Championing a Vision of Safe Cities that Centers Women and Trans-Queer Experiences

What explains the recent proliferation of CCTVs on the streets of Indian cities, and where does the funding for it come from? Does such state surveillance – the monitoring of people’s behaviour or data by governments – help prevent the violence that cisgender and transgender women experience regularly in public spaces? What role does digital surveillance play in women’s own vision of safe cities? How should state funds be allocated to make this vision a reality?

More than 400,000 crimes against women in India were recorded in 2021. In its 2013 annual budget, the Government of India announced the allocation of INR 4,357.62 crore ($524,579,010 USD¹) towards the Nirbhaya Fund to “support initiatives protecting the dignity and ensuring safety of women in India.”² This allocation came in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya case, involving a brutal gang-rape and murder in New Delhi in December 2012. A major focus of the Nirbhaya Fund is on “innovative use of technology.”³

An interdisciplinary MIT project asks cisgender women and trans-queer people in Indian cities about their vision of a safe city and the changes they would like to see to increase their safety, rather than having these definitions and methods dictated by those in power. The project, A woman’s place is in a safe city, builds upon interviews with grassroots organizations to explore the role that surveillance plays - or not - in a vision of safe spaces for women and gender minorities. Utilizing these findings, researchers for the project outline six areas of collaborative interventions for government funds to be re-allocated towards the creation of public spaces that reflect the diverse needs of women and gender minorities. 

“We were interested to understand what women and trans-queer communities envisioned for urban spaces that would truly afford them safety and freedom. Does more surveillance – in the form of CCTV cameras or other kinds of technologies –  equal more safety? What other kinds of community-led interventions and investments might be necessary?" says Catherine D’Ignazio, a co-principal investigator leading the research team and Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning. D’Ignazio, a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. D’Ignazio is also the Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial justice, particularly as they relate to space and place.

The project, instigated with seed funds from the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, draws on a summer⁴ of on-the-ground interviews and focus group discussions, and a year-long participatory process involving Point of View Mumbai, Red Dot Foundation and three anonymized Kolkata-based organizations. “As a team we needed to focus on how best to communicate the aspirations and desires for safe cities in India that we collected through our interviews and discussions with affected communities,” Radhika Radhakrishnan says. 

Radhakrishnan, a doctoral student at MIT’s History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) program, partnered with D’Ignazio to lead the research project. “The portal that we produced is meant as an educational resource and starting point for conversations around surveillance and safety, built in response to the needs of the organizations we worked with on the project. The website and the digital zine are not your typical case of city planning, instead we call on principles of participatory action research and participatory design, to help make voices of those at the margins  - who are most impacted by gender-based violence - the most prominent for policymakers and in the design of interventions.”

In addition to D’Ignazio and Radhakrishnan, the research team also included Sunita Bhadauria and Indu Harikumar as well as Master of City Planning candidate Bianchi Dy and DUSP alumna and current doctoral student, Natasha Ansari (MCP ‘23).

Visit the website, or request a free copy of the physical zine. 

_{1 https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-much-money-in-us-dollars-is-1-crore-rupees/}

_{2 https://www.deccanherald.com/content/315528/nirbhaya-fund-safety-women.html}

_{3 https://wcd.nic.in/sites/default/files/Approved%20framework%20for%20Nirbhaya%20Fund_0.pdf}

_{4 2023}