INTRODUCTION
Safety Audits were conducted by INTACH and SafetiPin in Delhi’s walled city of Shahjahanabad. The audits were done to assess the infrastructure and services gaps that exist in the area and to document these as objective data. This can then be used as an advocacy tool to facilitate up gradation of the area. Shahjahanabad, being centuries-old the settlement is currently facing many issues and challenges. Being densely populated housing residences and wholesale markets along with many heritage buildings; the area attracts people from all
parts of the city for domestic shopping as well as national and international tourists. However, the infrastructure is inadequate to support these. The area thus is in dire need of redevelopment.

METHODOLOGY

The audits were carried out using the SafetiPin App. SafetiPin is a map-based mobile phone application, which works to make communities and cities safer by providing safety-related information collected by users and by trained auditors. At the core of the app is the Women’s Safety Audit. A Women’s Safety Audit (WSA) is a participatory tool for collecting and assessing information about perceptions of urban
safety in public spaces. The audit is based on nine parameters – Lighting, Openness, Visibility, Crowd, Security, Walk path, Availability of Public Transport, Gender Usage of Public Spaces and Feeling. The audits were done in the evening hours of 5pm-10pm on nine selected routes inside Shahjahanabad, to evaluate the level of safety andidentify ways to improve it. A total of 280 audit pins and 16 hazard pins were collected.

SHAHJAHANABAD
An Overview of Findings

Safety Audits of the nine areas of Shahjahanabad indicate that the area offers basic safety in the evening hours. Each of the nine areas studied is different from the other. While the Jama Masjid, Red Fort and Chandni Chowk have been planned with a certain grandeur, the streets being used for commerce as well as residential purposes have a more intimate scale. The varying scales and uses have a direct relation with the perceived feeling of safety. While the parameters of gender usage and security are rated poorly, the area fares average in all other parameters. However, due to extreme congestion, open drains and litter, and fewer women using these spaces, these areas feel uncomfortable.

Safety Audits reveal that certain issues are common across all nine areas. The exposed electrical wires are a major threat to life and property. In many places, they are very close to the windows of buildings and also hanging very low in the streets. Another major issue is the loading/unloading of goods taking place throughout the day. This adds to the congestion on the streets already choked with vehicles.

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