Caroline Alexander Art
Safety Strategies:
Gender, Space and The City
A Collaborative Drawing Project with Cynthia Imogen Hammond
A woman's route home is rarely a straight line. It bends around dark corners, doubles back from certain streets, speeds up past certain doorways. I had been carrying this thought for a while when, in spring 2016, I brought it to Cynthia Hammond, wondering whether drawing might give shape to something so often felt, rarely spoken.
Drawing, it turns out, holds a particular kind of knowledge. A map drawn from memory carries the body's own sense of a place, its fears folded into the route itself. No training required, no particular skill — just a willingness to put a felt experience onto paper. That autumn, Cynthia and I led workshops at Studio XX and Concordia University, inviting thirty-five participants into this practice, calling it "memory mapping," a term introduced to us by Canadian artist Marlene Creates.
One question anchored every session: what are your personal strategies for feeling safe in the city? Before anyone picked up a pencil, we were honest about our intentions — these maps, these reflections, might become a public exhibition, addressed to the particular experiences of women, self-identified women, trans people, LGBTQ community members, and women with limited mobility. Participation stayed entirely theirs to shape: contribute or keep private, named or anonymous, decided at any point along the way.
What emerged, spread across thirty-five sheets of paper, was a quiet atlas of vigilance. Dark pools marking streets to avoid. Trees and shrubs, lovely by day, suddenly suspect once the light dropped. Routes bent into long detours, shaped by the memory of staring eyes, difficult choices made and remade daily. Age threaded through these maps alongside race, class, gender — each shaping a different relationship to safety, or its absence.
Danger in the built environment leaves material traces, evident, undeniable. Women's daily negotiation of that danger remains far less visible, tucked into private calculations rarely spoken aloud. Gathering these drawings, these words, into a shared room felt like a small correction to that imbalance, an insistence that gendered urban experience belongs in public conversation, in the planning of cities built for everyone's safety, not only some.
Studio XX exhibited Safety Strategies from February 11–25, 2017, as part of the gallery's 2016–17 programming on "Public Space." My gratitude goes to all to every collaborator and participant who trusted us with their maps and their words.Thanks also to Erandy Vergara Vargas for her support of this exhibition, to Concordia University's Digital Image and Slide Collection, the Institute for Urban Futures, and the Laboratoire d'Étude de l'Architecture Potentielle (LEAP) for making this project possible, and above all to every collaborator and participant who trusted us with their maps and their words.
