How can cities better support women’s safety and sense of belonging? 

To mark International Women’s Day 2026, Gaia Crocella, Senior Design Researcher at Publica, delivered a talk with Fletcher Priest Architects, sharing insights from the CIC’s Right to the City research programme.

The event featured a presentation and conversation exploring how women, girls and gender-diverse people experience the City after dark, and what this means for those shaping the built environment.

Gaia reflected on how specificity and lived experience shape design: understanding who experiences the city after dark helps reveal design solutions that promote the safety of all women and non-binary people, while avoiding assumptions that can limit our thinking.

Following Gaia’s presentation, a discussion chaired by FPA’s Rotem Lewinsohn and Michael Adewole reflected on how designers and practitioners can engage more closely with lived experience when thinking about safety, access and belonging in cities.

The event forms part of our ongoing aim to creating more inclusive, equitable and safer public spaces for women, girls and non-binary people by listening to lived experiences and sharing our research with other practices to implement inclusive design approaches in their own work. 

Thank you to Fletcher Priest Architects for inviting Gaia to share Publica’s work, to Rotem and Michael for chairing the conversation, and to everyone involved in making it happen.