to increased feelings of safety, wellbeing and equity among women, girls and other marginalised groups, which will generate social and economic benefits for the community.

Equity in society

Factors such as public lighting, the distribution of land uses, security measures and natural and passive surveillance all play significant roles in shaping experiences in urban environments. As women and girls are often excluded from the planning and design process, the handbook urges the use of planning conditions and the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) to help ensure delivery and enforcement of the objectives. As well as the need to appoint a gender inclusion champion and ensure that stakeholders are involved in co-designing projects that meet their needs, the handbook sets out a range of key recommendations (see Handbook recommendations).

Milosev, who has been responsible for its development, notes that it was crucial to set out clear processes that stakeholders should follow in order to create safer and more equitable spaces. “Women and girls’ use of the public realm is affected by how inclusive and accessible public spaces are. Poor mobility, gender bias, access issues, ageing and disability and fears of gender-based violence can all reduce the freedom and access to services and economic opportunities, and enjoyment of public, green and recreational spaces. As a result, this has a negative impact on health and wellbeing.

“This is not the first time the built environment industry has tried to tackle gender biases, but previous attempts have failed because there were no clear implementation mechanisms to follow. We have been very careful to show how planning tools set out in our toolkit can ensure sustained implementation and monitoring.”

While developed in the context of the LLDC planning area, the handbook is designed to be a comprehensive document that can be used by local planning authorities, built environment professionals and practitioners to embed the principles of gender inclusive design at the concept and planning stages. Milosev says that LLDC has worked closely with the Greater London Authority (GLA) and the four London Boroughs that will take over its planning functions in December 2024. These are Newham, Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest.

Active spaces for teenage girls

In the UK, more than one million girls drop off the sporting radar after primary school with important health, wellbeing and social ramifications, according to Women in Sport. Teenage girls demonstrate the sharpest decrease in physical activity upon entering adolescence, with 85% not meeting the World Health Organization’s physical activity recommendations globally.

It’s a trend that is proving hard to buck. But a research project at Birmingham City University (BCU) is exploring a different approach. The research project, supported by a new three-year PhD studentship, will investigate whether teenage girls can be encouraged to stay active by designing city spaces that make use of immersive digital technology.

The project is being led by Dr Silvia Gullino, Urban Planning Expert at the university. Gullino is a Professor in City-making within the Faculty of Computing, Engineering and Built Environment, and is collaborating with BCU colleagues Dr Carlo Harvey, Director of Future Games and Graphics, and Dr Simon Cook, Specialist in Human Geography and Active Spaces. “Spaces that teen girls can claim and feel comfortable being active in are negligible beyond the school gates,” says Gullino. “Teen girls generally drop out of public sight. Our research aims to understand how digital approaches can be used to co-design spaces that are more inclusive for young women.”

Her colleague Harvey has said that he sees the work as a groundbreaking opportunity to leverage augmented reality, virtual reality and artificial intelligence to create active city spaces that resonate with and empower teenage girls. However, the researchers remain open-minded as to what shape a digitally enhanced green space that encourages girls to be more active might take. Gullino says: “It could be, for example, a location-based game or some kind of virtual reality or augmented reality experience.

“This is a common problem around most cities in the world. So we want to generate transferable digital design principles with perhaps associated open-source datasets and prototype digital imaging that could be transferable elsewhere.”

Gulliano says that the idea for the cross-discipline research stemmed from seeing the experience of her own teenage daughter and realising that cities are not designed for women, particularly for younger women. “Once they turn 12-13 there is an enormous transition. They go to secondary school and, all of a sudden, they are expected to become autonomous and travel in cities from home to school.”

The research dovetails with Gulliano’s twin responsibilities within the university – she is the course leader in the underground course on planning, including teaching on the MA in planning built environments, and the college lead for equality, diversity and inclusivity. Her work has a strong emphasis on inclusivity and particularly that of social groups that are normally overlooked by urban studies. Previous research projects have included studying the impact of the urban environment on first-time mothers who had given birth to premature babies who had been in intensive care for some time. She led a research team that comprised neonatologists from King’s College London and medics from St Thomas’ Hospital to explore how new mothers negotiated the urban environment with their vulnerable newborns.

Find out more about the BCU MA at b.link/BCU_MA

Theory into action

The LLDC says the direct benefits of applying a gender-informed approach are already beginning to be realised. For example, the handbook has influenced the redesign of the Waterden Green Play Area, a green space dedicated to teenagers, as part of the Eastwick and Sweetwater development, as well as an improvement to Marshgate Lane Greenway Links.

The Waterden Green play area space was originally designed to be gender-neutral, but by applying a gender-informed approach, an opportunity to reinvent part of the space with a specific focus on teenage girls was identified. Designs for areas of teenage play often results in the exclusion of certain groups of people, such as girls and people with disabilities. This conception of play also focuses on large, easily monopolised spaces (pitches with a large cage-like structure around them), which are not accessible to a broad range of young people.

LLDC therefore came up with a co-clienting process to explore different ways of running community engagement and to test best practices. It was run with seven women aged 17-23 years from Elevate, the former LLDC Youth Group (co-client team), supported by the GLA and Mayor’s Design Advocates. LLDC found that co-clienting embedded the knowledge and voices of the community in the project and ensured that local girls and young women had an influential role in decision-making.

Another example of how the handbook is changing design thinking is the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park lighting review. The regular technical lighting review has been supplemented with a qualitative examination of the perception of spaces after dark, with lighting identified as a key contributor.

LLDC Planning Officers have also used hotspots identified in the Arup report to ensure that gender inclusive design was a key principle in the redesign of East Village Public realm. This included the relocation of the older children’s play area to a more central location that was overlooked by other uses. Older children and youth play spaces were specifically designed to make them more inviting to girls, including the provision of swings, seating and informal play in separate zones, so that they were not dominated by one group. Routes with no escape were avoided and lighting was improved.

To date, LLDC has allocated £12.9m of CIL and £30.3m of Section 106 funds for improving public realm in response to issues raised by women and girls.

Image credit | iStock