This project presents a response to the pressing issue of women's safety in public spaces, particularly in Latin American cities. Women worldwide are disproportionately affected by safety issues and fear in urban environments. I explore ways in which public spaces can enhance perceptions of safety and freedom instead. Based on extensive four months of fieldwork, including semi-structured interviews with thirty women and a survey, I identify common themes in women's experiences and propose planning and design strategies for enhancing the perception of safety. These guidelines encompass six categories: temporality and sustainability, inclusive functional programs, equal access to localized and high-quality infrastructure, planning trajectories and areas of influence, supporting existing networks of care, and creating spaces for organizing and collective action.

In response to these findings, I introduce a design concept for pavilions dedicated to women, strategically integrated within the network of the UVA (Units for the Articulation of Life) in Medellín, Colombia. Through the project, I emphasize the creation of a community of mutual care among residents, exploring how bonds can form both during construction and utilization of space. These pavilions are envisioned as transformative places, where women are encouraged to actively participate in construction, subsequent management, and adaptation of the building to evolving needs. The project is tailored for community construction, ensuring local ownership and long-term sustainability.

The selection of bamboo as the primary building material comes from the appreciation of its environmental sustainability benefits but also its transformative potential to empower women in construction. Being lightweight, safe, and easy to work with, it is suitable to facilitate active participation of women in the construction process. To maximize bamboo’s sustainability benefits, I complement it with a choice of biobased materials for the roof, and I propose concepts for demountable foundations and joints to ensure the circularity of the design.

This project contributes to the broader debate on urban safety and social inclusion. Through addressing both social and environmental aspects of sustainability, it enhances women's safety while fostering a more equitable and resilient urban environment.

Urban public spaces are one of the priorities on Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations (2015), in the target 11.7, on universal access to safe, inclusive, and accessible green and public spaces. Urban public spaces provide opportunities for people to meet and interact with the community, contribute to the connection between human and nature and have multiple benefits to human and environmental health. With a rising global population and the largest human migration in history, more than half of the world's population currently lives in urban areas. According to the Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this rapid and uncontrolled urbanization can often lead to the loss of public space. Contributing to the loss of public spaces, the digital and technical developments result in increasing mobility and remote patterns of work and consumption. These changes in user behaviour threaten historic urban areaswith loss of population, vacancy, and eminent building degradation that may result in loss of cultural identity. To adapt historic cities towards a sustainable future, it is necessary to focus on the total experience of its users, including the routing and accessible and attractive public spaces. This research aims at developing a methodology for designing user experience-based public spaces as a process to reactivate vacant heritage. It focuses on the case study of the vacant department store V&D Haarlem, built in 1934, and listed as national heritage in the Netherlands. The methodology includes historical analysis, urban analysis, and field observations of the 12 quality criteria for public urban spaces defined by Jan Gehl. The results provide guidelines for integrating user experience in the redesign of public spaces, preparing cities for a sustainable future while conserving its valuable heritage.