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Introduction
Women's safety audits have been defined as 'a process which brings individuals together to walk through a physical environment, evaluate how safe it feels to them, identify ways to make the space safer and organize to bring about these changes' (WACAV (Women's Action Centre Against Violence Ottawa-Carleton), 1995, p. 1). Since it was developed by Toronto's Metro Action Committee on Public Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC, 1989), the women's safety audit tool has been disseminated to different regions of the world. Women's safety audits raise fascinating conceptual questions and introduce very practical tools for interventions in communities. In this paper we evaluate the use that has been made of women's safety audits across the world. At the same time, we raise some conceptual issues - Whose knowledge is used in building communities? Whose knowledge is seen as legitimate? What kinds of knowledge can be understood and by whom? - as well as describing the practical nature of women's safety audits as a tool for improving urban planning and management. 1
In their 2005 paper, 'Engendering Crime Prevention: International Developments and the Canadian Experience', Shaw and Andrew describe work undertaken to improve women's safety:
Much of the work has centered on the use of tools such as safety audits and exploratory walks to develop recommendations for situational crime prevention initiatives. These include urban planning, housing design, and transport design and scheduling. They are also used to lobby for increased local authority support for front-line services for women. There has been an emphasis on developing prevention strategies through partnerships between local grassroots organizations, communities, and municipal governments and services thereby increasing the role of women in local decision-making. (Shaw and Andrew, 2005, pp. 296-297)
This description underlines the basic strategy of women's safety audits as a way of establishing partnerships with municipal governments and of giving voice to users of urban space as 'experts of experience', with equal standing to 'professional experts' such as urban planners and police officers (Whitzman, 2008a, p. 250). It is this combination of the analysis of the safety audit as a local governance tool, as an urban planning tool and as an expression of knowledge based in practice that is the central focus of this paper.
The idea of a...