Comfort, freedom, and the ambivalence of safety: a computational spatial ethnography of women’s experiences in Yogyakarta’s public open spaces

This study explores how women perceive, experience, and adapt the everyday use of public open spaces (POS) in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and how these experiences relate to emotional wellbeing in everyday urban life, through a computational spatial ethnography approach. This research combines survey data from 131 female respondents with sentiment and lexicon analysis of 480 Google Maps reviews across four POS: Wisdom Park, Embung Langensari, Alun-Alun Kidul, and Alun-Alun Denggung. Findings show that comfort and freedom underpin positive affective evaluations, while safety often conveys vigilance rather than reassurance. Cross-site differences reflect how governance and atmosphere shape women’s emotional experiences and structured spaces evoke calm and trust, while informal or commercial settings produce ambivalence between inclusion and exposure. By examining emotional responses as indicators of spatial experience, this study demonstrates how computational analysis can enrich ethnographic inquiry and offers practical guidance for urban design, planning, and public open space management by highlighting the need to prioritize affective accessibility, which is designing and maintaining environments that reduce emotional burden while allowing women to feel both secure and free.