Safety in pedestrian tunnels. An interview study of elderly women and urban planners.
Degree
Student essay
Other description
As safety in urban planning is getting more attention (Sandberg et a., 2017), it is important to conduct safety studies to better understand the population's needs. Sweden faces an aging population in the future, making elderly people of interest to study. Urban planning focuses mainly on changing the physical environment, but as it is impossible to make a city 100% safe, the underlying factors behind perceived safety should be deeply investigated. This thesis investigates what makes pedestrian tunnels safe and unsafe by interviewing elderly women in so-called vulnerable areas in Gothenburg. Pedestrian tunnels symbolize unsafe environments, and with inspiration from the gåtur method (de Laval & Svensk byggtjänst, 2014), walking interviews were conducted with 12 elderly women in Biskopsgården and Tynnered, two areas on the outskirts of Gothenburg. The interviews were held at four different tunnels with four groups of elderly women. The thesis also aimed to investigate what urban planners and safety coordinators have to say about tunnels' safety-related problems. By putting the answers of the urban planners and safety coordinators against the elderly woman's answers, it is intended to study how their answers align with each other. It is found that elderly women limit their use of the urban environment to a large extent during the dark hours of the day and that avoidance, therefore, influences their use of tunnels. The elderly women want tunnels to be bright, broad, and clean for them to feel safe. Social factors like meeting wrong people, such as young people, greatly impacted their perceived safety in the tunnels. The results of the elderly interview point to broader societal issues, such as power structures, mistrust in peers, and ageism. The findings from the interviews with urban planners and safety coordinators revealed that they work mainly on improving the physical environment, such as improving lighting and planning art installations in tunnels. Ways of improving safety that is not only in the physical environment are to conduct safety walks, which some safety coordinators and urban planners work with. The complexity of tunnels, such as being traffic secure, but perceived as unsafe, needs to be met with more dialogue with residents and look at every unique tunnel to argue for a tunnel to be removed.
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Date
2023-02-03Author
Ringeby, Louise
Keywords
safety, fear of crime, pedestrian tunnels, elderly, urban planning, walking interviews, vulnerable areas
Series/Report no.
Masteruppsats i Geografi med kulturgeografisk inriktning 2022:5
Language
eng