Where to walk women? Routes and fears that limit women’s experience in the center of Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil

Abstract

It is ordinary sentence in studies of national and international research that women feel more fear than men in public space. The fear of violence towards them or their children or even the simple feeling of insecurity are presented as limiting the use of public spaces, resulting in female collective” standards “ of times and locations allowed in the city. Based on the argument of fear can be seen as a social or as a urban issue, theorists and scholars who produced reflections of fear in the public space were highlighted. In general, besides the environmental characteristics of the space, these authors relate the insecurity feeling to the way that public space is used: surveillance presence, activities, maintenance and flow of people in space. Focusing on women, understood that fear of women in public space is one more expression of patriarchal society. Whether through the androcentrism of studies and urban planning, whether by the sense of vulnerability of the male figure, the life experiences or some secondary information, the women fear in public space is a result of men domination over women still existing in our society. This work on the assumption that the experience of women fear in public space is influenced by the relationship between the spatial aspects and the social. That said, we sought to understand how this relation occurs and how that influence in the experience of women fear in public space through investigative exercise that came from a national and international theoretical framework and the contextualization through empirical research in Recife’s downtown.