Making our city a safe and fair place for women and girls - Mandy Watt
Last week Ofcom published new guidance designed to keep women and girls safe online. In some ways it feels long overdue, given how much of our lives now take place online, but it also made me pause to reflect on how little has changed and how much work there is still to be done to make the world a safer and fairer place for women and girls.
As we approach International Women’s Day, I am also reflecting on our role as a council to make Edinburgh a safe and fair place for women and girls.
Our work in this area has been underway for a while. In November 2023, our Edinburgh as a Feminist City working group was set up aiming to create safer, more inclusive spaces for women. We are not the first city to explore this idea, our European neighbours in Barcelona and Vienna have published manuals on this.
This work builds on our efforts to make Edinburgh ‘safer by design’, started in January 2021 by our Women’s Safety in Public Places Community Improvement Partnership. This group led the creation of our #RespectHerSpace campaign, which was about respecting women’s personal space.
We’re now looking at the ways in which the wider public realm can be a place where women feel comfortable in their surroundings.
In Edinburgh we are adopting a feminist approach to the design and development of our city. This is a collaborative approach with officers from Planning, Active Travel, Neighbourhood Environmental Services and Equally Safe Edinburgh working together.
Planning officers have engaged directly with the Equally Safe Edinburgh Committee as part of the production of the draft Edinburgh Design Guidance (EDG) to inform and guide development proposals through a feminist lens.
In the council’s budget-setting meeting two weeks ago, it was agreed that we will invest £12.5m this year and next in improvements to pavements, roads, streetscapes and lighting, in line with areas identified by a women’s safety survey.
Our friends and colleagues in Glasgow are also committed to adopting a feminist approach to urban planning. Next week councillors from the two cities will come together for a collaborative event to discuss progress in this area and share ideas around ways to accelerate efforts.
So, as we approach International Women’s Day, let’s pause to celebrate how far we’ve come but also remain focused and realistic on the challenges ahead in working to #AccelerateAction to reach full gender parity, both in the online world and in the places we inhabit in the real world.
Councillor Mandy Watt, Deputy Leader and Convenor for Finances and Resources
Committee