Abstract

This paper examines the links between women’s un/safety and their night-time mobilities in Brussels, Belgium and Recife, Brazil. While the significance of women’s intersectional identities to the construction of fear and safety in urban space has been well documented in feminist urban geography, we argue that the lens of South-North comparison highlights specific ways in which local urban spaces are implicated in women’s experiences of un/safety. A comparative perspective draws out the spatial and temporal embeddedness of un/safety, while at the same time challenges the framing of particular cities and areas as either safe or unsafe (which is particularly damaging when it reproduces simple global North – global South binaries). The paper draws on mixed-method research combining a questionnaire-based survey and a series of interviews with women in Recife and Brussels. The four dimensions examined include transport modes; situated experiences of un/safety; the accumulation of unsafety feelings over the long term; and the work women perform in maintaining mobility. We find that while unsafety broadly limits women’s access to cities at night, feeling unsafe plays out differently in specific and situated interactions, many of which are recognisable from both Brussels and Recife. Across the two research locations, women’s mobility strategies at night are similar, in that they involve extensive planning, preparation, and drawing on financial and non-financial resources. We conclude with some reflections on the role of comparative research in the feminist geographies of gendered urban mobilities, particularly in relation to previously little-studied cities.

摘要

本文研究了比利时布鲁塞尔和巴西累西腓妇女的不安全/夜间出行之间的联系。虽然女性的交叉身份对构建城市空间的恐惧和安全的重要性已在女性主义城市地理学中得到充分证明，但我们认为，南北比较的视角突出了当地城市空间与女性体验的具体方式有关。联合国/安全。比较的视角勾勒出 un/safety 在空间和时间上的嵌入性，同时挑战将特定城市和地区划分为安全或不安全的框架（当它再现简单的全球北 - 全球南二进制文件时，这尤其具有破坏性）。该论文采用了混合方法研究，结合了基于问卷的调查以及对累西腓和布鲁塞尔女性的一系列访谈。考察的四个维度包括交通方式；联合国/安全的情境体验；长期积累的不安全感；以及女性在保持流动性方面所做的工作。我们发现，虽然不安全因素在很大程度上限制了女性在夜间进入城市，但在特定和情境互动中，不安全感的表现却有所不同，其中许多在布鲁塞尔和累西腓都可以识别出来。在这两个研究地点，女性夜间出行策略是相似的，因为它们涉及广泛的规划、准备以及对财务和非财务资源的利用。