ABSTRACT

Responding to the prevalence of crimes against women, locative safety technology targets women’s gendered experience in neo-liberal cities. Apps with panic buttons and incident reporting features connect the phone’s location to ‘friends’ or emergency services with cloud-syncing devices, serving as a ‘virtual witness’ to verbal or physical assault.

Unsurprisingly, safety Apps are marketable products for women to (re)construct their identities. By fusing women’s social reality with anticipated, and at times fictitious, fears about occupying urban space, the Apps may ironically pre-regulate women’s behaviours and interactions. The ‘Watch Over Me’ app sells a retro-sexist ‘guardian angel’ where women are viewed as passive, potential victims. Offering a counterpoint, geolocative projects developed by feminist activist groups connect the physical and material location of women’s urban harassment to their individual experience. By crowdsourcing an interactively-narrated map, activist projects like Free to Be, for example, recognises the diversity of women’s experiences of harassment in urban space.

By considering the way that locative media shape women’s territories, this chapter will evaluate the benefits and incongruities of this non-neutral tool. In revealing the complexity of the stakeholders of locative safety Apps, I suggest that geolocative activist crowd sourcing support actions towards more gender-sensitive cities.