On the 11th September AWW’s new home at TIDE, London hosted Building Safer Spaces, a hybrid event streamed to Bristol and beyond.

The afternoon was aimed at accessible and impactful ideas for socially conscious designers. Rather than offering a manifesto or a box-ticking exercise the event encouraged an open, practical conversation around how design can subtly reduce harm and strengthen community life.

Carly Adams Elias and colleagues from Safer London opened the conversation with an exploration of contextual safeguarding: an approach that looks beyond the family home to the people, peers and places where risk and harm often occur. Drawing on their work with hundreds of young Londoners each year, they highlighted a core insight:

Changing an individual’s circumstances isn’t enough - lasting change requires safer public environments.

Carly shared concrete tactics like safety mapping streets with young people, and empowering local “guardians,” to make small, pre-emptive environmental changes that can turn high risk locations into safer gathering spots.

We then placed these ideas in a broader architectural frame, considering how the built environment can invite care or signal neglect. Rather than dissecting academic theory, the emphasis was on a designer’s mindset: seeing space as an active participant in shaping community safety.

From there our AWW’s team of designers and architects then brought the discussion to ground level. Short, vivid talks explored how to design social spaces that encourage natural surveillance and neighbourly interaction, to balancing openness with protection in educational settings. Speakers explored how to integrate fire safety and accessibility; and how mapping pedestrian movement can reveal hidden risks and opportunities. Other contributions looked at security-led detailing and culturally conscious housing, and how aspects such as wayfinding and placemaking can ground a community spirit. A consistent theme emerged: small, thoughtful design decisions can meaningfully reduce risk without compromising the life of a place.


To conclude Ruth Skidmore from Meeting Place zoomed out to policy and metrics. She highlighted how measuring health and wellbeing impacts can guide investment and shape the very supply of homes, linking the day’s ideas to the levers of planning and development.The session closed with a candid group discussion that probed the tension between ideals and reality. Using prompts designed to spark curiosity rather than closure, participants were invited to examine how safety is sensed, negotiated and sometimes contested in everyday space. The debate surfaced challenging questions about perceived versus actual safety, and broader implications for communities. What emerged was a shared understanding that safer spaces are not the product of a single design move, but of ongoing, collaborative attention to how people actually live.

Lessons Learned

Several strong themes emerged as the conversation deepened. Foremost was purpose: every space we design should promote dignity, accessibility, trust and adaptive safety. This requires addressing physical security and emotional wellbeing together, so people can move, meet and rest without fear or humiliation.

We distilled this into a few working principles. Human-centred design asks us to consider light, material and layout through the lens of autonomy. Flexibility ensures spaces evolve as communities and demographics shift. Transparency and visibility support trust, while embedded wellbeing goes beyond mere compliance to foster comfort and a sense of belonging. Crime prevention is part of the picture, but ideally it is enriched by emotional and cultural sensitivity rather than defined by locks and cameras alone.

The Safer London perspective reminded us that safety extends beyond architecture. They highlighted how harm often occurs across peer groups, schools and neighbourhoods, and that holding parents accountable can be unfair and ineffective.

Close surveillance, particularly of young people, can undermine trust and privacy. The library-versus-McDonald’s discussion illustrated the unintended consequences of simply displacing teenagers instead of planning spaces they can genuinely use. It raised tough questions about what counts as anti-social behaviour and who gets to decide.

For architects, this insight brings both opportunity and caution. Stakeholder engagement is essential but not one size fits all: who you talk to, how and when can change outcomes more than any template. Over-prescriptive design guidance risks shrinking imagination instead of inspiring it. Even technical details: smart lighting, clear distinctions between public, semi-private and private realms, dignified routes of access and escape, shape how safe and welcome a space feels. Meanwhile, regulations sometimes collide, forcing trade-offs between openness and control.

It is often challenging to connect insights to hard numbers and policy. Impact of a Home data put figures to social value: the economic gain of moving someone out of homelessness, the measurable uplift of a private garden or a view of greenery, the wider GDP benefit of stable, affordable housing. Quantifying wellbeing gives designers and communities a lever to influence funding, S106 agreements and long-term planning - pushing back against developments driven purely by short-term profit.

All of this led naturally to a more critical close. Participants questioned whether any space can ever be truly safe for everyone, or whether we should aim instead for resilience. The discussion investigated perceived safety versus actual safety, and when “designing for safety” risks tipping into designing for control. Technology now enables extensive monitoring and planning politics can reward quick, visible fixes over the slower work of building trust and community. These tensions, between openness and security, prescription and freedom, measurement and lived experience, are not problems to be solved once, but ongoing questions to live with. The overarching lesson? Safer spaces arise less from a final formula than from an honest, continuous engagement with the people who inhabit them.

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