Safety for the Least Safe: Women, Vulnerability, and the Co-production of Safety in Interstitial Urban Environments

Research Project, 2026 – 2030

This project examines how urban safety is produced, distributed, and experienced in Swedish cities by taking as its starting point women who are among the least safe in everyday urban environments. The focus is on women living under conditions of homelessness, housing insecurity, drug use, or involvement in transactional sex, whose experiences are often marginalised or framed as sources of insecurity rather than as safety concerns in their own right. Through qualitative and co-produced research in Gothenburg and Stockholm, the project analyses how these women navigate safety and risk across public, semi-public, and informal urban spaces, and how their lived experiences relate to dominant planning, policing, and safety governance frameworks. The project combines interviews, alternative urban mapping, and policy analysis with workshops that bring together women with lived experience, researchers, and institutional actors. A core ambition of the project is to develop normative and practice-oriented perspectives on urban safety. Building on empirical findings, future-oriented methods are used to collaboratively identify feasible pathways for planning and policy interventions that reduce exposure to harm without relying on exclusionary or punitive approaches. In doing so, the project contributes both critical knowledge about urban safety for the least safe and concrete insights for more inclusive and socially sustainable safety practices.