Together for safety: the role of civil society in creating safe public spaces

While safety is often put forward as a self-evident political goal, there are competing ideas about what safety is.

In this project, civil society´s engagement to increase safety for children and youth, for women and in specific places is in focus.

Based on previous research we have identified these three areas as a primary focus of civil society-based safety engagements.

Such initiatives can be night soccer, women who organize driving-groups to get home safely or Neighborhood watch groups.

By focusing on civil society´s engagement for safety, this project´s aims to study how safety is addressed and given meaning in public space, who is to be made safe and who is considered to cause unsafety.

Through media and text analysis, participatory observations, individual- and focus group interviews with engaged citizens, representations of safety and how gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, class and age is negotiated will be analyzed.

We will include in total 12 cases of safety engagements, covering initiatives across Sweden, from larger cities to smaller towns. Today, research that incorporates the broad variety of civil society based initiatives for safety, is lacking.

This project will thereby generate important knowledge about how civil society understands and practices safety in public spaces today, making visible dimensions of safety that are more rarely addressed in contemporary public politics. This knowledge is central in the work for a more inclusive society.