Gender identity shapes how women move through the city. Perceptions of safety, danger, and vulnerability shape a parallel, invisible geography. Self-imposed restrictions on movement and bodily autonomy are an act to protect oneself, a very interpersonal, culturally, and gender-specific physical border.
Though women’s safety has always been an urgent and pressing issue as its relevance in the public eye has been emphasised through increased media coverage, the disparity between who is responsible for community safety and who these decisions affect results in countless systemic failures to protect women. Much research has been undertaken into understanding the historical failures of urban planning from a feminist perspective. Exploring decisions regarding urban economic policy to housing design, school placement to bus seating, and policing to snow removal, reveals the lack of knowledge, let alone concern, for women’s safety in an urban context. Over the years, feminist literature has described the male-designed urban realm as an alienating environment in which buildings have become “free-standing 'objects' lost in a sea of unusable open space”¹ disconnected from each other and linked by roads which serve the sole function of getting from A to B as quickly as possible. Historically, this segregation has had a higher effect on women, whose lives have contained more overlap between the different areas of work, leisure and home than men. Thus, women’s second-class status is enforced not just through the metaphorical notion of separate spheres, but through an actual, material geography of exclusion, which only exacerbates the politicised region of the female body as we attempt to navigate the dangers to us in an unfriendly urban environment designed for men. This project illustrates the boundaries and barriers women face in an urban realm through an autobiographical emotional cartography of thoughts and decisions that occur and influence my movement as I journey home. Even in a local context so familiar to me, I, and many other women, impose these restrictions on ourselves as they are embodied as a form of trained instinct. The counter-mapping emphasises the learned yet natural process of self-protection that women are forced to accept as their reality and highlights our responsibility to police our bodies as a result of systemic failure.