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The Urban Safety Reference Group (USRG) recently hosted a Gender Mainstreaming and GBV Prevention workshop which brought together city officials from 7 South African metropolitan cities and their counterparts from the ENDGBV Unit within the New York City Mayor’s Office, an intervention whose mandate is to end domestic and Gender-Based…

…one of the strictest lockdowns worldwide, restricting movements significantly and citizens were only allowed to leave home for essential services like shopping and doctors’ visits. Public Spaces are abandoned areas during this time. However, social inequality and the imbalance of opportunities remain apparent - maybe more than ever before.

…need to invest in public spaces that are truly co-created through social engineering processes. These need to be grounded in quality community participation processes which begin at the conception of the project, carries on when the project is handed over, and continues in different ways to ensure ownership and positive…

…October 2016, the New Urban Agenda was adopted at the Habitat III conference in Quito, Equator. While including many important aspect for sustainable urban development in the next 20 years, the Agenda is vague on one critical aspect: the importance of safe public spaces for social cohesion and more liveable…

In response to high levels of crime, South Africans have turned their homes into fortresses, seeking security behind high walls. But doing so might be counter-productive.

This post shares experiences from the upgrade of End Street North Park in inner-city Johannesburg; a pilot project that tests a participatory approach to park design and management for safety. It attempts a more socially inclusive, and community-oriented approach to park design and management.

The Mainstreaming Urban Safety and Inclusion short course provided municipal officials and other practitioners involved in urban upgrading with information and tools to prevent violence and crime by planning for safety within upgrading projects.

This article is based on brief interviews conducted on the streets of Pretoria, South Africa, where ordinary urban citizens voiced out how safe they feel in public spaces and what they recommend could be done to improve safety.

In this interview, Luyanda Mpahlwa - a Cape Town based architect and director of DesignSpaceAfrica - speaks about urban development in Cape Town and Johannesburg, the need for integrated urban transformation in townships, and why we must revive public street culture to make urban spaces in South Africa safer.