Race-based readings of safety in public space in Milan, the challenge for urban design

Abstract

Urban designers have long sought to plan more secure public spaces by encouraging a sense of territory through the surveillant and the surveyed. Nevertheless, the racial dimension of this territorialisation is insufficiently recognised. Our research tool, which we have trialled in Milan, identifies the influence of design in creating a sense of security in public space and, independently, the influence of race. It provides designers with a tool that could facilitate a more radically just practice that takes ownership of the role of race in perceptions of secure public space and challenges existing conscious and unconscious bias and which in so doing makes design practice more resilient to the rise of populist administrations increasingly engaging in bordering practices that conjoin migration, race and security at a national scale, but which are often enacted at the city scale.