Safety & Resilience
Why Safety & Resilience?
Around 55% of the global population resides in cities [1], which are tasked with providing crucial services like public safety, mobility, housing, clean water, efficient waste disposal, and proper sanitation and health utilities. These services are essential for economic mobility, climate resilience, and public health, making equal access to them a fundamental human right. Yet, for residents of informal settlements in Kenya, access is often severely restricted due to inadequate infrastructure, exclusion, and uneven development.The Rights & the City Principle advocates for the rights of all city dwellers to participate in creating just, safe, healthy, accessible, affordable, resilient, and sustainable cities. It emphasizes the necessity of sharing city resources with informal settlements and including them in city development processes.
Unplanned and unserviced neighborhoods frequently become battlegrounds involving residents, authorities, and political entities. Prioritizing integrated and inclusive infrastructure is crucial not only for providing basic human rights but also for facilitating the realization of the "right to the city" for the majority of urban dwellers. Adopting a human rights and justice perspective in city planning could transform infrastructure upgrades into tools of citizenship rather than mechanisms of dispossession.
“When planners fail to account for gender, public spaces become male spaces by default.”
- Caroline Criado-Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men
“At the most obvious level, cities have been built, designed, and planned primarily by men. So, there is a predominantly male perspective on how the city works or should work.”
– Leslie Kern
The principle looks at human settlements and the risks to which they are exposed in a holistic fashion, acknowledging that their economic, social, and environmental issues are intertwined[2]. Risk literacy is at the heart of the principle[3]. Accordingly, safe and resilient communities:
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accept that both process and outcome require long-term and continuous commitment and engagement
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are able to monitor, evaluate, and learn from the risks they face
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acknowledge that Safety & Resilience benefits all community members, as it reduces their vulnerabilities and allows them to thrive
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understand that Safety & Resilience is not an equal issue, meaning that some groups are disproportionately affected by the absence of Safety & Resilience
By taking up the lens and objectives of Safety & Resilience, upgrading efforts in informal settlements can deliver multiple, and multiplying, positive outcomes. Settlements are typically vulnerable places with high risks of damage to health, wealth, and well-being. Through integrated approaches, infrastructure upgrades should look to understand the challenge in full, collaborating with residents to develop infrastructures that increase local safety.
Planning & Design
Own graphic based on: UNODC (2021). Safety Governance Approach for Safe, Inclusive, and Resilient Cities, p. 1. URL
Designs should make all users feel comfortable, visible and welcome – in both the private and public realms. The latter in particular has often been shaped by and for able-bodied men, with the needs of women, children, people with disabilities, and non-binary persons ignored. In informal settlements in particular, they are commuters through public space but cannot lay claim to it; they are not expected to
loiter[4].
The most prevalent threats to Safety & Resilience in informal settlements are (1) crime and violence, (2) insecurity of tenure and forced evictions, and (3) natural disasters[5].
Key design constraints to achieve Safety & Resilience therefore include visibility and accessibility[6]. First, if people are seen, there is some form of natural surveillance, resulting in a feeling of safety[7]. Second, equal access to safe public amenities is associated with a greater sense of community cohesion[8], decreasing the risk of crime and violence, and improving the collective ability to respond to political disruptions and events beyond the community’s control.
Simple design measures aimed at Safety, however, must ensure that Resilience as well as Social & Ecological Balance are not compromised. For instance, better lighting can come with high energy costs or negatively impact biodiversity and ecosystems. Similarly, while trees provide shade and hence help prevent urban heat islands, they also block lighting, making them suitable hiding places and potential danger
spots[9].
Source: Daly, M., Becker, J., Parkes, B., Johnston, D., & Paton, D. (2009). Defining and measuring community resilience to natural disasters: A case study from Auckland, p. 4. URL
Communities know best what Safety & Resilience issues they face. If infrastructure does not correspond to the needs voiced by the communities, their willingness to maintain it can be negatively affected.
To implement the Safety & Resilience principle, investments in three types of “assets” are critical: social assets, health assets, and hard assets. First, safe and resilient communities require mutual trust and shared norms and values. Second, improving the health of individual community members also enhances a community’s resilience: healthy people are better equipped to physically and emotionally withstand shocks. They are also able to help other community members, strengthening social cohesion.
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Implementation & Use
Safety & Resilience as a principle can be further promoted by:
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tapping into government expenditure streams
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enforcing regulations for hazard risk reduction and prevention -
informing policy change -
setting out health and safety standards for infrastructure -
involving as many relevant government actors and institutions as possible.
Informal settlements are places that have long reached a state of formalisation: they are here to stay. Consenting to “unplanned” neighbourhoods must not be associated with social unrest and urban misery. Such thinking is defeatist and fails to bring about positive change.
Constant threats of evictions and demolitions, insecure land tenure, and poor relations with political decision-makers lead some residents to build housing in flood zones, compromising not only their individual Safety & Resilience but also the wellbeing of the entire community.
As Safety & Resilience is embedded in political realities, it cannot be achieved by working at the community level alone. Communities must be safe to thrive; we can only expect them to build Safety & Resilience if they are not at a constant risk of losing everything due to vested political interests.
Governance & Policy
[1] UN-Habitat. (2007). Preventive approaches to crime. URL
[2] Seeliger, L., & Turok, I. (2014). Averting a downward spiral: building resilience in informal urban settlements through adaptive governance. URL
[3] International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (2008). A framework for community safety and resilience. URL
[4] Phadke, S., Khan, S., & Ranade, S. (2011). Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets. URL
[5] African Centre for Cities. (2017). Promoting Safety and Violence Prevention Through Informal Settlement Upgrading. URL
[6] Chapman, C. (2020). Accessible Design vs. Inclusive Design (with Infographic). URL
[7] Ro, C. (2021). How to design safer cities for women. URL
[8] Brown-Luthango, M., Reyes, E., & Gubevu, M. (2017). Informal settlement upgrading and safety: experiences from Cape Town, South Africa. URL
[9] Bloomingrock (2017). Designing Safe Cities for Women. URL
