Winner of two awards: Annkathrin Dilly explores women’s sense of safety in urban areas in her Master’s thesis

The thesis, entitled “Embodied Experience of Fear – An Empirical Study on Female-Specific Safety in Urban Landscapes: The Case of the City of Nuremberg”, addresses a topic of great social relevance: the situational safety of women in public spaces. Whilst numerous studies show that women feel significantly less safe than men, particularly at night, this thesis broadens this perspective to include a dimension that has received little attention to date. The focus is on the question of the extent to which subjectively perceived insecurity is also reflected in measurable physical stress responses.

To this end, Annkathrin Dilly developed an interdisciplinary research approach that combines methods from tourism, urban and health research. As part of a night-time field study in Nuremberg, 21 female participants followed a route through various urban spaces, including areas perceived as potentially frightening. Both subjective assessments – such as feelings of unease and the urge to flee – and physiological stress responses, measured via electrodermal activity (EDA), were recorded under real-world conditions and analysed in relation to one another.

The results show that the experience of insecurity in public spaces has both a psychological and a physical dimension. Factors such as cleanliness, social presence and the acoustic environment, in particular, influence the participants’ sense of safety. At the same time, measurable physiological stress responses were observed in stressful situations. The study thus makes it clear that ‘spaces of fear’ cannot be assessed solely on the basis of objective safety indicators or crime statistics, but require a gender-sensitive analysis of spatial, social and atmospheric factors.

With its innovative methodological approach, this work makes an important contribution to feminist urban research whilst also providing practical insights for urban planning and local development. In his laudatory speech, Klaus Meier particularly praised the successful combination of subjective perceptions with objectively measurable physiological data – an approach that opens up new perspectives for research into safety in public spaces.

The Chair of Tourism extends its warmest congratulations to Annkathrin Dilly on her two awards. These honours not only highlight the academic quality of her work, but also demonstrate the potential of interdisciplinary research to address socially relevant issues using innovative methods and to provide impetus for the gender-sensitive design of public spaces.