#racheldowley

[tuftsuep]

Rachel Dowley: UEP Thesis Award Winner, 2020

Illuminations of Safety: Urban Design, Safety, and Conviviality in Danehy Park

This thesis combines rigorous ethnographic methods (e.g. semi-structured interviews, participant-observation, spatial observation, and companion species ethnography), with GIS analysis, and careful discussion of literatures on environmental remediation, security aesthetics, and sensory ethnography in a way that allows the author to make specific, grounded recommendations about how designing for conviviality can promote safety, equity, and community cohesion. This thesis exemplifies the “practical visionary” ethic of UEP, as the author does the hard, careful work to understand a local space and provides thoughtful recommendations for how to make the space work better and how these insights might be applicable to public space elsewhere. New thesis writers should look to this piece as a model for how to: (1) use qualitative methods, (2) study green space, (3) fluidly integrate academic literature into research, and (4) derive compelling policy recommendations from research.  

Abstract

Safety and social cohesion are interdependent components in park design. Safety increases visitation, but it also runs the risk of restricting activities at the cost of cultural diversity. How can social cohesion help shape safety design decisions? 

This thesis uses ethnographic methods to research the intricacies between social cohesion and safety in Danehy Park. First, it explores Danehy’s landfill remediation, demonstrating the ways that its aesthetic design has erased the neighborhood’s history. Second, it discusses how Danehy has been influenced by spatial safety models such as Defensible Space and Broken Windows Theory, hindering users’ right to the city. Lastly, it draws on insights from a multi-species ethnography of the senses to scrutinize how park users perceive safety, highlighting how users determine safety relationally, based upon their ties to those around them. This thesis argues for the importance of planning for social cohesion, not as a mere outcome of safety but as a way to generate it.