How safe a city is depends upon how safe a city feels.
Rapid urban expansion creates challenges for cities. Poorly conceived transport infrastructure, mega-development and increased pedestrian flow can create dead zones and dark places that feel unwelcoming and unsafe. The national conversation in Australia about the safety of women, minority identities and children is at a fever pitch. Furthermore, it is imperative to consider the role art industry professionals can play in urgent urban improvement.
Public Art as a Safety Mechanism
This article examines the principles of public art as a mechanism for safety and community-building. It also contemplates public art as an under-explored alternative to aggressive policing or antisocial urban design. Additionally, it articulates how art processes can develop accessible and welcoming public space.
Public art offers an obvious synthesis of art and safety. It involves projected or sculptural works that prompt moments of contemplation and interaction. Light art increases the circulation of people in display areas. It activates dark alleyways, tunnels, transport thoroughfares, urban parks and dead zones. Across day and night, light art can transform outdoor and indoor spaces. Sydney’s ever-popular Vivid Light Festival demonstrates this roaring success. As people pause, spaces become more populated, making even more people want to congregate there.
Digital technologies can further enhance this effect. The vibrant light box artwork Tumbalong in Sydney’s Darling Quarter precinct is a strong example. Soundscapes can also improve positive user experience. Studies show that sounds of nature and acoustic music often make people feel safer and more comfortable (Buxton et al. 2021).
Light Art in Sydney
Burgeoning support for public art in Sydney has resulted in exciting light art projects across the city. Art Pharmacy worked with several local artists on a series of activations in the Rocks in 2023. One of these was Vincent Burret’s Enlightened Reflections. Along Greenway Lane in Sydney’s oldest suburb, a contemporary interplay of mirrored triangles and colours framed the entry to an old sandstone laneway. It represented the distinct character of this area. The reflection of natural light combined with artificial neon lighting brightened the path of users. It invited passersby to enter, become the centre of it and take time to wander through.
Around the corner, visitors could also find Saltwater Country. This was a collaborative artwork between Goldberg Aberline Studio (GAS) and Graham Toomey, an Indigenous artist of the Wurrumunga Clan of the Wiradjuri and Wongaibon nations. The lantern shapes of the work dotted the laneways of the Rocks. They brought natural and Indigenous artistic motifs to an area that is arguably the genesis point of Australian colonial urban life.
Public art of this kind recognises that people do not experience city spaces similarly. Different areas hold connotations for different groups, along racial, cultural, gendered or ability-based lines. Where one person may feel safe, others may experience fear or anxiety. Light art transforms and elevates urban spaces, remedying the ordinary and destabilising experiences of insecurity people feel when out and about.
These impermanent, colourful art projects create a sense of everyday joy among urban dwellers. Reducing crime rates or ameliorating socio-political inequality may be difficult to quantify. However, there is still extraordinary benefit to alleviating common stressors through incorporating public art in dark alleyways or empty streets.
Public Policy Benefit
Concerted investment in light and sound art in public spaces fulfils an underlying public policy interest. Specifically, it aims to eliminate groups and behaviours associated with insecurity (Svanelid 2023, 149).
Insecurity combines technical components like low light and poor visibility with social components like potential criminal activity. By improving lighting, local councils and governments use art to remove the social elements that give rise to insecurity. Furthermore, light art actualises what architectural theorist Jane Jacobs called natural surveillance in the 1960s. Rather than funding more policing, Jacobs argued that cities could prevent crime by creating environments where people knew their behaviour was visible. As a result, public light art can be considered strategically crucial for creating a safer urban landscape.
The Stockholm Lions
Public art can also make physical alterations to urban environments in the interest of safety. Anders Arfelt’s Stockholmslejon (Stockholm Lions) have stood guard at Drottninggatan in Stockholm since 1995. The 30 lion sculptures are strategically placed at street intersections. They act as roadblocks to control traffic and demarcate pedestrian zones in central Stockholm. Their design draws on the lion on the Swedish coat of arms. The organic, curved lines of their bodies contrast pleasingly with the hard, angular streetscape. Children often play and climb on the lions, and there is a fond sense of community support for them.
The Lions assumed a shockingly different role in 2017 when a terrorist drove a stolen truck through Drottninggatan, killing five people and injuring many more. A lion sculpture rammed against the front of the truck as it sped down the thoroughfare. The lion quickly became a symbolic hero of the day. Following the attack, the lions were adorned with flowers, teddy bears and messages of love. They became a physical beacon of community solidarity. Ethnologist Billy Ehn describes their transformation as a kind of spontaneous memorial, where the public came to find comfort after the attack (Ehn 2007).
The City of Stockholm later expanded the use of public art as a security measure through the Lions XL project. This saw a three-fold increase in the number of lions guarding central Stockholm streets. More streets are now blocked off by the Lions to protect the area from any possible repeat of 2017’s atrocity.
Placemaking and Community
For these benefits to be fully realised, implementing public arts programming must consider gender, racial and class dynamics.
Art historian Grant Kester argues that public art is an excellent design mechanism through which communities can engage with social and political realities. This forms part of the broader philosophy of placemaking. Placemaking has become a popular term capturing institutional and community approaches to improving urban vitality and promoting people’s health and well-being.
Performance researcher Sarah Wilbur argues that placemaking opportunities are particularly successful when they engage socio-politically active artists and targeted community participants. In concrete terms, placemaking creates opportunities for diverse artistic voices to present their works. It also channels the lived experiences embodied in a given place into the public art featured there.
Safer Cities: Her Way
Safer Cities: Her Way is a collaborative partnership program between Transport for NSW and several pilot councils across NSW. Transport for NSW describes that the program will deliver demonstration projects aimed at improving the perception of safety for women, girls and gender diverse people. This includes art installations, improved lighting and more help points. There is huge scope for women and gender-diverse creators to take control of design and implementation processes.
As with the Art Pharmacy project in the Rocks, the Transport for NSW program recognises that art can be harnessed to realise public safety concerns. It also regenerates dead urban zones and builds a sense of recognition of the different ways people experience city areas.
Urban cultural policy that uses art as an improver of public space is founded upon recognising that art can do good. It may assuage the need for more policing, create welcoming thoroughfares and generate incidental artistic encounters that bring wonder and inspiration into the everyday. Ultimately, this should be done with a sensitive and critical eye, allowing for collaboration with and creation by minority groups to reflect the diversity of city life.
Article by Lauren Lancaster.