Cooke John works on everything from residential spaces to public art projects to problems of urban strategy:
They talk about walking at night being this amazing experience, that as you wander through a city at night it's meditative in a way because of the lights and it's quiet and everyone should do this. But everyone can't do this. Women wouldn't even dream about doing that right after a certain hour. So how do we give women the access to this purportedly amazing experience by allowing them to walk freely at night?She developed a combination of physical interventions (lights embedded in sidewalks) and digital ones (an app for communicating with other women) to make women feel safe and empowered:
In my research, much of what they said as well is that women are more likely actually to be attacked by people they know than people on the street. So a big part of it is just giving women the confidence to feel like they can walk at night.
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