Women in a safe and healthy urban environment: environmental top priorities for the women’s presence in urban public spaces

Abstract

AbstractToday, in developing countries, women's need to be present in urban public spaces and the establishment of everyday social interactions seem to be ignored more than other groups. Therefore, the present study aims to achieve the environmental components related to women’s presence in urban spaces and prioritize them. In this study, by scrutinizing the criteria obtained from the interviews, a questionnaire was prepared and randomly distributed among 256 women in the population. IBM SPSS has been used to analyze the data and explain the priorities. The results of the T-test show that security (T-value = 6.508 in T1 test), compatibility with behavioral patterns (T-value = 4.975 in T2 test), eventuality (T-value = 11.064 in T3 test), permeability (T-value = 10.220 in T4 test), attention to climate (T-value = 5.692 in T5 test), liberty (T-value = 11.184 in T6 test), collective memory (T-value = 7.367 in T7 test), variety (T-value = 1.816 in T8 test), complexity (T-value = 13.228 in T9 test), and identity (T-value of 18.905 in T10 test) are the most important criteria in motivating presence in urban public spaces, respectively. According to the results, among the individual characteristics of the respondents, the components of collective memory (r = 0.805), identity (r = 0.784), liberty (r = 0.703), and safety and security (r = 0.644) have had a positive correlation with the age of the respondents. The results of this study indicated that improving security (individual, social, and psychological) is the main environmental priority for women over 18 to be present in urban public spaces.