Perceived Liveliness Impact on Sense of Safety

In the urban landscape, the perception of safety shapes street utilization, particularly affecting women’s access. Human presence has shown effects on increasing a sense of safety while their presence also contributes to overall liveliness of a street.  However, the mere sight of others doesn’t guarantee increased feelings of safety; one can feel secure on an empty street and, conversely, uneasy in a crowded one. Similarly, an empty neighborhood can feel lively through the physical attributes present, perhaps serving as human traces. With this in mind, my master’s thesis, titled “Perceived Liveliness Impact on Sense of Safety: A Study on Women’s Perceived Safety in Human-Lacking Urban Environments through Virtual Reality” ventures into the territory of exploring how perceived liveliness impacts sense of safety.

Activist Jane Jacobs argued that well-designed urban environments that increase “eye’s on the street” with features such as street-facing windows and promotions of mixed-use streets, giving multiple reasons to be on or pass a street, encourages natural surveillance [1]. Drawing on this theory, among others, I created eight 3D street environments in Unity, each combining solid or windowed facades with greenery and street-level attributes predicted to increase the liveliness of the urban environment. Comparing the varying streets with solid versus windowed facades created 16 street corners to be evaluated. Testing involved 27 female participants aged 22-31 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, incorporating a two-alternative forced-choice method in a VR environment. Prior to starting the VR trail, the women were given a scenario of that they are walking home by themselves and that they should choose to walk towards the street that they would feel safest. Participants were then placed in each street corner in VR, making both streets visible from the starting position (to minimize the risk of choosing the street first perceived) and instructed to walk towards their choice upon hearing a beep. Their movement teleported them further down the street of their choice and this was repeated for all 16 corners, twice. Post-testing included a semi-structured interview regarding their real-life experiences, along with a presence questionnaire.