Research project
Safer Parks by Design: Utilising Open Data to Enhance Safety for Women and Girls
- Start date: 1 November 2025
- End date: 31 October 2026
- Funding: UKRI
- Value: £204,561.52
- Partners and collaborators: Mayor of West Yorkshire, West Yorkshire Combined Authority, West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Partnership, West Yorkshire Police, Leeds City Council, Calderdale Council, City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, Kirklees Council, Wakefield Council, Police Crime Prevention Initiatives, Keep Britain Tidy/Green Flag Award, ESRC Vulnerability & Policing Futures Research Centre
- Primary investigator: Dr Anna Barker
- Co-investigators: Fran Pontin (School of Geography/Law), Maeve Quinlan (Research Computing), Vikki Houlden (School of Geography)
- Postgraduate research fellows: msfq344
Violence against women and girls (VAWG) and the fear it generates restricts women’s freedom in public spaces. It limits mobility, wellbeing and participation in society. Parks are among the environments where safety concerns create the greatest barriers to access. In Britain, one in six women feel unsafe in parks during the day, rising to four in five after dark (ONS, 2022). Harassment, poor visibility, exclusionary design and wider inequalities compel women and girls into habitual ‘safety work’ (Vera-Gray and Kelly, 2020), constraining independence and excluding them from the full benefits of public life.
National VAWG strategies and the Safer Streets Mission recognise the need for safer public spaces, yet there is no scalable, data-driven way to evaluate park safety from women’s perspectives. Current approaches rely on generalised crime statistics or resource-intensive audits, lacking spatial granularity and intersectional insight. This project addresses this gap by co-creating an interactive Safer Parks Dashboard that integrates women’s qualitative insights with open spatial data (lighting, sightlines, layout, access points, facilities, CCTV and crime rates) and gender-sensitive spatial syntax measures.
Building on a West Yorkshire study 'What makes a park feel safe or unsafe?' and a Bradford pilot that demonstrated feasibility, the project will refine the methodology and extend the Dashboard across West Yorkshire before scaling nationally. The tool, aligned to the Safer Parks: Improving Access for Women and Girls guidance will enable councils, designing out crime officers (DOCOs), and community partners to visualise safety-related features, identify risks and prioritise improvements. Tailored outputs will support structural changes, maintenance and community engagement, ensuring evidence can be acted upon across scales.
Project aims
The Dashboard will be an open-access, interactive web application with tailored views for local authorities, police, community groups and the public. It will visualise safety-related features, highlight quick-win improvements and suggest priorities for investment aligned with the Safer Parks: Improving Access for Women and Girls guidance. Supporting resources guides, videos, and documentation will ensure accessibility for both technical and non-technical users.
Aims
- Increase women’s and girls’ use of parks.
- Improve feelings of safety and confidence in public spaces.
- Support prevention of VAWG through evidence-based design, policing and policy.
- Deliver a scalable, open-source tool embedding women’s experiences into urban design and crime prevention, enabling police and partners to create safer, more inclusive public spaces.
Publications and outputs
The Safer Parks Project Dashboard