The rapid pace and nature of urbanization taking place throughout the world has thrown up new challenges for governments, and their populations as well as social scientists and activists. Urban spaces provide new opportunities for people to build their homes and lives, but at the same time reinforce existing inequalities and often create new ones. There is increasing concern about women's safety in cities over the past few years.

Creating safety involves much more than just responding to violence. It is important to create the conditions by which women are able to move about safely and without fear of violence or assault. Research has shown that many factors play a role in determining women’s access to the city including urban design and planning, community involvement, improved policing, usage of space etc.

Keeping this in mind, we developed the mobile app and online platform Safetipin which collects information about public spaces through a safety audit that can be done by anyone, anywhere in the world. In cities everywhere in the world, women's safety in public spaces is becoming a growing concern. Safetipin is a free app and can be downloaded from the App store or Google play. At the core of Safetipin is the safety audit that measures nine parameters including lighting, the state of the walk path, as well as the presence of people and specifically women, on the streets and 'eyes on the street'. Each audit appears as a pin on the map and is used to compute the Safety Score of an area.

This report examines the data from eight cities in India - Delhi, Kochi, Trivandrum, Calicut, Pune, Chennai, Guwahati and Jaipur. In all the cities, audits were done by trained volunteers over a period of a few months. Delhi being the place where Safetipin was introduced in 2013 has a much larger number of audits. In each city, a local NGO was a partner in the data collection and a minimum of 800 audits were conducted to provide enough data for analysis. Download Complete 8 Cities Safety Reports