We’ve been claiming the night for decades, when will the city meet us halfway?

Another incident. Another victim. More flowers, outrage, news coverage, hashtags. More women saying: this isn’t the first time I’ve felt unsafe. It is the umpteenth time no one truly listens to those feelings of insecurity. Only when something happens do we respond.

In recent days, both Amsterdam and Brussels have been talking about safety in public space. About girls being murdered on their way home. About cafés closing because staff no longer feel safe. About citizens speaking out against apathy, against normalising harassment, intimidation and fear. Support for the Dutch campaign “We Claim the Night” has been overwhelming. Rightly so. Because women being able to move safely through their own city should be the most normal thing in the world.

And yet it isn’t. We talk about safety as if it only means crime. As if everything can be solved with more police, more cameras, harsher punishments. But if you think safety is only about incidents, you look away from what lies beneath: structural feelings of insecurity. Feelings that are bound up with how our public space is designed. With how people behave. With who feels welcome where, when, and in what way.

Managing risks

Policy must start with people’s lived experience. With what they go through, feel, perceive. Safety is not a neutral unit of measurement. What for one person is a familiar square is for another a place they never dare visit alone. What for one is just a café is for another a site of unwanted touching, leering looks, double-edged remarks.

This difference is not random. It relates to gender, age, ethnicity, health, experience. It relates to how a city is built and lived in. And to how we shape, maintain and manage public space.

It’s not enough simply to ask how unsafe people feel. The real questions are: where, when, why? And what do they do then? Change their route? Stay indoors? Leave the bike at home? Pull their coat tighter? Keep silent?

Research shows women adapt. Every single day. They time their departure. They get off a metro one station early or late. They avoid certain streets, squares, cafés. Not necessarily because something did happen there, but because they’ve learned it’s safer to be cautious. This adaptation—this silent management of risk—is a form of structural inequality rarely visible in policy papers.

A tunnel without an exit

The way we design our cities plays a crucial role. No single measure will work miracles if we continue to build environments deserted at night, where there is no social oversight, where functions like living, working and relaxing are strictly separated.

No camera can dispel the feeling that you have nowhere to turn if something happens. No police officer can make a tunnel without an escape route feel less suffocating.

If we truly want women to move safely, day and night, we need more than good intentions and outrage after each incident. We need solid research, structured data, pattern analysis across time, space and perception. We need policies that look beyond headline incidents and take seriously the daily reality of thousands of people who adapt, simply because the city still does not adapt to them.

As long as we define safety as “something that only counts once it goes wrong,” we’ll always respond too late.

Real safety starts earlier

Real safety begins earlier: by listening to experience, by understanding how places feel at different times to different people, and by acting on those insights.

If we want our cities to be genuinely safe, we must invest in structural changes—based on what people actually need, not just on what policymakers think will work.

Claiming the night is one thing. But it’s time cities take the next step: not only reacting to outrage, but looking ahead and building public spaces that feel safe for everyone. Always. Everywhere.