The text below is a transcript from my presentation in the panel discussion Cities and Security, part of the project Cities for Change:

Today I want to reflect on some of my experiences as a documentary filmmaker and artist with a socially engaged practice and touch on specific projects that dealt either directly or indirectly with the themes of visibility/invisibility in the space, who belongs to the city landscape and who can move freely. But mostly I am talking as a woman, and we all know that we are experts when it comes to the issue of our own safety on the streets. Whether we have articulated them or not, we all have strategies and coping mechanisms that we have embodied in order to function in the public space.

On safety and visibility: :

Instead of the city, I would like to talk about space as a more generic concept. I often experienced that spaces are not gender neutral. They are often designed to cater specifically for white, heterosexual, middle aged men. As pre-teenage girls we begin our experience with the space outside of us with a feeling of discomfort and alertness. When we enter the public, we either want to be seen or validated by the male gaze, or even more often , we want to be invisible. We try as much as possible to not attract attention, fearing its repercussions. This alertness has been transmitted to us by our great-grandmothers who knew very well what it meant to feel vulnerable, watched upon, objectified and having to perform a certain type of femininity. 

A while ago, triggered by the horrific abduction, rape and killing of Sarah Everard by a policeman in London, my artist friend Dana Olarescu and I initiated an informal exchange on Zoom with a group of female friends. What we hoped to do was to collectively process the grief and the shock of this tragedy and talk about our own safety. We wondered if we could also think about solutions, or simply share practical advice so that together we could build-up our resilience.

One issue that kept coming up during our meetings was the lack of street lighting in certain areas of the city, and how we all knew those back streets that must be avoided. We talked about everyday harassment and one participant recalled how, every time she passed a group of men, her whole posture changed and muscles contracted in anticipation of a potential threat. This made me wonder if, as women, we are often reactive and passive subjects when we move in space, becoming more of a reflection rather than beaming our own light.

We also recognised that, under patriarchy and neoliberal economics, our public spaces, be those virtual or physical, expose many other groups to risk or even violence. Be they migrants, refugees, LGBT+, men of colour,many others experience this duality of wanting to fight for their own spaces while also continuing to be guarded, aware that our commons continue to punish their stance for visibility. 

On navigating cities and belonging:  

When I first came to London, from Romania, my first job was with a charity working with young marginalised young people. The job involved delivering training that was mainly done in participation with the trainees who were actively involved in the making of a TV show, therefore learning on the job. They were producing a TV show with content that mattered most to them and which they would rarely see on mainstream TV. Over three years I have worked with several groups and among the issues that kept coming up again and again with each group was the question about lack of access to safe spaces.

Young black men often talked about the stop and search policy. One incident stuck with me - a participant told us that one evening he went to Oxford Circus with his friends and police stopped them asking what they were doing there and questioning why they were not “hanging out in their own area”. This was pre-BLM era and it struck me just how segregated a city like London really is and how little mobility certain people may have.  

In my current role as a Domestic Violence Advocate working with Eastern European women, I once encountered a woman who referred to the highstreet of her own borough as the city centre. This is because she very rarely stepped out of her area to go to the actual centre. The language barrier, economic precarity, and even the often intimidating and , are some of the barriers that many migrants I met face.

For example, in 2012, I spent 3 months  filming a group of homeless Roma men doing day jobs and waiting to save enough to go back home to Romania. Their experience of the city was profoundly precarious and they had very little agency when it came to how they moved in the city. It was men in trucks that would pick them up at 5 am that decided where they would work for the day and how much they would get paid. Very often they were paid less than originally agreed on  and often they even found themselves in danger if disagreeing with their ‘employer’. Whenthey didn’t get a job, they would go to the local betting shop, or hang around  one or two streets of the same neighbourhood. It is interesting to observe how highstreets encourage certain behaviours depending on the socio-economic status of a neighbourhood. It is too often  that we see gambling shops targeting poorer areas, often condemning struggling workers into addiction and a poverty spiral.  

But it is not just walking, working and travelling through city spaces that are hard for certain groups. Many cities in Europe, and certainly London, have very little access to affordable housing and many don’t even have the luxury of a safe space to sleep. The Roma men I filmed were sleeping in dilapidated, rat infested houses, where one would keep rocks by the bed to scare those rodents that came too close.

But let’s get back to the topic of gendered spaces and reflect on how the design of these spaces relates to power. In 2012, I made another short documentary in Pakistan about one of the very few women taxi drivers in Islamabad. The way she navigated gender and class politics in her field of work was through exerting power and force, emulating the behaviours of her fellow male drivers.

She had no option to be real and vulnerable in the public space. She literally had to fight her way in and learn to become not resilient but aggressive and competitive in order to survive.

I’d like to end with a note as food for thought. Of course nothing of what I have talked about today is new, especially for the groups I have mentioned. I believe that as ‘others’ - whether we are from a low economic background, migrants, women, black, non-binary or any intersection of these- we have the option to mimic the values of those in power and adapt to the rules of the game, or we can try to find our own power and then use our privilege to build solidarity, resilience and organise so that the city becomes one that is for all. One where ideally we can operate more horizontally and freely.