Supervisor:
A feminist urbanist case study on women's safety at Oslo Central Station Plaza: Jernbanetorget
The discussions around designing for female safety in our cities are often legislative or rooted in planning, such as advocacy for more streetlights or more surveillance with police on the street. This project is interested to find solutions in design through modelling and formgiving. To translate complex psycho-social theory into formal, spatial design, rooting the discussion in tactility.
Street harassment often happens in passing, where it is hidden in plain sight, where others are too busy to notice. One of the busiest places in Oslo is Jernbanetorget, this case study seeks to find site-specific & intersectional feminist answers to the question of how to design against feeling unsafe in public.
The answer to demystifying public harassment explored in this project is not through direct surveillance, but by deterring harassment through spatial strategies that promote care and engagement with public space.
TRANSLATING THEORY
This inclusive design draws from several theories: Jane Jacobs (urbanism, Eyes on the Street), Kaplan & Kaplan (environmental psychology, Trust and Fear through the balance of Mystery and Legibility), Andrew F. Bennett (ecological typology to move through space: Stepping Stones), Simone de Beauvoir (feminism, oppression through the internalised male gaze), and Silvia Federici (feminism, the social performance of care labour) amongst others. This dense body of theory is translated into three spatial design strategies: Decluttering, Lingering Spaces & Empowering Situations, explored in three scales.
INTO SPATIAL FORM
By designing with a stepped typology, it argues for an urban environment that makes people feel seen, physically and metaphorically.
The project restructures the plaza in 1:200, explores integrated street furniture that can host a dignifying public toilet in 1:50, and ornaments this in 1:10 with a framework for participation that de-monumentalises the existing symbolism found on site, broadening the expression and representation at the plaza. This results in a design that creates an inclusive place, answering to Michel Foucault’s Biopower and Panopticon.
The design restructures the plaza, making it easier to navigate and inviting to slow down and enjoy the place. The proposed integrated stepped street furniture is able to host not only a diverse range of uses and users, but also small architectural structures such as a dignifying public toilet with an inviting entrance. The steps are ornamented with metal plaques that have engravings and drawings that are acquired through participation projects with marginalised communities and local school children. They are asked "What message would you leave for someone who feels unsafe in public at Jernbanetorget?"
People with all kinds of mobilities, such as wheelchair users or people with strollers can easily use the new plaza, they no longer feel rushed through, allowing for spontaneous appropriation through protests, play, care, rest, art performances or just to linger around and pay attention to a fellow stranger. Specifically, this lingering on a sloped structure increases safety because it allows to disconnect from the busy tram tracks, yet it becomes easier to check in on each other when the space allows you to actually notice each other. To notice harassment when it is happening and thus deter it from happening. The participation in the detailing ensures the social sustainability of this plaza, broadening who feels ownership over one of the most important plazas of Oslo. Making this is the first explicitly feminist urban design grounded in form in Norway and it is a pioneer in Europe.
Design cannot prevent unwanted behaviour out in public, but it can guardrail against human error, and as designers we should design the best guardrail we can, instead of blaming humans for their (social) errors. Designing against social hostility is about designing against hostility of the physical urban environments that shape our societies.
This project started form personal experiences with misogynist harassment and is translated to harassment of any kind, against any marginalised group. Because this inclusive design shouldn’t be labelled as radical or controversial, this is DESIGN FOR EVERYONE.
Contact
Sacha Paternotte is a Dutch Landscape Architect who completed her Master in Landscape Architecture at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). She specialises in socially and ecologically sustainable design, from small detailed urban scales to large regional and cross-border scales. In The Netherlands she was educated in Landscape Architecture and Spatial Planning at the Enviromental Sciences Faculty of Wageningen University and Research (WUR). This dual education makes her an allround landscape and urban designer with extensive expertise in both ecological systems and societal systems, and how the two are interconnected.