Vaissnavi Shukl
If you’re a young woman like me who has grown up in a city or travelled to another, you might have been warned about steering off certain areas of the city because they were deemed not safe. What lends safety to urban areas is a matter of data and statistics. But it’s also often subjective, relying heavily on how one feels while traversing through that part of the city. So for today’s episode, we decided to have a conversation about urban wellbeing and safety, and spoke to Dr. Kalpana Vishwanath, who is the founder and CEO of ‘Safety Pin’, a social enterprise that uses technology and data to advocate for gender inclusive urban spaces and mobility. Dr Vishwanath is a part of the Delhi government Women’s Safety Committee, and has worked as a consultant with UN Women, and the UN Habitat.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design perspectives, practices, and research projects that reflect emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture Off-Centre features conversations with radical designers, thinkers, and changemakers who are redefining the way we live and interact with the built environment.

The first thing I want to do today is think through the idea of safety with you, having been born and raised in India and for the women in countries like India, I think there’s a widespread notion amongst families that their daughters are safe only when they are at home, resulting in restriction of movement of the men for years, even if it is only at a certain time of the day. Whereas due to the unfortunately high number of cases of domestic violence, it seems that there is no real safe haven for women either at home or outside. And from my understanding of the way I’ve been thinking about, it seems like there’s a certain hierarchy in terms of how we experience safety. I don’t know if there’s a proper demarcation or classification of safety with something that kind of borders personal safety or safety or urban safety. What do you think about just safety? Very broadly speaking.

Kalpana Viswanath
Yeah, Vaissnavi, I think that’s a good question. Because you know, it’s often just it’s often understood in a limited sense, it’s, sometimes it’s just seen as security almost. At other times, there is this whole thing of women’s safety and it’s only seen outside public spaces as you say that women’s movements are restricted. I think you know, for me, what we need to…what we oftentime recognise is that we need to make the linkage that safety is in fact must be seen almost as a fundamental right. Because safety has its impact, or the lack of safety or the lack of the perception of safety has a very dire impact on the lives of women. So for me, the lack of safety doesn’t only result in violence, the lack of safety results in restrictions on your right as a citizen, so, you know, to go out to access education opportunities to access employment, or certainly to access leisure. So, you know, we’ll link into the larger concept of urban wellbeing, I think the lack of safety and the lack of perception of safety has an impact on that. Now, I think in India and in South Asian cultures and others there is… there are a lot of restrictions on women’s movements with ability to move around the mobility, because it’s very strongly linked to notions of honour, you know, so when, you know when a particular case of violence takes place outside there is still oftentimes a tendency to keep it silent to, you know, restrict women’s movements after that. So we have heard of many cases where young women say that they don’t tell their families even if they face sexual violence outside because they know the result of that will be only further restrictions on them. You know, so really, the odds are stacked against women, especially young women, because this whole notion of honour, if something happened, marriage, reputation, the family’s reputation…

Vaissnavi Shukl
The question of purity, I guess. 

Kalpana Viswanath
Yeah. So there is an entire network of anxiety that gets built around, you know, maintaining girls’ or women’s honour. As I said that, the flip side of it is exactly what you said that neither is the home a safe space for women, right? But that doesn’t get taken into consideration so much in terms of honour because, you know, it doesn’t seem to bother anyone’s honour. If a woman is facing domestic or intimate partner violence, right? So it’s really seen as something that you sort of brushed under the carpet but it’s not, you know, it’s not focused on as much in terms of restricting like, for example, a younger woman may be married, face violence, and when she comes to a family, they just say, you know, please try again, just do what he says, do what you’re said. So in both cases, you know, the reporting is less. Having said that, I think it has changed a lot in the past seven, eight years. I wouldn’t say that. You know, we are seeing more and more families coming out and reporting supporting their daughters, so I don’t think it’s a static thing. I do think lots of changes are taking place. I think young women are insisting on their lives. And I think families are supporting them more and more to come on and report at least a little bit. So you know, so I think safety is linked to mobility, it’s linked to rights, it’s linked to honour, it’s linked to family, it’s linked to a whole lot of things, which really complicates it and makes it kind of a complex web of interactions that we need to engage with, when we talk about safety.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I want to get into the genesis or the origin story of how the organisation Safetipin came into being, but before that quick question, I think something that really struck me was the idea of urban wellbeing. I think we don’t think about it that often or we don’t use the term that often and I’m wondering if safety at the end of the day is somehow directly related to crime? I don’t know, is it a subconscious cause and effect relationship that, you know, a place is only safe if there’s less crime or if there’s more crime, the places are unsafe? Would you say they’re directly kind of proportional to each other?

Kalpana Viswanath
Actually, not necessarily, because a lot of it is also linked to perception, right? So if you feel a place is unsafe, like for example, sort of a deserted street, even if there’s never been reported crime on that street, you will feel unsafe, because it’s a deserted street, right? So there are many elements that lead to a perception of lack of safety, for example, the city of Delhi, right. The perception, you know, post the Nirbhaya case  and other things is that it is an extremely unsafe place, women can’t go out. But in reality, if you look at the lives of women who live in the city, it’s not that it’s not a If women don’t access the city, those women don’t go out and do it given enough work they aren’t given a naughty goobers back at 12 o’clock at night from the airport. It is in that sense a big city and we all live like big city citizens in the city also. So, you know, I think, you know, for example, after the Nirbhaya case, we’ve been told that many parents will not send our daughters to Delhi for further studies. Now Delhi probably has the best educational institutions in this country. Right and it’s not that it became more than safe in December, 2012, right? It’s just a perception change in that it was always seen as a little bit unsafe, but you know, you got a good education here. Many people got through life without too many mishaps, But after that, you know, it just became this perception that, you know, we should not send our girls to Delhi. And that then becomes a kind of self fulfilling prophecy, unfortunately, and I think that’s why we talk about it well because I think when you don’t have safety when you don’t feel safe, it impacts many aspects of your life. Like you do not feel comfortable enough to take a cab you don’t feel comfortable enough to sit in a park. You don’t feel like a young woman in a low-income neighbourhood may not be able to go for an evening tuition class. So it actually impacts your entire sense of…I would say even right to the city, but also a sense that you know, you own this place you can do whatever you want to do. I think that is where I bring in the notion of well being that we have to think twice before doing anything. Which, you know, I think very few men have to recognise how much we have to think before we step out.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So this is the perfect segue into the work you do now. Putting everything that we just spoke about in the foreground, how did you start Safetipin then what is its origin story?

Kalpana Viswanath
So I have been working on the issue of Women’s Safety and gender inclusive spaces for many years. Well, before I started Safetipin, I was working with Jagori, I’ve worked on international projects and I’ve worked on Women Cities International on several UN projects. Um so what happened was that, in 2013, one of the things was, you know, we use this tool for the safety audit for many, many years in India, as well as in cities across the world. And it’s a very simple tool, which is very empowering. Because women go out and they look at the public space, they tend… they sort of record why they feel safe or unsafe, or where they’re feeling and then you start unpacking and then you’re able to implement changes. So it’s a very simple tool which records which documents which assesses and which empowers the person because we really found that women said this act of standing on a street with a notebook and pen and looking at it in the evening to see what makes you safe or unsafe and is an empowering act. So the tool has been used a lot and in 2012-2013, you know, my co-founder and he is the kind of technology brain behind Safetipin, you know, I’m not a technology person. So we have been discussing the idea of Safetipin, or the idea of, you know, how do we take the safety audit and make it much more widely available to people. So in 2013, it was also the post Nirbhaya case, there was a lot of awareness, a lot of interest. There was a lot of talk about when it’s safe. So we sort of said, “Okay, this, you know, apps for becoming the way to do everything.” So we thought let’s try and make a safety audit. And then you know, just put it out there and then women can do safety audits, women can see all the safety audits and thereby they’re able to access the city with greater information and data, which in itself can be an empowering act. So it was really a while at that time, if you remember many, many emergency apps, so I mean womens’ safety was also linked to emergency right? When you’re in a situation of danger, you press a button. To me, that really reflected, you know, lack of imagination of what it is women really want, you know. So our idea was really how do you put something in the hands of women which will allow them to actually continue to occupy public space rather than recede from it or only fear it and I think that’s where we started off as just putting it together, building an app that we got support, support to actually build it, pilot tested, launch it. So we had support from UK aid and sometimes the local newspaper supported us but advertising it so it just suddenly took off, you know, women, honestly, we started thinking we just want to make an app and put it out there but we actually found people really liked the idea of or willing to try it or willing to experiment with it. And so we launched it in… on November 13, 2013 innovate invent and it was well used after that was the Delhi government approached us and so it just, you know, as you know, it just the rest of it became history without just I would say anxiously planning it that way.

Vaissnavi Shukl
While on the topic of safe cities, in our next episode we speak to Dr. Lindsay Asquith from the University of Technology, Sydney, on their research initiative called Designing Out Crime, 

Lindsay Asquith
 “Most crime problems, they haven’t really changed over time, you know, we still are dealing with a lot of the same crime issues, but we have through time we’ve been using the same solutions. So maybe more and more CCTV, maybe more policing. And so by actually really going beneath what was on the surface and looking at underlying, and seeing where we could use design to intervene, to change behaviour, really. That was the fundamental thing.”

Catch us back here in two weeks, for now, let’s resume our conversation with Dr. Vishwanath.

I do want to get into some more specifics of the app. So in a way, and if I was to summarise it in one sentence, which one should not do it’s it’s almost crowd sourced mapping. If that’s the right way to put it. So if we think of Safetipin as a tool that uses mapping as a method to capture experiences of women in cities and then deploys data as a tool to arrive at a set of action oriented changes. Can you tell us more about the app, the criteria that it uses to capture specific data points and how the resultant changes have led to safer public spaces? You did mention light as one of the criterias, here are some of the others…

Kalpana Viswanath
So as I said, we use a methodology called safety audit, which measures or assesses both physical infrastructure as well as the nature of the usage of the public space. We look at lighting, we look at the walkability, how open it is, whether there’s public transport close by, but we also look at, you know, eyes on the street, so is it an actual surveillance or is it an active street? You know, are there restaurants and cafes and street vendors and auto rickshaws who occupies it? So we also measure, look at you know, whether it’s a male dominated space or whether women and children in the space and the app also asks the perception of safety. How do you feel in space? So, so that we can also trying to build correlations between which parameters actually have a greater impact on safety? In order to give you an example, for example, if you ask somebody, you know, “Oh, you feel so unsafe in this space, what do you think will make it more safe? They’ll say, “Oh, there should be more policing.” But in reality, they don’t go to the police. They don’t even this thing… So you know, there’s a kind of set answer in our heads, which we know of when a safety audit tries to unpack it a little bit more by asking certain questions that are not so obvious. So the app basically has this tool. So what you can do is as an individual, you can do a safety audit and you can see all the safety audits. And overtime, we have developed…it has seven other features, you can also see the safety score, you can see the safest route. So if you want to walk somewhere or take a car or Uber you can see the you know, which is the safer route based on the three routes that Google throws up. We also have in India something called a ‘find support feature’, that gives you where are the nearest police stations, women’s one stop crisis centres, etc. We also have something called nearby places. So you know, it tells you, suppose you have to wait somewhere and you know, you don’t…it’s a slightly dark road, you just look around on the app, you can see where there will be better lighting where there is a cafe with an ATM, or a hospital or a clinic so there’s more likelihood that this activity light people in that area. So the…you know, the elements of it are really to try and enhance women’s ability to access public spaces. So that… that is the ‘My Safetipin’ app. But Safetipin as an organisation actually has more than one app which are then the other apps we have ideally data collection to supplement the crowd sourced data that My Safetipin  is able to generate.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Do you want to talk about one of your projects, maybe Bangalore or Bogota? Whichever. 

Kalpana Viswanath
Yeah. I can maybe talk about Delhi and Bogota, because, you know, these are more sustained projects. So in addition to the crowd sourced data, as i said, we collect data in other ways, one is we use an app called ‘Safetipin Night’ whereby we actually send out cars in the city with our app mounted on the window, and images are generated of the city, at every fifty metres. So what we’re able to do is that we’re able to do a large-scale mapping of the entire city because when people do audits, you only get partial information. You get it in certain places. You’ll not get data in another place. And actually, a place which is more unsafe, it is very less likely a woman’s going to take out a phone and do a safety audit. Right? So we have to supplement this crowdsource data to get a much larger robust data set. So we collect this data on lighting all the parameters through the images. So in Delhi, for example, our one of the data collections, large scale within 2016 threw up the data point that there were around 7,800 dark spots in the city that is where lighting was zero, there was no lighting, not even ambient lighting. This data that was given to the Delhi government. The Delhi government constituted a multi stakeholder Committee, which had all the stakeholders that look after lightning, there is not only one stakeholder that looks after lighting in the city, right? There is a municipality, there is a PWD, there is the highway authorities and they took our data. They gave it to each of the agencies, they had three monthly meetings where they invited us also to come and explain the data. And after two years, they actually asked us to do a second round of mapping of the city to get a sense of was lighting improved? Now two things. One was actually I think they probably came down to nearly 2500 on dark spots in the city. Secondary also asked us to then if you’re mapping, let’s look at a lot of other things. So when we looked at walkability, we looked at last mile connectivity, we looked at areas outside liquor shops, outside schools, parks to measure safety and give recommendations on how to improve it. So our work with Delhi government has been quite consistent. In fact, during COVID, we also added the find support feature and last year we launched in partnership with the Delhi government, you know, where all the resources for women in the city that the city government has, is an our app, you know, it’s been verified and it’s on the app in one place. So if you want to go to a one stop centre, you want to go to a  police station, whatever there is. So you know, it’s a combination of things improving public space, improving information for women, that we’ve been doing.
The other I think example I’d like to give is the work we did in Bogota. As early as 2013, I had gone to Bogota for another conference where I presented Safetipin, and they actually were very interested in. And they took it upon themselves to translate the app into Spanish and in April, 2014, we launched the Spanish version of the app. That was the second language. They then publicised it, they asked people to do data collection and they came up with a very interesting idea because as like we were saying we did in Delhi with lighting on the streets, they wanted to focus on the bicycle tracks city, because you might know that by the Bogota has a very healthy network of bike paths. So they wanted to map the bicycle path. So they actually innovated on our technology, which was really exciting. Where… whereas we had been using cars to…deploying cars to go and collect the data using the app. They said let’s do it on bicycles to map the bicycle lane. Right? So that was already interesting, because one is a bicycle moves much slower. So the images we get are actually much clearer. Secondly, they mobilise the biking community themselves to do it. So they had a campaign. And the Secretary herself and the department they themselves went out onto the streets with the bikers. They had a kind of a video, they had a campaign material, they had colours and the people who use the streets mapped it, and the data was given and we give it back to them, they used it at that time to do things like decide where to put the bicycle stands, where to put CCTV and where to improve lighting where to link it to the past and stuff like that. And they actually found that more women use the bicycle tracks and again, they also came back to us in 2018, to do another round of audits, this time to focus at different times of the day, you know, so both in the afternoon as well as the evening as well as a later evening to see how does it differ at different times of the day. So you know, it’s an app which, you know, in a sense, we don’t really hold any great IP to it. So we’re really happy if people innovate and use it as to how that community or that city needs it. So for us, Bogota, the experience has been very valuable. And like that, you know, it’s been used in Papua New Guinea. It’s been used in Colombo and during COVID we actually linked it up to whether COVID had changed the nature of public space for women. We had done work in Buenos Aires, Sao Paul, Hanoi, so we’ve really worked in cities across the world, as well as across India. We’ve worked in many Tier 2 cities, we’re trying to do some work in even smaller cities in Haryana. Currently, we’re doing some work across four cities in Rajasthan. But really every time we build a kind of a local network partnerships so that it’s sustainable process, it’s not the Safetipin itself is setting up an office in every country, but we really try to activate a local network, to use the data to help connect the data, to help advocate with the government to make the changes so that it becomes a more sort of a co created and sustainable process.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I do want to talk to you a little bit about data. Because, you use data extensively in different contexts for different applications. And if you think about say, data and safety, what we’re talking about right now is almost in the broader scheme of like the crime cycle at a prevention stage, we are trying to really create public spaces to avoid car accidents or to avoid rapes or whatever, whatever that is. Do you think there is some kind of scope to use data in crime alleviation or  I wouldn’t say alleviation maybe just crime deter and because that’s… that’s been my question throughout the season is, you know, we’re looking at questions of violence, crime and justice. And if you think about crime, it seems like because we live in a heterogeneous society, and if crime is an inherent part of the society, it’s never really going to go away. I think it’s only going to exist in different shapes and forms. What do you think about the role of data in deterring crime, especially when it comes to large urban spaces or cities at a scale or what would that future look like? How would we use data?

Kalpana Viswanath
You know I think there’s so much today, right? There is machine learning. There is large-scale mapping, there is drone imagery that we’re going to be able to access, there is artificial intelligence, you know, I think the way that data is going to be coming to us is significantly changing also, you know. And we need to be able to harness and deploy some of that as well. For example, when we started Safetipin, we tried to see if there was public domain data available, right? Now the satellite data did not… was too far. We couldn’t actually see the city properly. Not satellite data that’s available in the public domain. I’m sure security agencies have much better satellite data. Then when we went to Google. Now Google login is all there is Street View, but it’s limited, right? It’s limited to some countries and limited to certain time periods. It’s also often in the daytime, not at night, cities change during different times of the day and night. So in that sense, drone footage will actually give access to a lot of very granular data that we’re able to access easily. I’m thinking in a few years we should be able to get this footage much easier. So we don’t need to send out cars to collect data. Secondly, machine learning right now, but even what we are doing, so the image analysis that we used we started doing manually, we have now done machine learning on some of it, right? So, especially lighting, the availability of a pavement, et cetera, the nature of usage of a street, we are able to do quite a bit with machine learning now. Now how does it help? If you think about it, crime is not going to go away right? And crime, how do you manage it? How do you ensure that there is justice done? So for example, I had a  conversation with a police officer recently, who themselves, they realise that, you know, the CCTV camera is not really a preventive of crime, but it does add a way to help the police solve a crime after it’s happened. You know, so I think, if you look at the CCTV camera from that perspective, rather than continuously talk about how it prevents crime and recognise its limited usage and use it for that; that becomes one way of, I think, doing it. Secondly, I think if you have faith in the justice system that it will deliver for you. That is another big area which we need to work on, right? And this is not just data, data is a part of it, but it’s like really building the trust, building the sense that, you know, if you go and report, it is going to come to its logical conclusion, you know, there will be justice, most likely, there will be good investigation. So I think even building that ecosystem, that sense that, you know, where we recognise that there’s the urban agencies, there is transport, the response against violence against women, there’s the criminal justice system. And all of it go together, whether as well as the education system and all of it go together to build a kind of a culture, where violence against women is not tolerated, not at the micro level, not at the macro level, not in the family, not at the workplace. So you know, there is no magic bullet. There is no quick answer. We have to do the hard, painstaking work to reach that goal.  

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah. And what I also appreciate about your tools and you method is that while satellite imagery and drones are great, I still feel like they are objective data. But when you’re talking about perception, when you’re talking about intuition, you know, when you walk in a certain place, you just like intuitively, feel like it’s fishy, you know? So that level of just like subjective data, I think it’s something that maybe like different layers of data collection should figure and I don’t know I’m terrible with data myself, zero knowledge, but it just feels like what you feel in certain spaces is kind of supersedes what a drone would.

Kalpana Viswanath
Absolutely, because big data companies think that big data alone can solve the problems and I completely agree we have to have a combination we have to use big data strategically. But you have to have the bottom up community level data production qualitative data, to supplement that to have transformative change, otherwise it will be very superficial changes that you do.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So big question after big data, what is next for Safetinpin? Where do you go from here? And if you want to talk about any interesting projects in the pipeline…

Kalpana Viswanath
I think there are many interesting things ahead for us. One is that you know, so we’ve had the safety audit, which is really looking at public space, but what we are trying to do is we recognise that while that is very important, if we really want to build what we call a gender friendly city, there are a lot of other indicators that need to be looked at. You know, urban policies, availability of services, so we are actually out in the process of trying to build a sense in broader indicator. So one has a safety audit, but we also want to be able to have a kind of a tool, which says, you know, these are, this is what would make a city gender friendly. Like… like we’re doing now with safety audit in a public space. You want to make it a broader tool to say how do you build in different cities, what are the set of indicators, some of it you collect your secondary data, some primary, some qualitative surveys, whatever it is, you come up with a colour from way of making change at the micro and the macro level. The second thing I think, very important is that, you know, as we work more and more with city governments, I feel the need that building their capacity to work with data, something is very much many of them don’t understand how to use the data so that they don’t want to see you know, like you say, they’re really big data they see they don’t see the value of the crowd sourced data, need to build that capacity on both sides. I think that’s it that leads to work with recognising that even gender is an intersectional lens.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I was just about to say that. Yeah, it’s very interesting how you mentioned gender, not just women. It is now increasingly with the awareness of people having an identifying with multiple gender identities. I think it’s very interesting how you’re trying to kind of extend that to people who don’t necessarily identify as…

Kalpana Viswanath
Gender but also other axes, which can make you excluded in the city. So now we’re doing a project in Rajasthan with young people and young people’s well being, urban well being. With the focus on young women but to look at that then we’ve done some work on accessibility. How do you make streets more accessible for all people? Then of course, gender as a more intersectional, when I say intersectional I mean, like, it’s not that all women experience the city the same way. If you’re a young person or you’re an older person, with life span expand… extending, many women being single as they grow older, how do we make a city that includes their needs and and their elements? So I think you know, just… it’s also important to constantly learn, constantly expand what you’re doing and not sit and think oh, we have found the answer. And I think that is so yeah, these are the broad areas that I think we need to do more and more to you know, because if our goal is to really make cities transform cities to make them places where people are not fearful people to not only face violence, free to move around with women at the centre of that, but certainly recognising that there are many others who are excluded from… from the table when cities are being planned and designed to sort of make sure that is ongoing process.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Knowing now that you have a meeting. I really want to thank you for taking time out and being with us here today. And also give a big shout out to Malika who made this happen. 

Kalpana Viswanath
Thanks Vaissnavi. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.