Concern around personal safety is a significant factor in constraining women’s access to and use of public space. One strategy presented to address this involves altering the design of built environments. However, tension and controversy surround these arguments in the literature on safety perception in public space. This study seeks to explore whether the presence of three design interventions commonly cited in the literature act to enhance or reduce perceptions of safety in public space, focusing on women’s experiences in particular. Three design interventions are examined: public toilets, solid walls, and graffiti removal. To test these interventions, an image-based randomised control trial with 104 participants was conducted in 2018 in London (UK). A series of control and treatment images simulating each design intervention was viewed and ranked by participants according to perceived safety. The findings of this study suggest that: the presence of public toilets does not affect perceived safety; eliminating graffiti has a weak significant impact on perceived safety; and removing solid walls leads to significant improvements of perceptions of safety, with the effect being stronger for women. These results suggest that to maximise investment effectiveness, urban design and planning policies that aim to increase perceptions of safety should be evidence-based, and need to integrate a gendered perspective. The presented technique could support urban design processes by examining the safety-enhancement impact of proposed public space interventions prior to their being rolled out.

对人身安全的担忧是限制妇女进入和使用公共空间的一个重要因素。为解决这个问题提出的一种策略涉及改变建筑环境的设计。然而，在关于公共空间安全感知的文献中，围绕这些论点存在紧张和争议。本研究旨在探讨文献中常见的三种设计干预措施是否会增强或减少公共空间的安全感，特别是关注女性的体验。研究了三种设计干预措施：公共厕所、实心墙和清除涂鸦。为了测试这些干预措施，2018 年在伦敦（英国）进行了一项有 104 名参与者的基于图像的随机对照试验。参与者根据感知的安全性查看并排列了一系列模拟每个设计干预的控制和治疗图像。本研究的结果表明：公共厕所的存在不影响感知安全；消除涂鸦对感知安全的影响很小；拆除实心墙可以显着提高安全感，对女性的影响更大。这些结果表明，为了最大限度地提高投资效率，旨在提高安全意识的城市设计和规划政策应该以证据为基础，并需要纳入性别观点。所提出的技术可以通过在推出之前检查拟议的公共空间干预措施的安全增强影响来支持城市设计过程。