The STEP UP – Walkability for Women in Milan project, winner of the ‘INEQUALITIES RESEARCH – Generating new knowledge to reduce inequalities 2022‘ call for proposals and financed by Fondazione Cariplo, was presented at Base Milano.
This research involved four partners working together from March 2023 to February 2024, integrating skills, experiences and technological tools: the lead partner Foundation Transform Transport ETS, Sex & the City APS, TeMA Lab – University of Naples Federico II – and Walk21 Foundation.
STEP UP focuses on walkability in Milan and analyses women’s perception of safety in the city. Walkability is in fact an essential parameter to detect how welcoming and inclusive the urban environment is: suitable for walking, in terms of availability of proximity services, street connectivity, comfort of public spaces and road safety, considering that the experience in public space changes significantly depending on the users.
STEP UP assessed the level of walkability at night in Milan as perceived by women, disseminating online questionnaires, organising focus groups with women, and analysing about 70,000 reports – both negative and positive – from users of Wher, an application that collects evaluations on girls’ perception of safety, which provided an assessment of about 67% of Milan’s streets.
This data was then processed through a series of GIS mappings to investigate how different factors manifest themselves in urban space.
The data collected from the questionnaire confirm an already known aspect underlying this research: women’s perceived fear of walking alone in public space is significantly higher than that of men, especially at night (57% vs. 8%). 20% of women even do not leave their homes at night out of fear, compared to 3.8% of men.
In this way, three statistically significant factors for women relating to the night could be identified: the presence of social activities, adequate lighting and the frequency of surface transport.
This classification shows that 54.2 per cent of the streets would benefit from an increase in aggregative places open at night, 28.1 per cent from an improvement in the level of public lighting, and 25.8 per cent through the strengthening of surface public transport during the night hours.
The results of the project are available on the project website www.stepup-milan.it.
