Much like in many other cities around the world, women and marginalized groups in urban Turkey experience public spaces through an entirely different lens than their male counterparts. Our streets, parks, and squares are not neutral grounds; they are shaped by deeply ingrained patriarchal norms and unequal power relations. To combat the spatial exclusion that drastically limits women’s daily mobility, the Safe Cities for Women Map project was born.
This anonymous, interactive digital platform provides a safe space for women to map their spatial realities. By doing so, we are collectively transforming silent, everyday struggles into concrete, undeniable data that will drive evidence-based advocacy and reshape local policy.
The invisible boundaries of our cities
For many women, simply navigating the city is rarely a straightforward journey from point A to point B. Instead, leaving the house involves an intricate, almost entirely subconscious calculation of risk and a continuous assessment of one’s surroundings.
Before we even step out the door, we ask ourselves a series of exhausting questions: “Is the street lighting adequate on that route?” “Is that neighborhood park dominated exclusively by large groups of men?” “Will taking this quicker shortcut expose me to verbal harassment, unwanted surveillance, or physical danger?” “If I stay out late, how will I safely walk the last few blocks to my home?”
These are not just passing thoughts; they are the invisible boundaries that dictate our lives. They control where we can go, when we are “allowed” to be there, and how we feel while occupying public spaces. When a city is not designed with women in mind, it forces us to shrink our presence. It dictates our access to employment, limits our social interactions, and restricts our fundamental right to the city.
While women’s experiences in public spaces are widely discussed and fiercely debated in activist circles, they remain largely undocumented in systematic, publicly accessible formats. For generations, these everyday stories of spatial exclusion, discomfort, and fear of violence have been shared primarily in private conversations, whispered between friends, shared in closed solidarity networks, or passed down as survival tips from mothers to daughters.
The critical data gap in urban planning
When local authorities, municipalities, and urban policymakers sit down to design a city, they look at data. They look at traffic flow, infrastructure costs, and zoning laws. However, they often operate on highly generalized statistics that completely overlook the nuanced, deeply gendered realities of the streets. Without concrete data highlighting where and why women feel unsafe, urban planning remains blind to our needs.
That is exactly why we created the Digital Map of Gendered Urban Safety: A Pilot Initiative for Inclusive Digital Democracy in Turkey, supported by the Digital Spark grant program. This initiative is designed to bridge lived human experiences and structural urban planning. We refuse to let our experiences remain anecdotal. By translating our daily realities into a visible, interactive map, we are giving a powerful voice to those who have been historically and systematically excluded from the design and governance of their own cities.
Putting women’s experiences on the map
The primary objective of our project is to document women’s first-hand experiences and use that information to develop tangible solutions. Because urban inequality disproportionately affects those with less structural power, our primary target groups are women living in urban and semi-urban areas who navigate these barriers daily.
We are not just collecting stories; we are building a foundation for real-world change. In the short term, we aim to gather at least 1,000 anonymized spatial submissions from across the region. The submissions are already pouring in, and painting a picture of what life is like in Turkey’s urban spaces. One woman reported:
“They [men] walk directly toward you on the pavement, leaving you with no choice but to step down onto the road. If you don’t, they will just bump into you as they pass.”
This quote perfectly captures the everyday reality of male entitlement on the streets, showing how even a simple walk down the sidewalk becomes an unspoken power struggle where women are physically forced to step aside. As a negative experience, another participant woman reports that:
“Drug use and dealing are highly prevalent in the backstreets.”
A specific example strikingly conveys how shortcomings in physical infrastructure are overshadowed by strong social cohesion:
“People are out on the streets until late at night. It’s a predominantly family-oriented neighborhood, and the subway runs until midnight. The lighting is inadequate, but the area isn’t as deserted as one might think. You might feel uncomfortable after 11 PM, but I haven’t witnessed any bad incidents so far.”
Shaping the future of urban policy
These submissions will culminate in a comprehensive, evidence-based policy brief on gendered urban safety. We will present these critical findings at dedicated dissemination workshops to inform urban stakeholders, involving key civil society organizations and municipalities in Turkey’s selected metropolitan areas. This crowdsourced data will serve as the undeniable foundation for strategic, collaborative meetings aimed at solving these exact urban challenges.
To ensure the longevity of our mission, the digital mapping tool will remain accessible for a full year, with the potential for further extensions. The methodology behind this project is explicitly designed for scalability. Our long-term vision is that this Turkish pilot initiative will serve as a replicable, adaptable model for other cities and countries.
We aim to lay the foundation for larger-scale digital democracy initiatives worldwide, continuously strengthening the evidence base for gender-sensitive urban policy, such as in Vienna.
