Promoting safety has become an essential part in creating the attractive and inclusive city and a recognized element of urban planning. In a Swedish context, women’s fear and its consequences is often addressed as a gender equality issue and linked to the unequal gendered power relations in society. Despite this way of presenting the problem in policy, in practice the focus often ends up on measures such as better street lighting and pruning bushes, i.e. treating the symptoms rather than challenging the root causes. This “analytical-practical paradox” can be related to the field of critical studies on gender equality emphasizing the gap between rhetoric and practice. It could also be understood in relation to neo-liberal forms of governmentality and the growing focus on consensus, measurability and efficiency that, in Chantal Mouffes words, does not leave any room for conflicts between different perspectives and therefore de-politicizes issues that are essentially political.
The aim with this paper is to analyse how local governments in Sweden are addressing the issue of creating safe public spaces. How is the problem of fear and unsafety represented by different actors, at different levels, in both policy and practice? One ambition is to scrutinise the analytical-practical paradox; how could this gap between policy and practice be understood? More specifically the paper addresses the following questions: What initiatives for creating safe public spaces have been implemented at a local level? What strategies for change are promoted and who are the targeted groups for these changes? How is gender and fear constructed in these problem representations? The analysis departs from a discursive approach to policy analysis (c.f. Bacchi 2009) and the empirical material consists of national and local policies for safe public spaces and a questionnaire survey that will be sent to Sweden’s 290 municipalities.
