Safety and the city: (Re)Imagining the politics of public safety through queer-feminist co-design workshops

Gender-based disparities in feelings of public safety are now well documented in rich, interdisciplinary bodies of Feminist scholarship. However, understandings of safety which go beyond the gendered binary of fear/fearlessness have been limited, and many solutions have tended to emphasise women's and minorities' responsibility for their own safety and/or urban changes devoid of structural critique. This paper suggests that theoretical and methodological alternatives are needed to understand complex experiences of (un)safety in public space. We argue that Feminist Design methods allied with a Queer Theory approach present productive ways of researching this complex topic because they facilitate but do not require direct reflections on personal experiences of harm and engage productively with feelings of discomfort; they aid in prioritizing ambivalence and disagreement; and they allow participants and researchers to engage in speculative thinking towards an imagined ‘Feminist future’ for the city.