Tracing the Importance of Safety Audit in Making Inclusive Cities: A Step Towards Smart Cities

Abstract

The concept that human behaviour can ascertain the design of place and vice-versa had been discussed over decades. In the design of public buildings and shaping our modern built environment, we come across certain issues. These are influenced by the geographical context, human behaviour, culture and practice of a region. However, time and technology has been two masters in shaping such spaces with the modern pace of development.In the later part of last century the concept of “barrier free architecture” was generated that quickly escalated to “Universal design” concept, which today is established with a broader horizon as “Inclusive design”. Several audits are designed and tool-kits established to check the accessibility or universality of a particular built space.Hand in hand, with the increasing population and increasing criminal demography, another issue that planners and architects are facing now is “crime prevention” and hence, a field of “design against crime” has also emerged prominently. With the hands of Crowe as in Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED), Oscar Newman's Defensible space, Jane Jacob and so many others, architectural design directives and architectural solutions have been suggested.Green urbanism is a term that embraces “urban ecology” where the city dynamics is dependent on the city dwellers and their involvement in the urban environment. Thus an ecological city can be interpreted as a city the allows people to be involved, reducing dependency on fuel guzzling urban solutions and thus emerging as an Inclusive and sustainable city. In light of the given background, aim of the research is to study the authenticity of the hypothesis that “promoting women's safety in public spaces promotes inclusive design in urban area and consequently makes its Urban ecology more productive”.Thus, the main objective is to find a relation and applicability of the Universal design audit check-lists with the design directives for safer city-designs- both being two important components of a “Inclusive and sustainable City”.This study has been done mostly based on literature study and comparative study of secondary data. Application of this concept has been done on the data obtained from a Study conducted by INTACH in Shahjahanabad area, New Delhi, India inApril 2010. The unsafe criteria obtained from the study has been analyzed and incorporated in this present study.