Game-based project to design, define public spaces for women in Bengaluru

How gender-inclusive are your city’s public spaces? How late is too late — when does a trans person feel it is time to call it a night and head home? How does a woman see the stranger on the street, telling her it is too late to be out? Does a state-installed CCTV heighten her sense of security?

The answers could be varied and decided by the nature of the respondent’s engagement with these predominantly masculine spaces. They could also reveal patterns of systemic discrimination and open possibilities of addressing it but are we asking enough? The Centre for Budget and Policy Studies (CBPS) is drawing context to these questions through community engagement of working women in public spaces.

A three-year project CBPS launched in August 2022 aims to understand the individual and collective experience of three communities — informal and formal waste workers, street vendors, and sex workers — with public spaces and institutions, and among themselves, in two cities, Bengaluru and Mumbai. The project will engage the communities through immersive, experiential learning using games to help them articulate their concerns and requirements better, and build knowledge-sharing networks.