Prioritizing the Needs of Women in Urban Public Spaces

This article emphasizes the importance of urban public spaces for women. It attempts to identify and prioritize the most important priorities and requirements of women in urban ​public spaces. Then, urban public spaces and gendered public spaces are compared to determine whether they are reflective of the requirements of women.
This article employs a hybrid methodological approach. In the initial phase, a systematic review of 21 articles was conducted to identify the requirements of women in urban public spaces and significant indicators from a qualitative perspective. The findings were subsequently synthesized using basic coding. In the second phase, the most important categories were extracted after the basic coding of the articles' conclusions. A questionnaire was developed and administered to two groups of women (30 individuals) in two urban public spaces with comparable functions (a cultural center and a Shahrabano). The questionnaire was presented and prioritized according to the respondents’ assessments of women's needs, as determined by AHP hierarchical analysis.
The most critical needs of women in public spaces can be categorized into three main social categories (lack of women's security, lack of appropriate laws, institutionalized gender inequality, women's needs neglected in urban design), physical dimension (inefficient physical infrastructure, infrastructure criminalized urban activities, and gender differences in the perception of space) and defined the psychological dimension (urban design and identity redefinition, urban design and encouraging a sense of life, and women's frustration with urban planning). Then, female users developed and evaluated a questionnaire regarding urban public spaces by incorporating the economic dimension and indicators such as cost, quality, and variety of services.
The following indicators are associated with the three essential priorities of women's requirements in two urban public spaces: the security and peace of women in the complex (rank 1), the cost of services (rank 2), and the lighting and the manner of encountering and behavior of employees in the complex (rank 3). The three indicators that were of the least importance to the female respondents were the absence of a sense of harassment as a result of the presence of men (rank 12), the existence of a unique space for women without the presence of men (rank 11), the existence of a space to interact with friends, and the existence of a space for the care of children (rank 10). The creation of gender-specific spaces for women is not justified by the Security and Peace Index's first rank. The definition of women’s and security can be both physical and infrastructural. For example, the third rank in the prioritization of indicators is assigned to the luminosity of the space and the induction of a sense of security, as demonstrated in the present article.