Improving the feeling of safety in residential areas

Challenge: How may we improve safety for women and girls in our residential areas?
Challenge Giver: Svenska Bostäder
Redefined challenge: How might we empower Svenska Bostäder and its employees to increase their tenants’ feeling of safety in a sustainable way?
Solution: ACT for Social Sustainability
Concept: A new concept and a digital tool designed to facilitate Svenska Bostäder’s work with
Team: Safer Days
Amila Sampath, Daniela Andersson, David Tran Wechana, Dilara Maasoglu & Thati Phologa

ABSTRACT
People should feel safe in their residential areas. Municipalities and property owners have lately gotten more responsibility regarding the work with social sustainability, which includes the tenants’ feeling of safety. Svenska Bostäder, a housing company in Stockholm and owned by the municipality, aims to find new solutions and methods to increase safety in their residential areas.

This project report is about our process and results on how to solve the challenge to increase safety in Svenska Bostäders’ residential areas. Within the framework of the project we used the Design Thinking methodology, an innovative problem-solving method, consisting of five phases: empathizing, defining insights, ideation, prototyping and testing. After a long process where we went back and forth, we concluded that the work with safety and social sustainability requires continuous and multiple efforts over time. “ACT for Social Sustainability”, our final concept, intends to contribute to this through a new way of working with social sustainability and the feeling of safety. Through the digital tool ACT the work with safety and social sustainability will be encouraged, simplified, structured and more efficient.